W.H.: 'Ferns' boosting ACA traffic

President Barack Obama’s sit-down with Zach Galifianakis led to a spike in traffic to HealthCare.gov on Tuesday, the administration said, as it touted the effectiveness of the president’s latest effort to reach out to young adults.

As of 1 p.m. ET Tuesday, the website had racked up more than 19,000 referral visits from Obama’s “Between Two Ferns” video for Funny or Die, which was posted around 7 a.m., Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright said.


By 6 p.m., the video had directly sent 32,000 users to HealthCare.gov.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama plants jokes on 'Two Ferns')

The influx of traffic to the Affordable Care Act website made funnyordie.com the top referrer of the day, Albright said.

But those who clicked through from the video to HealthCare.gov represent just a small percentage of those who watched the video. Around 1 p.m., the video had drawn about 3 million views through Funny or Die’s video player. By 6 p.m., the total was around 7 million.

The number of referrals reported by CMS “represents only a fraction of the people who came to HealthCare.gov separately after seeing the video online or on television,” Albright said, and the agency saw “substantially increased traffic to the site overall” on Tuesday. As of 6 p.m., the site had drawn 575,000 unique visitors for the day. The White House said that was higher than Monday’s traffic at the same point in the day, though it didn’t indicate how much higher.

About 95 percent of the referrals that came directly from the video brought new visitors to HealthCare.gov, Albright added.

Earlier Tuesday, during his daily briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney had touted the video’s success in bringing new visitors to the site but hadn’t yet been able to quantify the video’s effect on traffic.