Online As On Screen – The Big Brother Effect Continues On The Web
When Nasty Nick met his downfall in Channel 4’s summer hit Big Brother, net-heads everywhere knew about it long before more than 6 million TV viewers tuned in to the evening programme (see Nasty Nick’s Nightmare Notches Up Record Ratings For Big Brother). The Big Brother website, www.BigBrother.terra.com is an integral part of making the phenomenon interactive, offering additional footage via webcams and opportunities to vote on issues apart from eviction, such as popularity, as well as providing news from the house before the evening broadcast.
If the television shows have recorded impressive viewing statistics for Channel 4, they are nothing compared to the traffic through the website. The latest report from MMXI Europe has declared the site the fastest moving since records began in October last year, going straight into the July rankings as the 26th most visited site in the UK, ahead of established names such as lastminute.com, letsbuyit.com, and tescodirect.com.
The Big Brother site had a total of 874,000 unique visitors during July, representing 8.1% of the UK at home internet population. Of these, 67% were men. The popularity of Big Brother online also boosted traffic to Channel4.com. In June, Channel 4’s website had a reach of 1.4%, with 148,000 unique visitors, but by July this had grown to 6.9% reach, with 740,000 unique visitors. If there was any doubt as to the cause of this increase, 77% of July’s visitors went on to follow the link from the Channel 4 website to the Big Brother website.
One of the most successful aspects of Big Brother, from an advertiser’s point of view, is its appeal for the hard-to-please, but highly desirable young adult age brackets. Channel 4 has already claimed that 50% of Big Brother viewers are in the 16-24 age group (see Big Brother Is Watching Audience Figures Go Up), and the profile of website visitors seems to reflect this. The largest proportion of visitors (32%) comes from the 25-34 year old age bracket, followed by 15-24 year olds (25.1%) and 35-44 year olds (21.8%). Despite popular opinion, recent research has shown that these age groups are not necessarily the heaviest users of the internet (see UK Internet Population Grows One Fifth In Six Months).
Three brands who invested in web links from the Big Brother site were rewarded with increased visits to their own sites as the programme’s popularity grew throughout July. 9.6% of visitors to the Big Brother site then went to auction site QXL.com, 6.6% went on to visit E-bookers.com and 4.5% Shopsmart.com.
Mari Kim Coleman, UK managing director of MMXI Europe, commented, “The incredible success of the Big Brother website in the UK highlights the potential this medium has to reach and interact with the public.”
MMXI Europe: 020 7563 1606