[Asparagirl]

Over a hundred thousand. I was the Senior Web Producer (head geek) at Bravo, the cable channel, and we did live voting during "Project Runway" first-run episode commercial breaks, where viewers would respond to on-air questions either through our site or through SMS. Vote tallies were displayed during later commercial breaks, after a competitor had been eliminated. People who voted would also be entered in contests to get prizes and their names splashed on screen during the live broadcasts.

Then we'd do it all again, live, for the West Coast airing of the episode, the same night.

Season finale episodes brought roughly a bajillion people to our site simultaneously, because everyone wanted to "participate" in telling the world which contestant they wanted to win the season.

Thank God for Akamai...

[timjahn]

That's awesome! How many people it take total to run the operation?

[Asparagirl]

In LA (Burbank, actually) we had one manager, two devs (me and a slightly more junior person), and two video editors who transcoded stuff almost on-the-fly and kept our online video library humming along. In New York (at 30 Rock) we had about four content and social media people, two designers, and a photographer.

This was about five years ago, so the set-up is a little more robust now. For example, they now have a CMS to manage web content, whereas we used to code and manage all our assets by hand. And back then they were too stingy to buy an extra server to automate a lot of the processes, so I actually had to stay late every week to literally "push the button" to make things go live in sync with the on-air broadcasts. All kinds of crazy stuff, on a shoestring budget.

But yeah, if you're talking about code stuff alone, we only had two actual coders/devs, me and another girl. Fun times!