Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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June 25, 2008
TV spoilers and Digital Spy
Anyone who uses Wikipedia or IMDB frequently will be used to the ‘spoiler warning’ notification when reading an entry on a book or film. While notifications in these and similar websites are designed to help you avoid spoilers, there are people who actively seek them out. The table below lists the top search term suggestions for the term ‘spoilers’ over the last 12 weeks, and you can see that the most sought after are for soaps and other popular TV programs: ‘hollyoaks spoilers’, ‘eastenders spoilers’, ‘lost spoilers’, ‘wwe spoilers’ (wrestling), ‘soap spoilers’, ‘doctor who spoilers’, ‘home and away spoilers’ and ‘coronation street spoilers’
Taking those top 3 shows, the popularity of spoilers became even clearer when we looked at their search term suggestions reports. ‘hollyoaks spoilers’ is the most popular term containing ‘hollyoaks’ aside from the basic term (6.4% of searches, higher event than ‘hollyoaks babes’) as well as for ‘eastenders’ (2.3%), while it is the fourth for ‘lost’. One site in particular that picks up a lot of traffic from spoiler-related searches is Digital Spy, the TV forum / news / technology site. It is currently the second highest ranked site receiving traffic from the term ‘spoilers’ after Extreme Auto Accessories (which deals in a different kind of spoiler).
The table above illustrates the top 10 search terms sending traffic to Digital Spy over the last 12 weeks. As you can see, the site is very well optimized for TV related terms – it receives traffic from almost 70,000 distinct terms, but less than 1% of this comes from paid search. In addition to covering television ‘content’, it also receives traffic from searches for more technical matters, with ‘sky hd’ and ‘sky digital’ both appearing in its top 30 search terms. As with our analysis of the Independent a couple of months ago, the success of Digital Spy (which the chart below shows has quadrupled its market share over the last three years) nicely illustrates the benefits of successful SEO.
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:30 AM
Posted to News and Media | Search | TV
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Comments
Gosh we're a bit of an impatient nation aren't we! I wonder if we're all looking them up because we hate not knowing or just want to taunt others with the fact we know something they don't!
Posted by: Michelle at June 25, 2008 11:32 AM
Interesting data - we hate spoilers! :-P
Posted by: Pay Per Click Journal at June 26, 2008 02:34 AM
