BB FANS

Four charities are to benefit from the new series of Celebrity Big Brother.

The programme's producers say all net profits from phone lines will go to the charities.

Every time an eviction call is made 15p will go into a fund to be split between Centrepoint, National Missing Persons Helpline, Rethink and the Samaritans.

The cost of evicting celebrities by phone, interactive TV or online will 25p each time with 15p of each vote cast going to the charities.

Ananova

And the other 10p goes .............

Mainly to that well known charity called BT !

I work with premium rate numbers, the end customer gets about 10p from a 25p call, unless there are millions of minutes - in which case they can get up to 15-16p a minute in revenue, the guess is that the 15p's are what they estimate they'll get from the phone calls and will only keep the odd penny per minute surplus, if they get that many calls.

I can probably get a clearer picture when I see one of the numbers being used, as I can track that back to the company issuing that range.

The phone company will get a small proportion of the money raised, but a fair chunk goes to BT for carrying the calls, no matter where they originate.

Or - to put it another way. If I'd have issued the numbers then BB would be getting 15-16p a minute, I'd be getting perhaps 0.4p a minute, the company I use would be getting 0.5p a minute and the remainder is BT's. That's based on a straight million minutes... If they get more minutes than that then they'd only get a fraction more income.

If anyone from BB is reading this and disagrees, because they've only been promised 15p - PLEASE get in touch before the next series 'cos I can probably do better than that