Big Brother costs UK business £1.4m a week
The Big Brother Web site is costing UK business £300,000 a day, or £1.4m a week, according to a new report from software provider Websense. In short, the site is severely hitting the productivity of UK companies with its live footage to fast corporate machines.
Seven hundred thousand people visited the Big Brother Web site at least once in July, with the average user logging on for 16.1 minutes according to research carried out by NetValue. This works out to be £2.91 per video stream if based upon the average gross hourly rate of £11.64 quoted from the Office of National Statistics.
The video-streaming reach of the site went from 1.8 percent in June to 2.9 percent in July, indicating that visitors to the site were tuning into the Web cams for average sessions of 25.3 minutes in July.
Morgan Holt, editor of the Big Brother Web site, is "extremely pleased that people are choosing to spend their summer in recreation rather than doing hard work".
Holt says he is inclined to believe the £1.4m figure is probably largely overblown, as "employees will be having the Big Brother Web cams on the background, just as they could be listening to the radio".
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