10 January 2008
Over the Christmas period the Internet traffic to the BBC’s iPlayer increased 14-fold.
According to research carried out by Hitwise the television catch up service provided by the BBC increased 14-fold and ranked as the 80th most visited website in the UK for the week ending 5th January 2008.
The BBC has also been promoting iPlayer both on TV online, and over half of traffic to the site in the first week of January came from other BBC websites. On News Year’s day the website ranked and the 62nd most visited website.
Robin Goad, Hitwise UK Director of Research commented:
Searches for ‘iPlayer’ increased 15-fold over the last month, and 18% of the site’s traffic came from search engines last week…UK TV viewers are also finding iPlayer when searching for their favourite BBC programs online: ‘eastenders’ was the most popular non-navigational search term (i.e. search term that didn’t include iplayer’ or ‘bbc’) sending traffic to the site over the last month. Other popular program searches sending traffic to the site were ‘live at the apollo’, ‘three men in another boat’ and ‘holby city’.
Although YouTube still remains the online video leader the success of the BBC iPlayer and other video websites such as Channel 4's 4oD suggests that YouTube’s market leadership position will not be guaranteed in the future.
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