Will an online competition between boys and girls work?

4T2 have just launched a website for Toonattik – GMTV’s Saturday and Sunday morning TV show. The site revolves around a weekly competition between boys and girls where competitors play games to score points. The site has been live for two weekends now and well over 300,000 scores have been submitted.

I was slightly concerned when refining GMTVs overall website concept that the majority of game players who regularly submitted scores would be male and therefore the competition element would become redundant very quickly. 4T2 even built in a “catch up” mode in the scoring system that could be turned on if this became the case.

How wrong was I. The site was visited 65,000 times between 08.30 and 11.30 on the first day it was live. 52% of these visitors selected to play on the girls team. And yes – the girls scored more points than the boys that week (by roughly 2%). And then they won the next week as well. This week the scores are just as close.

So there you have it. If you have a young audience (although "young" includes everyone at 4T2 and several GMTV staff at 16.00 on a Friday at the moment) competitions between genders using simple online games seem to work perfectly.