UK Christmas Number 1 Single? - Nizlopi - What can traffic statistics tell us about this internet phenomenon?

One of the more intriguing contenders for this year's UK Christmas #1 Single is Nizlopi's "JCB" or The JCB Song as it is often known.
The UK special bets community remembers what a Happy Christmas they had the last time an outsider hit the top spot - Gary Jules' "Mad World" - a "Tears For Fears" Cover in 2003. But is there any way we can gauge the potential sales of this single ahead of the insiders who can physically count the damn things?

Given that http://www.jcbsong.co.uk/ has garnered most of its success through the internet and viral marketing, a close analysis of the domain's web traffic may provide some clues. Certainly traffic stats have been helpful in the past in predicting the Crazy Frog craze via hits to the www.jamster.co.uk domain

So here's our first look at the main domain's traffic, starting with "reach". Reach measures the number of users of a website. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. As you can see in the graphic below; www.jcbsong.co.uk has had fantastic momentum through November, certainly helped by its Radio 1 playlist support and the viral marketing that that spawned. The fly in the ointment however is the very recent pullback - was it just the end of a busy weekend or has the JCB run out of (Red) Diesel? Watch this space for updates! Best, Special Bets.




Case Study - The Crazy Frog - May 2005

The single was released on May 23rd 2005 and reached the number one spot in the UK Singles Chart outselling the nearest contender, Coldplay, by three or four copies to one. This was the official song endorsed by Jamster! As you can see on Jamster.co.uk's traffic chart the release of the single and fast sales momentum of the single ran concurrent with a rapid rise in traffic on Jamster.co.uk - this is why traffic analysis may be useful in the case of Niplozi's single. And also possibly a good indicator of this year's Crazy Frog single's prospects... Special Bets.

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