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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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ITV.com traffic reaches record high thanks to Britain’s Got Talent

June 01, 2009

The Britain’s Got Talent final attracted 19.2 million viewers on Saturday night, making it the most watched non-sporting television programme since 2003. The ITV show, which was won by dance troupe Diversity rather than favourite Susan Boyle, picked up almost three quarters (72%) of the television audience during its time slot.

As chart below illustrates, the show’s website also received a massive boost last week, receiving twice the amount of traffic as during the equivalent week last year. On Saturday (30/05/09) the Britain’s Got Talent homepage was the 40th most visited website in the UK, picking up 1 in every 600 UK Internet visits. On a weekly basis the site received over eight times as many UK Internet visits as the Apprentice homepage, despite the fact that this year the Alan Sugar fronted BBC show is attracting more online visitors than ever before.

Britains_got_talent_vs_the_apprentice_online_2009_2008_2007_chart.png

Two other websites notably benefitted from the success of Britain’s Got Talent. The first was itv.com, which sent 31% of its downstream traffic to the broadcasters’ most popular programme’s homepage on Saturday. Searches for ‘itv’ more than doubled last week and, as a result, ITV’s homepage became the 36th most visited website in the UK on Saturday. As the chart below illustrates, this was the website’s busiest day over the last 3 years - and therefore probably ever.

The other big beneficiary of ITV’s Saturday success was the ticketing website TicketZone. It was the top website visited after Britain’s Got Talent, picking 7.9% of the site’s downstream traffic. Consequently UK Internet visits to TicketZone increased by 347% on Saturday and it became the fourth most visited ticketing website as a result.

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However, this Saturday wasn’t quite the site’s busiest day recently. As the chart above illustrates, that happened a couple of weeks ago on Saturday 16/05/09. And the reason? It was the day that tickets for the final Championship playoff match went on sale. 25% of the sites traffic came from the Burnley FC homepage that day(more than Google), with a further 5% coming from Clarets Mad, a Burnley supporters’ fan site.

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