Digital Spy

URL http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Entertainment
Registration Free/restricted to ISP e-mail - Use of anonymous email such as Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail etc with one time payment of a User Verification Fee
Owner Hachette Filipacchi (UK) Ltd
Created by Digital Spy Ltd

Digital Spy (or DS as it is often known by its users) is a British Entertainment and Media website, noted for its extensive Big Brother coverage and forums. According to comScore figures, it is the fourth largest British entertainment website with 2.1 million unique users on its news site and 3.1 million forum users. According to Alexa Internet traffic statistics, as of June 2008, Digital Spy is the 83rd most popular website in the United Kingdom and has an overall Alexa ranking of 1,862.

The site was first established on January 18, 1999 as digiNEWS before the then member sites of the digiNEWS network were merged and Digital Spy Ltd was formally incorporated in 2001. The website's latest design was launched on March 1, 2006. Digital Spy has been described as "the nation's favourite showbiz website" by one magazine.
On April 9, 2008 it was announced that the website was purchased earlier in the month by magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi UK, a subsidiary of the Lagardère Group[1][6] for a "significant" sum.

Forums
The site also features forums which went live in March 2000. The forums themselves incorporate one of the largest media-based discussion centres on the internet,[dubious – discuss] with topics covering the above as well as computing, telephony, gaming, politics, radio, sport and general discussion, which also has sub forum called chatter for less serious general discussion. On the 10th May 2007, the number of registered users climbed above the 200,000 mark. In February 2008 this had grown to over 245,000. To date over 87,500 users have never participated in the forums.

The forums are powered by twelve front end Apache HTML servers running on FreeBSD and a cluster of four MySQL database servers. The forums utilise the vBulletin software.

During Big Brother over 40,000 posts per day can be added to the forums - currently around 180,000 posts are made each week. The peak usage during Big Brother was in January 2007 was a new record of over 17,000 concurrent online users in the aftermath of Jade Goody's eviction. In December 2007 after the end of an X-Factor show the Digital Spy Forums saw over 20,000 online users and registered over 320,000 pages displayed between 10 and 11pm on that evening. In July 2007, The Times reported on the number of customers who had registered on the forums to express their concerns and negative aspects of the Virgin Media cable service.

Representatives of several major companies including Top Up TV, Joost, Sky, Goodmans and Amstrad CEO Sir Alan Sugar are registered members that post on the forum.