• by Masha Geller , July 13, 2001

Last week, CBS's reality show Big Brother 2 didn't quite impress anyone with their TV ratings, but whatever viewers they didn't attract to the screen, they may have caught up with on the web.

According to the latest from Nielsen//NetRatings, CBS.com took the top ranking as the fastest growing domain during the week ending July 8, as surfers hit the site for the latest news regarding the contestants on "Big Brother 2." CBS.com attracted 639,000 unique visitors compared to 282,000 surfers the previous week, jumping 127%. More than 29% of CBS.com's audience visited the "Big Brother 2" portion of the site.

According to NetRatings Internet media analyst Betty Cho, the site "enables a level a voyeurism that is extremely compelling but not possible in the offline world."

Elsewhere on the web, NetRatings shows that the most visited sties from home were AOL Time Warner (with 37 million unique visitors), Yahoo!, MSN, Microsoft, and Excite@Home. While at work, surfers favored the same five site, Yahoo! topping the rankings with 16 million visitors.

Blame it on the nice weather outside and the July 4 holiday, but it looks like people spent a lesser portion of their workday online last week - a total of 33 million people accessed the web from work, which is 4% less than the week before (ending July 1).

Interestingly enough, at-home numbers held almost constant. At home, people spent a total of about 3 hours and 15 minutes online, visiting 231 pages total (an average of 6 unique sites) for less than a minute each. NetRatings calculated that the average click rate for top banners went down 7.1% both at home and at work, with .26% and .13% respectively.