Royal wedding drives record traffic to Yahoo!

Yahoo! on Monday said that online interest in the royal wedding led to record high traffic at its websites.

Preliminary figures released by the California-based Internet pioneer indicated that it handled a record-setting 50,000 requests per second for wedding-related content.

Requests-per-second peaked at 33,000 after the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and topped out at approximately 40,000 after word broke of US military forces killing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday.

Yahoo! served up 400 million page views on Friday, when Prince William married his bride Catherine.

There were reportedly 27 million video streams and 2.6 million live video streams at Yahoo! web pages on Friday.

Skyrocketing online interest in Prince William's wedding had prompted Yahoo! to launch websites spotlighting the April 29 ceremony at Westminster Abbey.

Versions of Royalwedding.yahoo.com websites were tailored for 10 countries, including Britain, France, and the United States.

Yahoo! released the figures on the same day it announced that it hired Jai Singh away from the Huffington Post to be editor-in-chief of its Media Network.

Singh was considered a top editor at news website Huffington Post.

"Jai's appointment comes on the heels of one of the most event-filled news weeks in Yahoo! history, which underscores the importance of our editorial operations," said Media Network head Mickie Rosen.

Singh was in charge of day-to-day news management at the Huffington Post. He is to begin at Yahoo! at the end of May.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! has been reinventing itself as a digital media company after being eclipsed by Google in the online search market.