Dancing With Helio

The Dancing with the Stars show with Helio Castroneves has given indycar.com a nice boost in traffic for October/November. Compared to last October visits are up 28.73%, pageviews up 42.04% and average time on site is up 14.38%. For October the Dancing with the Stars landing page is the most popular outside of the homepage. Now that is Heliomania! No doubt that trend will continue for November.

The growth has been attributed to a couple of Web 2.0 applications. The post a comment has over 60 pages of users leaving comments for Helio and Julianne. By allowing users to comment on the photos, audio and video clips, this keeps users engaged with Helio and keeps track of his progress. This has led to creating everything from wallpapers to ecards and even opening it up to user submitted art.

The longer Helio stays on the show, the more traffic we are seeing on the site. The number of fans watching the show who never would have has been impressive. This shows how viral components quickly spread.

The only thing I am stumped about is the lack of viral elements from ABC. No video is allowed to be used. How odd is that? What a missed opportunity for ABC to capture even more fans. Live video of a 15 minute workout or just highlights would keep fans engaged everyday instead of just the Monday/Tuesday shows. Sites like ours are following the show week in and week out with no content from ABC. We are even restricted to TWO photos a week. Come on. ABC has done a great job of getting their content on the internet but like the rest of the broadcasters has been slow to understand the true power of the internet.

We continue to send a large number of fans to Vote For Helio to ABC.com. It will be interesting to see what kind of traffic we will receive if he makes it to the end. Keep on voting!