I thought I'd share an interesting little phenomenon that we've noticed over the last few weeks. Each Saturday evening traffic between roughly 6pm and 7:30pm there's a very distinctive decrease in gold traffic. It happens almost exactly when Doctor Who is on TV. This graph shows gold traffic on our network over the last 48 hours, as you can see on Saturday around 6:30pm gold traffic decreases and then around 7:30pm it goes back up again. Doctor Who started at 6:45pm and finished at 7:30pm. Coincidence? 
We don't tend to see this type of traffic pattern with many shows on TV, certainly not as noticeable a drop. England football games, particularly on terrestrial TV, cause a drop in traffic but most other TV shows don't. Is there something unique about Doctor Who or the audience that watch it? Is it just the number of people that watch it? Overnight ratings show that 6.6 million people watched it this week (38.4% of the total TV audience). The show 2 weeks ago was the 17th most watched of the week with 7.06 million viewers. Maybe it just captures the imagination and full attention of the whole household unlike other shows and the PCs just get switched off, whereas the soaps or other popular shows don't. The PC is definately a living room item in many households these days so a lot of people will be online whilst watching TV, maybe they just don't do this while watching Doctor Who, or there's a big chunk of those with PCs in the bedroom/study that come down to the living room to watch their weekly dose of David Tennant. This graph shows streaming traffic over the last 48 hours, again you can see a dip in usage around 6:30pm on Saturday but there's also a big increase in streaming on Sunday evening around 8pm. 
We can't be certain exactly what this is because we don't analyse the content to see what it is, but it's fair to speculate that a fair chunk of that traffic will be people catching up on Doctor Who via iPlayer. (There may also be a chunk of traffic from people watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom online too as that started about 8pm last night which could explain the way the graph increases.)
Doctor Who dip