April 07, 2006

Deal or No Deal a Hit for NBC.com

Recently I noticed that the top TV show search term sending visits to the Hitwise Entertainment - Television category was 'deal or no deal,' and that terms related to the show accounted for 4 of the top 11 terms
sending visits to NBC.com. When taking a look at daily site traffic, I found that visits to NBC.com, home of Deal or No Deal had been increasing by 100% or more on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays when the show aired. Not only did visits increase, but session times did as well, to over 11 minutes on Deal or No Deal show days. This could indicate that visitors are playing the Deal or No Deal game on the site to test out their own luck and level of risk aversion. The spike to NBC.com on Monday April 3 was larger than normal, most likely due to Katie Couric's announcement that she would leave the Today Show for CBS.

It appears that NBC.com has finally hit its stride with its web efforts - since Deal or No Deal launched in late February, weekly visits to the site have increased by 121% (week ending 4/1/06 vs. week ending 2/25/06), and visits have reached their highest point in the past 15 months, as shown on the chart below. We covered in a press release how well the NBC Olympics site fared, and here how the SNL skit sent You Tube skyrocketing. It also helped out NBC.com, as you can see from the late December spike on the chart. Now that NBC has stopped YouTube and other online video sites from showing copyrighted content, it needs to improve search functionality on the site to match how users actually search for videos. A search on NBC.com for 'lazy sunday' does not show me where I can view the skit. To find it, I have to navigate to the page for Saturday Night Live, and hope that it appears in the featured videos section.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:23 PM
Posted to Entertainment

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