DIGITAL SPY

'Digital Spy' (or 'DS' as it is often known by its users) is a British media and entertainment website, noted for its extensive ''Big Brother'' coverage and forums. The site was established on January 18 1999 when the operations of the digiNEWS network were merged and Digital Spy Ltd was formally incorporated in 2001^[1]. The website's latest design was launched on March 1, 2006.

Contents

Forums

TV Guide

DS:BB

Popularity

References

External links

Forums

The site also features forums which went live in March 2000. The forums themselves incorporate one of the largest media-based discussion centres on the internet, with topics covering the above as well as computing, telephony, gaming, politics, radio and general discussion, which also has sub forum called chatter for less serious general discussion. On the 10th May 2007, the number of registered users climbed above the 200,000 mark.
The forums are powered by six front end HTML servers and a number of MySQL database servers.^[2] The forums utilise the vBulletin software.
During ''Big Brother'' over 30,000 posts per day are added to the forums. The peak usage in January 2007 was a new record of over 17,000 concurrent online users in the aftermath of Jade Goody's eviction. ^[3] In July 2007, The Times reported on the number of customers who had registered on the forums to express their concerns and negative aspects of the Virgin Media cable service.^[4]
Alan Sugar and Mark Philippoussis are well-known celebrities who post there. ^[5]

Representatives of several major companies including Top Up TV, Joost, Sky^[6] and Goodmans are registered members that post on the forum.

TV Guide

As of Friday November 17 2006 the Digital Spy website has a TV Guide powered by DigiGuide.

DS:BB

''Digital Spy:Big Brother'', or more popularly abbreviated, ''DS:BB'', brings the latest news stories, and during the series records ''Live Updates'', in which forum members record up-to-the-minute updates from the live streaming. The site also, during the series, has columns written by journalists such as Jenni Trent Hughes as well as ex-''Big Brother'' housemates. DS:BB won a WebUser gold award for its ''Big Brother'' coverage.^[7]

Popularity

On 17 January, 2007, the site logged 3.93 million page impressions, a figure that then rose to a new best of 4.07 million page impressions - some 180,000 unique visitors - on 18 January, 2007. The previous record was 3 million impressions, set as the seventh series of ''Big Brother'' began in May 2006. ^[8]

References

1. Digital Spy History
2. Digital Spy
3. Digital Spy's best ever figures
4. Private equity targets Virgin Media
5. Famous Members
6. Sky
7. About Digital Spy
8. Digital Spy's best ever figures

External links

★ Digital Spy

★ Digital Spy Forums