• by July 14, 2000

"Big Brother," CBS' newest entrant in the voyeuristic programming race, debuted last week and drove many viewers to the BigBrother2000.com site where details about contestants' personal lives, comments from viewers and hints about who would be the last one standing were posted.

But even die-hard fans will abandon the site if they have to wait for it to download or if it doesn't load at all. Research shows site visitors will wait a maximum of 6 seconds before abandoning a site. Site performance during peak hours topped 23 seconds and the availability rate, meaning how often the site is accessible to users, was only 3%, so "Big Brother" will cause many first-time visitors never to return again.

Exodus Communications Performance Optimization Solutions has been monitoring the performance of the "Big Brother" site since the TV program's premiere and has compared it with the performance of rival shows "Survivor" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" to determine how each site looked to the end user. It seems that the TV game show crowd that previously flocked to the high-performing "Millionaire" site will have to adjust to the slower download times and sporadic availability of the next big thing. The "Big Brother" site, that is.

The following statistics from Exodus Performance Optimization Solutions provide data to illustrate the size and performance of the three sites:

Percentage of time that the homepage is fully downloaded to the user: Survivor: 97%; Millionaire: 99%; Big Brother: 3%(performance degradation due to several broken GIFs on the homepage)

Number of objects on each homepage: Survivor: 39 Millionaire: 12 Big Brother: 80

Average download times for the past week: Survivor: 5.56; Millionaire: 2.29; Big Brother: 7.48

Download time during peak hours - (1 p.m., July 10): Survivor: 1.87; Millionaire: 2.31; Big Brother: 23.05

Web page size (bytes): Survivor: 118,582; Millionaire: 53,351; Big Brother: 184,236

The average size of a site in the Exodus Performance Optimization Internet Index is 65,000 bytes. The "Big Brother" Web site weighs in at 184,236 bytes, almost triple the size of the Internet's heaviest hitters, which has a significant impact on the site's download times.

As these "old-school" media companies attempt to extend their audience reach on the Internet, will the user's experience online affect the show's viewership? Has the melding of Internet and traditional media changed the landscape of pop culture? Only time and measurement will tell.