ITV’s Millionaire Proves Major Online Ratings Winner
ITV’s first major bid to attract large scale web traffic has been declared a success by the company after its online Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? game achieved 45m page impressions during its first three weeks of operation.
Comparing itself to last year’s TV/web success Big Brother, which averaged 3m page impressions per day on its website, including a 10m peak on ‘Nasty Nick’s’ judgement day (see Big Brother Website Makes It Into August Top Ten), ITV claims that its 2.7m page impression per day average during the second week after launch makes it the largest specific web destination since Channel 4’s summer 2000 hit.
The site uses questions taken from shows already broadcast on ITV, allowing contestants to see how they compare to previous big winners. At present no real money prizes are offered, although the scope to attach prizes to future applications may be explored earlier thanks to this initial success. Three further games are in development, including a game synchronised with programme transmission, allowing users to compete with on-air contestants and a multiplay game which allows up to 10 players to compete head to head.
John Hardie, ITV’s marketing and commercial director said, “Putting Millionaire online is just one of a raft of major developments planned in ITV’s new media strategy so it is really encouraging that it has been so well received.”
Plans revealed last week for an integrated ITV (see Prebble Heads Up An Integrated ITV) could also see the creation of the long-awaited itv.com, which would harness the TV station’s considerable advertising pulling power into a web venture to rival the mighty bbc.co.uk (see Granada And Carlton To Unite Online Assets).
The current game is hosted by itv.co.uk, has its hardware and technical hosting taken care of by Carlton Interactive, while Granada Broadband has designed the pages and provides editorial support.
ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.co.uk
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