Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is back on ABC and hammering the competition, or so we're told.
Still, the show hasn't regained its spot in the Lycos 50. (You may recall it went as high as #8 on the list last November.) Does this mean the show is fading? Is the game show boom over already? Is the competition gaining?
Let's take a look at the numbers. We scanned last week's top 25,000 user searches for all the game show-related topics we could find. The results, with their percentage of the game show total, look like this:
47% Who Wants To Be a Millionaire
16% Twenty-One
08% Wheel of Fortune
07% Jeopardy
06% Family Feud
05% Game shows
04% Greed
03% Vanna White
02% Regis Philbin
02% The Price Is Right
(Did not qualify: Hollywood Squares, Winning Lines, Win Ben Stein's Money, The Newlywed Game, Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, Maury Povich.)
Frankly, these are not dynamite numbers. Add all of them together and they would have ranked just below science fair projects (#16) on this week's list.
That said, clearly Millionaire is the cream of the crop. Add Regis to the mix and the show is a whisker away from 50% of all game show queries. Twenty-One, NBC's attempt at a Regis-killer, makes a very respectable showing with 16%. So does Family Feud, which is creeping up on old standbys Wheel of Fortune and (my own favorite) Jeopardy. Greed, Fox's entry in the megabucks bandwagon, just edged Vanna White -- not a powerful sign.
Question of the day: what ever happened to Win Ben Stein's Money? Isn't that the kind of cult show that usually draws tons of interest on the web? Neither the show nor the host cracked our top 25,000.
