On Monday night, the CW will air the highly anticipated (or is that just me) season finale for the first season of Gossip Girl, a much talked about show (called the Greatest Teen Drama of All-Time by New York magazine) based upon a series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar. Since this show is often discussed around the office and with friends, I was curious to see the show’s website traffic. As one would expect, the premiere on Sept 19th caused the traffic to ramp up pretty quickly, resulting in the 2nd highest week for the website in terms of the market share of visits. The actual peak (to date) was the week ending October 20, 2007 as the show grew in popularity.

A lull in new episodes due to the writer’s strike caused traffic to dip sharply mid-February through April. However, when the show returned in mid-April, the network had made the decision to cease streaming full episodes of Gossip Girl for fear of cannibalizing TV viewer ship (the show is also among the most downloaded on iTunes). Despite that decision, traffic has rebounded somewhat after the strike thanks to a racy advertising campaign and promises of an explosive plot line. Although we are heading towards Monday night finale, the market share of visits still remains lower than the peaks during the launch of the show.

Searches on ‘gossip girl’ were highest during the week of the premiere, the week ending Sept 22, 2007, but also mirror much of the website's traffic patterns, increasing as new episodes were aired. The good news is that when searchers are looking for information on Gossip Girl, The CW’s website is receiving the bulk of the traffic from the resulting searches. This is also the case even when ‘gossip girl full episodes’ is the search query, so even without the full episodes, they are still the beneficiary of most of the traffic.

Check out Lily & Bart’s wedding website – clever marketing for the season finale. We’ll all be watching to see if Lily goes through with it!

Heather Dougherty

Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. This piece originally appeared on Hitwise's analyst blog here.

Image by muse, uninterrupted