[President]

Thanks to BB SPY:

We can reveal today that approximately 3 million votes were cast throughout Big Brother 9 last year, an increase of around 50% on BB8’s total.

Figures in Channel 4’s annual report for 2008, which was released today, show that £300,000 was split between BB9’s nominated charities - Scope, PAPYRUS Prevention of Young Suicide and the Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

At least 10p from every 35p vote was split between the charities, which means that up to 3 million votes were cast over the entire series.

This is an increase of approximately 1 million over the previous series. Big Brother 8 raised £200,000, again with ‘at least’ 10p per call going to charity, meaning at most 2 million votes were cast.

Following the premium rate phone-line scandals which affected the TV industry in early 2007, and Channel 4 dropping text and interactive voting, BB8’s total figure was significantly down on that of Big Brother 7.

The series raised a total of £1.3m for charity in 2006, with just over £250,000 coming from the controversial vote to bring back ex-housemates which saw C4 donate all profits (28p for texts, 36p for calls) to charity from over 750,000 votes. At least a further 10m votes were cast across the rest of the series.

Since 2001, Big Brother voting has raised around £5m for charities through voting from BB2, BB7-9, all Celebrity series, and E4’s Big Brother Celebrity Hijack.

In other series, which did not raise money for charity, voting peaked at 22.7m in BB3, but BB6 saw a significant fall, resulting in C4 not realeasing any data for that year.
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No wonder we get all these shock results nowadays. It's because there's so few people voting!