The Players’ Tribune saw its highest traffic ever -- more than 5 million total content views -- on Monday when it hosted Kevin Durant’s announcement that he will leave the Thunder as a free agent for the Warriors, leading the site to reportedly crash for some users. TPT Exec VP/Partnerships & Business Development Raphael Poplock in an email wrote, “While some users may have experienced brief, intermittent outages, all were corrected within 15 minutes after the story posted.” Content views include site-based page views, social platform views and syndication views. Monday was more than double TPT's second-highest traffic day -- the day that Kobe Bryant announced his retirement from the Lakers. “Kevin’s announcement is yet another example of how players are using TPT as a trusted platform to share news and stories and control their message,” Poplock wrote. “The anticipation of the announcement generated significant interest across the site and our social channels, which carried throughout the day.” Several media outlets reported that Durant would break the news on TPT, and prior to the announcement there were 25,000 active users on the site. Within one minute of the Durant-Warriors news breaking, there were 150,000 active users on the post and within 10 minutes, there were 300,000 active users on the site. In total, TPT on Monday received 4.5 million page views from 2.56 million unique visitors. The homepage received 800,000 page views and 77% of users were new users. TPT received extra social media exposure, including trending on Twitter and Facebook and being a top post on Reddit. TPT gained 55,000 Twitter followers and 12,000 Facebook likes in the first 48 hours. There were more than 200,000 Google searches for “Players Tribune” on Monday. With Monday being Independence Day, “Players Tribune” was the third most popular search on Google, behind “July 4” and Declaration of Independence.”
