Earlier this month, Congress decided to delay the scheduled transition from analog broadcasting to digital, pushing the deadline out until June. Over the past year, the website for the TV Converter Box Program, has captured the highest market share of visits among websites with information on the impeding switch. Although the deadline was just recently pushed back due to the lack of consumer readiness, the peak in visits took place during the week ending Jan. 3, 2009, rather than the delay helping to increase coupon requests. Despite the overall visit decline over the past few weeks, 72% of visitors to dtv2009.gov were new to the website last week (meaning they haven’t visited in the past 30 days).

With the coupon program driving most of the traffic to the website, the demographics of the visitors to dtv2009.gov are not surprising, skewing older with a lower household income. For the 4 weeks ending Feb 14, 2009, over half of the visits to dtv2009.gov were from households earning less than $60,000 and 25% were 55 and over.


Coupons for the converter boxes are common among the search queries driving traffic to dtv2009.gov, with 21% of the 872 search terms including the word ‘coupon’.