That’s what I’m talking about! Like nine million other Britons, the Hitwise UK office has been slightly obsessed with The Apprentice over the last few months. We were pleased to see peoples’ choice Lee McQueen crowned winner last night, although we do have sympathy for the runner up and favourite, Claire Young (I wonder if she’ll take up that job offer from Karen Brady?). In addition to the reverse pterodactyl and Clurr, our other favourites included thespian Raef (also the viewer’s favourite - ‘raef’ and ‘raef bjayou’ were the top contestant search terms sending traffic to the programme’s homepage over the last 4 weeks); Lady Lucinda Ribenaberet; Kevin, the only gay in the Italian restaurant; and of course Surallen himself. Naturally, we weren’t so keen of on the evil trinity of Alex, Michael and Jenny.

This fourth series of the BBC show was also the most popular online, with the official homepage receiving more traffic than ever before. As the chart below illustrates, the peak in traffic was experienced after the opening episode (March 26th), with last night’s finale generating the second highest number of visits. You can also see that the weekly peaks occurred on Wednesdays, when the main show and The Apprentice: You’re Fired were aired.

With the announcement that there will be a fifth series next year, there clearly isn’t a shortage of willing applications. The most visited website after the Apprentice homepage yesterday was a page set up by Fremantle Media allowing prospective contestants to apply. The Fremantle site received 16.8% of The Apprentice’s downstream traffic yesterday, while the second largest recipient was BBC iPlayer with 11.5%.

The iPlayer site has benefited significantly from The Apprentice, which was the highest ranked BBC programme site sending traffic its way yesterday. In addition, ‘the apprentice’ was the top search term not containing a variation on the words ‘BBC’ or ‘iPlayer’ sending traffic to the site for the 4 weeks ending June 7th. Looking at things on a weekly basis, as the Apprentice increased in popularity it has become the top BBC programme page sending traffic to iPlayer. As the chart below illustrates, it outperformed Doctor Who as well as other consistent sources of traffic such as Eastenders and Cbeebies.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.