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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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X Factor vs. Strictly Come Dancing 2008

October 30, 2008

The annual pre-Christmas battle for Saturday night tea time TV supremacy is well under way. In the red corner: ITV’s The X Factor, with Cheryl Cole replacing Sharon Osbourne on the judging panel. In the blue corner: the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, fronted as always by Bruce Forsyth and head judge Len Goodman. Strictly Come Dancing started off ahead in the ratings, but has now been over taken by the X Factor. UK Internet traffic to the show’s homepages has followed a similar path, with Strictly in front during September but X Factor pulling ahead this month.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_x_factor_and_strictly_come_dancing_websites_august_september_october_2008_chart.png

Despite the fact that the two shows are seen as competitors, they actually play to quite different audiences. As you would expect, a show fronted by Brucie attracts an older audience than one involving Girls Aloud. Although both homepages attract a similar ratio of male to female visitors (roughly 55% women in each case), they attract very different age groups. As the chart below illustrates, the X Factor Homepage is more popular with every age group, except the over 55s.

x_factor_and_strictly_come_dancing_online_audience_by_age_group_2008_chart.png

UK Internet searches for the two programmes follow a very similar pattern to the website traffic. However, at least a quarter of these searches don’t result in a visit to the show’s homepages. As the table below illustrates, 71.5% of people searching for ‘x factor’ end up at www.xfactor.tv, while for www.bbc.co.uk/strictlycomedancing the figure is 65.0%. However, when you look at traffic to the broadcaster’s other sites, the figures even out because ‘strictly come dancing’ searches go to a wider range of BBC properties. Interestingly, ITV Catch Up captures 2.8% of traffic from X Factor searches, but iPlayer only picks up 0.2% of traffic from searches for ‘strictly come dancing’

UK_Internet_searches_for_x_factor_strictly_come_dancing_homepage_BBC_ITV_2008.png

Other sites that are benefitting include Wikipedia and the popular TV forum Digital Spy. Newspaper sites are better at picking up traffic from Strictly searches, with the Mirror currently topping the list. Fans and social networks are equally popular for both shows. Looking the search terms sending traffic to the official sites, most of it currently branded but the contestants names are starting to appear. So far, Diana Vickers tops the list for the singers, while Cheri Lunghi is the favourite dancer.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be trying to see if we can repeat our success in predicting Alesha Dixon’s Strictly Come Dancing victory last year. This year we’ll be doubling the challenge and trying our luck with X Factor too, so keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for further updates…