Visits to BBC iPlayer soar

The BBC iPlayer on-demand programming service has seen a 14-fold increase in visits following its relaunch and first marketing campaign, according to traffic figures.

An analysis of how people are finding their way to the BBC iPlayer homepage found that over half of the traffic came from other BBC websites, according to internet traffic research firm HitWise.

The official websites for EastEnders and Doctor Who - which both had hugely popular Christmas Day shows - were found to be the biggest sources of iPlayer traffic among the BBC's programme sites during the period surveyed by HitWise.

HitWise compared internet traffic to the iPlayer for the week ending December 8 and the week ending January 5.

The BBC relaunched the iPlayer on December 13 and began its first on-screen marketing campaign for the broadband TV catch-up service on Christmas Day.

HitWise found that in the week to January 5 18% of the traffic to came from people looking up "iPlayer" on search engines such as Google, Ask, Yahoo! and MSN.

Overall searches using the term "iPlayer" increased 15-fold in the week ending January 5, after the marketing campaign launched, compared to the week ending December 8.

HitWise also found that people are increasingly inputting popular BBC programme names into search engines before going on to use the iPlayer website.

"EastEnders", "Holby City", "Three Men and Another Boat" and "Live at the Apollo" were the most popular programme-related searches that sent traffic to the iPlayer.

The surge in traffic between early December and early January is not a huge surprise. During this period the BBC relaunched the iPlayer to make it Mac-compatible and much more user-friendly by streaming programmes.

"The average visit time for iPlayer is currently just under nine minutes, compared with almost 20 minutes for YouTube," said Robin Goad, director of research at HitWise UK.

"People are currently in the testing phase of many of these new services, and people are really starting to use them. Sites such as iPlayer also have a broader demographic reach than YouTube, particularly with regard to older users."

HitWise measures changes in the number of visits to a particular website address over time and its size in terms of market share based on numbers of visits over the course of a day, a week or a month.

Most other website measurement firms, such as NielsenNetratings, ABCe and Comscore, only count unique users - one visit by one person one time to a website over a period of time.

HitWise's rivals publish traffic figures in terms of millions of unique users and can therefore give a directly proportionate comparison of actual increases, or decreases, in numbers of people visiting a website.



Today's best video

Today in pictures