Published in The Australian, May 2 2002

LIKE its television parent, the website for the second series of Ten's reality show Big Brother has been a conspicuous ratings hit. Web monitoring service Hitwise saw the site jump from 260th to fifth in its Australian website rankings after the new series began in early April.

While the TV show's formula remains essentially the same, there have been changes in the approach taken on the web. The most obvious is a new hard-edged commercialism, extending right through to the site's address.

Last year's bigbrother.com.au has become bigbrother.iprimus.com.au, providing a highly visible plug to site host and show sponsor iPrimus.

Archives of audition tapes are only accessible by entering a code found in packets of Energizer batteries, another of the show's sponsors.

The change that has stirred the most controversy among Big Brother's net fans, though, is a move to charge for access to the live 24-hour web cams, which track the housemates' every move.

In 2001, the web cams were advertiser-supported and could be viewed for free. This year, to get the full range of cameras, users must sign up for a Director's Suite package, either by paying $29.70 for three months or by signing up for internet access with iPrimus, which offers a discount on the package.

Web discussion groups and email lists have quickly filled with tips for circumventing the sign-up fee (many of them unreliable) and complaints about the service. "The live cam is an absolute joke," wrote one viewer on a Big Brother newsgroup. "You cannot see anything on the free 'Pan Cam' but blurred, distorted shapes, and paying iPrimus for what we got for free last year boarders [sic] on fraud."

Despite the complaints, the service is popular. Hitwise figures show that nearly 10 per cent of visitors to the Big Brother site are coming to it directly from Bill to Bill, which provides the Director's Suite sign-up system.

However, some fans have reacted to the new regime by setting up their own sites, which feature highlights captured from the web cameras. (The show encourages fan sites, but asks them to respect copyrighted content such as images.)

One such site, Big Brother Uncensored, concentrates largely on naked or near-naked images of show contestants captured from bathroom footage. In the first 14 days of the site's operation this year, it attracted almost 60,000 visitors – small numbers compared with TV's Big Brother Uncut, which also pro motes raunchy content, but an impressive haul for a site promoted almost solely by word of mouth.

The site's operator Mike (he declines to give a surname) has no doubts about why it is so popular. "I think with so much nudity early on, it has given us so much more content and with people having to pay for the web cams this year, there are a lot of people wanting to get glimpses."

Having survived legal threats from producers Southern Star Endemol last year (although the site was forced to change its original address), this year Mike has risked incurring SSE's wrath again by offering to sell advertising on the site. So far, however, there have been no takers.