While the 12,000-odd voters in Ijok are getting millions of ringgit in development projects, malaysiakini is getting a bonanza of a different kind.
The Ijok by-election to be held tomorrow has helped push malaysiakini's readership to new highs.
Since Monday, Malaysiakini.com has been averaging over 1.3 million pageviews and more than 160,000 unique visitors a day. This is a 60 percent increase on the subscription-based website's daily readership of 100,000 visitors.
Traffic has also increased dramatically on malaysiakini's fledgling Internet TV website, launched late last year. Malaysiakini.tv peaked at over 44,000 video downloads on Tuesday.
Malaysiakini expects traffic to its various websites to increase as the by-election reaches its climax tomorrow.
"We expect to get up to 250,000 readers today and tomorrow. This will put a lot of stress on our servers but we will do our best to manage the surge in traffic," said malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran.
"Readers may however experience some delay in accessing the website at peak periods."
More to come
The increase in traffic to Malaysiakini.tv yesterday as a result of readers accessing malaysiakini's exclusive interview with former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad temporary shut down the site for one hour at 8pm.
"There are more things to come. Ijok is just a teaser," said Premesh. "We intend to give our readers the best coverage of news, views and videos in the run-up to the next general election."
Tomorrow, malaysiakini plans to be the first to provide the results of this crucial by-election.
Polling is expected to begin at 8am and close at 5pm. The official results will be known by 8pm but malaysiakini will start tracking the vote counting from about 5.30pm.
If you are not a malaysiakini subscriber, it's best to do so now .
