bbspy is a Big Brother website which surfaced during the start of Big Brother 7. We began life as a Blogger blog named “Big Brother’s Big News” back in May 2006, which was quickly abandoned due to the limited functionality of the publishing platform.

With next-to-no experience in web design, we found an online sitebuilder and rushed out a website for Big Brother 7, with the name shortened to “BB News”. It opened on May 19th 2007, one day after BB7 launched.

The site was generally unpopular, and it was pretty annoying for us too, as at the time we had a limit of 15 pages and a tiny amount of storage space for images. Frustrated, we paid to have these restrictions boosted/lifted. We then redesigned the site and held a poll to find a new, permanent name for the site. ‘bbspy’ was chosen, so we bought the domain www.bbspy.co.uk.

Our CBB5 site	Our BB8 Site	Our BB:CH Site	Our BB9 USA site

It was at this point that the site’s popularity began to increase. We closed our Big Brother 7 website with 30,000 hits, which was not a great figure, but better than we were expecting.

We stuck where we were for Celebrity Big Brother 5, and achieved 30,000 hits for our coverage of the series, which was an improvement on our BB7 site (30,000 hits over 4 weeks as opposed to 30,000 hits over 13).

Whilst this was going on, we were learning new skills in web design. We see our online sitebuilder days as a learning curve.

With our new skills intact, we abandoned the sitebuilder at the end of CBB5, and created our first fully HTML site for Big Brother 8. The site experienced 4 significant design changes during the course of the series (yes, 4. We know, we’re crazy). Again, we saw these changes as another learning curve.

It was during Big Brother 8 that our popularity escalated to new heights. We closed our BB8 site with more than 4 million hits, 242 published articles and over 2,000 comments.

We gave the site a total makeover for shorter, E4-exclusive series Big Brother Celebrity Hijack, which aired in January 2008. We were applauded for being one of few non-official websites to be both open and kept constantly updated for the duration of the show.

By the time Hijack ended, we had added over 110 news articles, attracted 1,000 comments and notched up 2million hits.

Not long after Hijack had finished, E4 announced that they were to air the new series of Big Brother USA, so we decided to roll out the bbspy bandwagon once more to cover the series, which aired between February and May 2008. We were one of very few UK-based websites to cover the show, and (again) one of even fewer to be regularly updated.

Whilst our coverage of BB9 USA didn’t do too well in the UK, we did find that our American userbase expanded somewhat during the season. The site had attracted 960,000 hits by the time the show had ended, which was at least double the number we expected.

Now, we’re back with a design that’s radically different to anything we’ve had before. We plan to become bigger and better during our coverage of the ninth season of BBUK. Watch this space to see what features we have up our sleeve…

…thanks to everyone who has helped us on the site so far (special thanks to Adam, James, Josh and Rory), and thanks to you, our readers, for visiting the site and helping us turn from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan :)