-By Mike Shields

Americans logged onto the Internet in massive numbers on Nov. 4 to track the conclusion of a historical presidential race, which in turn yielded historic online audience numbers for several major news sites, according to figures released by Nielsen Online.

The news category’s traditional leaders CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Yahoo News each enjoyed banner traffic days, found Nielsen. CNN reached 12.9 million unique users on Nov. 4, an increase of 51 percent versus the previous Tuesday, when interest in the election was already high. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s digital audience more than doubled week-to-week, hitting 12.1 million uniques on Election Day.

Yahoo News’ audience also climbed to 11.4 million users on Tuesday, an increase of 50 percent compared to Oct. 28. And the surging FoxNews.com—which has seen its Web audience grow considerably during this presidential campaign season--reached 5.7 million uniques, up 46 percent versus one-week prior. per Nielsen data.

It was the ninth largest site in Nielsen Online’s Current Events and Global News category, Washingtonpost.com, which exhibited the highest week over week growth rate on election day, as its user based soared by 113 percent to 2.3 million uniques. Overall, Nielsen found that from Oct. 28 to Nov. 4, traffic swelled by 27 percent in the category as a whole, with page views more than doubling and time spent increasing by 61 percent, as users were drawn to results and analysis of the presidential race.

Beyond Nielsen’s third party data, both CNN.com and MSNBC.com executives are reporting much larger record shattering traffic gains based on their internal data. CNN.com claims to have reached a staggering 30 million unique users on Election Day, an increase of 123 percent versus the previous record – Super Tuesday of this year. The site also generated a record 282.5 million page views -- 103.2 million more than the previous record.

Similarly, MSNBC.com is reporting monster numbers for Nov. 4, which execs say is now the highest trafficked day in the site’s 12-year history. MSNBC.com reported 250 million page views—double Election Day in 2004-- and over 20 million unique visitors.