The insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip is fuelling colossal demand for BBC3 show Celebdaq, which allows viewers buy and sell shares in TV, film and music stars.
Such is its success that the website has already crashed and extra computer memory has had to be brought in to cope with the demand from players - and all without a hint of publicity.
The BBC has signed up just over 130,000 users to its web-based celebrity trading game less than a week after the launch of the show.
The success of the website and accompanying programme on recently launched digital channel BBC3 has been hailed by the BBC as the first example of a TV programme supporting a website rather than the other way around, and is likely to be a template for future programme launches.
"This is an absolute phenomenon. It has just taken off, even though we haven't marketed it. It is also the first TV show that has been launched by a website months before," said one executive.
In the Celebdaq game, players are given a fictional £10,000 to spend on shares in celebrity stocks, which go up and down depending on the laws of supply and demand.
Every week, players are paid a dividend depending on the number of column inches their chosen stars receive.
So while Michael Jackson is worth £19.71 as a result of the coverage he received following Martin Bashir's ITV documentary, former Tory MP Neil Hamilton is worth just £1.01.
The TV version is modelled on a business show with real-time price information scrolling across the screen while the presenter, Patrick O'Connell, a former BBC Wall Street correspondent, interviews pundits from firms of stockbrokers, financial journals and the tabloids.
The runaway success of Celebdaq has taken BBC bosses by surprise, causing the site to grind to a halt this earlier this week because of the number of people playing.
More than 25,000 people registered to play the game last weekend alone, putting the total number at more than 130,000.
On Monday, BBC technicians had to install extra servers and the site is on course to get more than 5 million hits this week, putting it in the top 10 of all the BBC's sites.
In a further sign that popular culture is slowly eating itself, several celebrities have themselves signed up to play the game, including Ant and Dec (worth £4.53 and £3.39 respectively), Anthea Turner (£2.53) and Richard Bacon (£1.42).
Chris Wilson, the executive producer of the show, said the popularity of the format had surpassed all expectations.
"It's potentially a very good model for the future. Big Brother had a very popular website, but the programme could easily have existed without the site. Celebdaq is the first TV show to rely entirely on a website for its content.
"The site launched last July and the show only launched last week so we've had plenty of time to build up data and attract a loyal base of players," he added.
Mr Wilson also claimed that the show went beyond mere celebrity obsession and tapped into a growing awareness of the way the media covers people in the public eye, as well as teaching people how the stock market operates.
But there has already been criticism of the morality behind the game. In a column for trade magazine Broadcast last week, the Guardian Unlimited editor-in-chief, Emily Bell, questioned whether "gambling on Sadie Frost's post-natal depression and marital breakdown has a place in a publicly funded organisation".
The format of the show was devised by reality TV guru Conrad Green, who was one of the key TV executives behind the launch of Big Brother and has since left the corporation to join Simon Fuller's 19TV, the company behind Pop Idol.
The site itself has been developed by the team behind Popex - a popular music share trading game that has been running for the last two years - who were poached by the BBC to build the Celebdaq site.
