Sirius free two-day event was widely publicized - from on-air promos, to multi-lingual press releases, to commercial spots chanting "Howard! Howard!" - they pushed it hard. The question remains though whether this was effective in driving new subscribers... and that question will likely not be answered for a few months.

What we can do though, is look at traffic numbers. 

According to Hitwise, traffic to Sirius' website was up 91% on October 25th compared to the week before and up 201% when compared to the same day a year ago.

And while I loathe referring to Alexa data now (it seems to be getting less and less accurate), it does show Sirius' traffic numbers nearly doubling from its average levels. 

Looking at the Yahoo Buzz Index, which scores according to Yahoo searches, shows that searches for "Sirius" jumped 78% on October 25th over the Monday before. Searches for "Howard Stern" went up 51% over the same weekly period as well. Google Trends, on the otherhand, shows no change in searches (perhaps it's not updated yet?).

For some hard numbers to compare this with: Sirius.com drew in 1.75 million unique users in September, while HowardStern.com grabbed 832,000 (XMradio.com drew in 2 million unique users in September as well).

The interest in Sirius and Howard Stern, at least for a free-trial, did cause a significant spike in traffic last week. If we're to assume the same numbers as in September, that's an average of ~60,000 unique visitors a day to Sirius' website. So a 91% increase would work out to just under 115,000 unique daily vistors for those two days. Not too shabby. Whether or not this translated to paying subscribers? Well, that's a different matter.

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