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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Alesha Dixon to win Strictly Come Dancing?

December 07, 2007

A couple of weeks ago we posted about the rivalry between the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing and ITV’s The X-Factor, including a promise to make some predictions as to who would win the shows based our search data. Well, Strictly Come Dancing overtook the X-Factor in terms of internet visits this week, so we’ll do them first.

And our prediction is… Alesha Dixon to win it!

Here’s why we think the former Mis-Teeq star will win it rather than Gethin Jones, Letitia Dean or Matt Di Angelo. Firstly, total search volume; as the chart below illustrates, Alesha is the most searched for contestant, and she really pulled ahead of the competition last week. Clearly searches do not equal dancing ability but, as the show is voted for by the public, popularity is the most important thing.

Searches for strictly come dancing contestants Alesha Dixon Gethin Jones Letitia Dean Matt di Angelo.png

Now, searches do not necessarily equal popularity. Bill has demonstrated this with his famous Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient, and it is particularly true with female contestants, as illustrated by our Big Brother analysis earlier this year. Therefore, it is important to check that there aren’t too many prurient searches by the type of men that are unlikely to vote on Strictly Come Dancing. As the search term suggestions report below shows, this isn’t the case – ‘alesha dixon pics’ and ‘alesha dixon topless’ may be the third and fourth most popular terms, but they each account for less than 1% of all searches.

The penultimate test is to look at where people who are searching for Alesha are ending up, and again the signs are positive. The top 10 sites listed below are all the type of sites you would hope for – her homepage, a fan site, Wikipedia, YouTube, the Sun, and the Strictly Come Dancing home page itself. In fact, ‘alesha dixon’ was the highest ranked contest name search term sending traffic to the Strictly Come Dancing site. Even more encouragingly, the second most popular contestant wasn’t one of her three remaining rivals, but her dance partner Matthew Cutler. So not only is she popular, but her partner is too.

websites receiving traffic from searches for alesha dixon.png

The final test is demographics. We know that sites such as the Sun and YouTube have similar demographics to Strictly Come Dancing, but her home page is currently the number one destination for searchers. It has slightly more male visitors than the Strictly site, but its age profile is almost identical, leaving us pretty confident in our prediction. Of course, she could still throw it with a poor performance or a mistaken comment, but fingers crossed she won’t!