September 21, 2007

ABC Television Digital Strategy Paying Off

The Australian ABC's decision to open up its television archives online earlier this year appears to have resulted in significant growth for the ABC Television website, increasing its market share of visits amongst Networks websites by 374% year on year in August 2007.

ABC Television received a further spike in traffic of 60% during the week ending 8 September 2007, achieving top position in the Hitwise - Television Networks and Channels industry, ahead of Yahoo! 7 TV, CNN.com and ESPN.com.

It was the antics of the ABC's, Chaser's War on Everything at APEC in Sydney that was responsible for this boost in traffic, with the public keen to download footage of the fake motorcade on the Internet. Hitwise data indicates that searches for 'chaser' reached their highest-point ever over a 12-month period. The below chart shows a daily spike in visits to ABC Television during the media reportage on September 6, as well as the night of the screening on September 12, which apparently drew a record 2.3 million viewers to the show.

Summer Heights High

Despite the popularity of Chaser's War on Everything, the leading search term to ABC Television (4 weeks ending 8/9/07) was in fact 'summer heights high', another Australian comedy show, and brainchild of Chris Lilley. The below chart indicates entertainment-related search terms driving traffic to the ABC Television website:

Viewer interest in Summer Heights High has outstripped other ABC shows as indicated by search term data; while user interest in Chasers War on Everything appears to have a strong relationship with the show's airing periods. It's also interesting to note that while ABC Television drew the majority of visits on searches for 'summer heights high' with 61.1% of traffic for the week ending 15 September 2007, YouTube attracted 5.19%. This appears to be due to Google embedding YouTube videos in their search results:

The non-commercial status of ABC has meant they can provide a greater amount of free video content online without the same level of return commercial stations require. It will be interesting to see if this service will remain free in light of the increasing popularity of their website. For the record, Jonah is my favourite character on Summer Heights High :)

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 12:52 PM
Posted to Television

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