Big Brother site tops BBC in August

Research into UK home surfers' habits for August has hammered home the popularity of Channel 4's Big Brother webcast, after it broke into a UK top 10 chart that is dominated month in, month out by web portals.

The Big Brother sub-domain accounted for 99.8 per cent of all traffic to its host, www.terra.com, and was accessed by a shade over two million visitors, one in five of all UK home surfers, according to research firm Net Value.

It was more popular than bbc.co.uk, Lycos.com, Altavista and the website of every UK internet service provider with the exception of Freeserve.com.

Elsewhere, Lastminute.com remained the UK's number one travel website during the August holiday season, with an 8.2 per cent web reach (percentage of all UK home surfers visiting the site once), narrowly beating thomascook.com which had a reach of eight per cent. Airline Easyjet.com managed a 4.6 per cent web reach, ahead of railtrack.co.uk (4.1 per cent) and britishairways (3.3 per cent).

Lastminute.com was also the fourth most popular UK ecommerce website behind streetsonline.co.uk (15.2 per cent reach), amazon.co.uk (12.3 per cent) and jungle.com (8.6 per cent). Egg.com is the first bank on the list, with an 8.0 per cent reach, with tesco.co.uk popping in at number nine (4.9 per cent).

UK home surfers' Top 10 websites, as compiled by Net Value