Big Brother Website Makes It Into August Top Ten

Channel 4’s hit show of the summer Big Brother is thought to have a lot to thank the internet for. The ability of eleven ordinary people locked in a house to draw some of the largest audiences the channel has ever seen (see Big Brother Finale Gives C4 Largest Ever Friday Night Audience) was greatly enhanced by the opportunity the show’s website, bigbrother.terra.com gave for viewers to enjoy more voyeurism and interactivity outside of broadcasting slots.

Page impressions on the site for the weekend after it went live were reported by Channel 4 to reach 1.5m (see Big Brother Is Watching Audience Figures Go Up). This figure was overshadowed on Thursday 17 August- Judgement Day for Nasty Nick- when an estimated 10 million hits, possibly the largest volume of internet traffic ever seen on a website, were recorded (see Nasty Nick’s Nightmare Notches Up Record Ratings For Big Brother). Last month MMXI reported that the site had crashed into its internet usage charts for July at an unprecendented number 26 (see Online As On Screen – The Big Brother Effect Continues On The Web).

This month’s report, showing August’s net activity, has more of the same. The top ten domains in the UK are usually a solidly predictable selection of the big name email providers and search engines, but during August Bigbrother.terra.com managed to hop into the number 8 spot, elbowing the likes of Lycos and Excite out of the way with a reach of 17.8%, up from 8.1% during July.

The Big Brother phenomenon also had a knock-on effect on other sites, as Real.com, where free software for viewing Big Brother footage live online could be downloaded, jumped from 15th to 10th in the rankings, with a reach of 15.4%, and Channel 4’s own website, www.channel4.com, climbed to number 16.

MMXI: www.mmxieurope.com