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HITWISE COMMUNITY UPDATE
Comic Relieg a winner as fameacademyfinal goes to air
London, 14th March 2005, Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, today reports that Comic Relief has achieved massive online success with the culmination of both its Red Nose Day and Fame Academy initiatives last Friday.
Friday’s Red Nose Day activities prompted a huge surge in traffic to several key sites, including Comic Relief’s official RND ’05 website (www.rednoseday.com), the BBC’s Red Nose Day site (www.bbc.co.uk/rednoseday) and the Comic Relief website itself (www.comicrelief.com). As reported last week, rednoseday.com increased its ranking rapidly in the lead up to the day, and the site ultimately achieved a massive market share figure of 14.6% on Friday March 12th, becoming the second most popular site in the Hitwise Community sector. The top ranking went to the BBC’s Red Nose Day site, which jumped more than 227 places overall, overtaking Comic Relief’s RND site at the last minute with an incredible 20% market share of the Community category.
Friday also saw the final of Celebrity Fame Academy, the phenomenally popular BBC series that raised money for Comic Relief with its celebrity singing competition. Viewers contributed more than £1.3 million for the charity by registering 8.25 million votes in the weeks leading up Friday’s final, and this tremendous show of public support translated into a four-fold increase in traffic to the official Fame Academy site, www.bbc.co.uk/fameacademy. The site held just over 1% of all traffic to the Hitwise Television category last Friday 4th March, and this increased to almost 4% by Thursday 11th March as viewers cast last-minute votes for their favourite celebrities.
The competition’s three finalists were Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman, East Enders actress Kim Medcalf and comedian Adrian Edmondson, and an analysis of Hitwise Search Terms data shows that the share of online searches each contestant received in the weeks leading up to the final accurately predicted their exact finishing order. The term ‘edith bowman’ was the most searched-for, followed by ‘kim medcalf’ and ‘adrian edmondson’ respectively.
Comic Relief’s official website also benefited greatly from the publicity generated by both Red Nose Day and Fame Academy: www.comicrelief.com reached #3 in the Hitwise Community category on Friday March 11th, a jump of more than 17 places from the previous week’s rank of #20.
Visits to www.rednoseday.com vs www.bbc.co.uk/rednoseday,March 5th – March 11th 2005
Visits to www.comicrelief.com,February 25th – March 11th 2005
About Hitwise:
Hitwise is the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.
By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.
Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.co.uk
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Jannie Cahill
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