Let me begin with full disclosure – I am addicted to several shows on Bravo: Project Runway, Top Chef, and The Real Housewives of Orange County. The most recent addition to the line-up is ‘Make Me a Supermodel‘, which debuted on January 3rd with a ‘Meet the Models’ episode. The real fun started the following week where the judges selected 3 models with the worst performance of the episode (approx. a week in the real world) and left their fate up to the viewers, who decide who to send home by voting online, via text message, or an 800 number.
The first round of online voting, all of which takes place on BravoTV.com, helped drive a 70% increase in market share of visits on Thursday, Jan. 10th from the previous day. Last night’s second round of online votes resulted in a 116% increase for Thursday, Jan. 17th. The traffic to BravoTV.com for last night’s episode was higher than the traffic surrounding the premiere of season four of Project Runway on Nov. 14, 2007. While I don’t have data on the number of text message or phone votes, clearly online participation to help determine the final outcome is a successful strategy to drive traffic.

The show is also quickly becoming popular with searchers, where ‘make me a supermodel’ came up second after ‘project runway’ (don’t worry, searchers still love you Tim Gunn) for driving search traffic to BravoTV.com last week.

A quick look at the search term suggestions for term ‘make me a supermodel’ last week revealed only one model’s name – Perry. Of course it’s very early to try to start predicting winners, but it is intriguing that only name appeared with so many different models.