The 3rd phase of the Hitchhiker’s, based on Life the Universe and Everything, has been broadcasted from 21st september to the 26th October both on the air and on Internet.
As you know, Radio 4 has made a great mini site about Hitchhikers to celebrate the new series attracting a lot of people (with a lot of great sections and even a new version of the famous Hitchhiker’s text game). And the episodes were avalaible for listening during seven days on Internet.
Of course the success has been overwhelming but noone expected that more than one million persons would listen to the radio series on Internet and 40.000 players would be attracted by the new online edition of the old Infocom text game.
For the fist time, the BBC has published in october a press release with accurate details about their success on the web. In this press release, they say that “nearly six million people used the BBC’s radio websites in October, listening to more than 10 million hours of radio via the internet and generating almost 160,000,000 page impressions, new figures reveal”. Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactive, said: “These are the first set of monthly statistics we have published and they show record numbers for both online listening and web traffic”. In fact, one year before, the BBC radios attracted a little less than 4 million listeners. Two millions more in one year is not too bad, and obviously Hitchhikers had an effect on the BBC radio’s success on line.
For october, Radio 4 got the first place in top 30 on demand programmes with 653.636 persons listening to Hitchhikers on the web (this include the four episodes broadcasted in october, the first and second episodes were broadcasted in september). Hitchhikers is far ahead the other programs. The classcial soap “Archers” gets the second place (still on Radio 4) with 382.726 listeners. Chris Moyle got 325.975 listeners on Radio 1. And all the other programs score less than 200.000 listeners.
Thanks to Hitchhikers, Radio 4 was in october the second most successful BBC radio network on Internet with 1.247.445 visitors. Radio 1 is still first with 2.352.366 visitors
