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Diana Vickers leading the X Factor pack online

November 07, 2008

Now that we’ve got the American election and the Glenrothes by-election out of the way, we can finally direct our attention to more important voting matters. Last week we showed how ITV’s The X Factor was picking up more online traffic than the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, and promised to make our first round of predictions about the latter show.

Just a quick recap on our methodology: a couple of years ago Bill Tancer developed a technique for predicting the winner of reality TV shows based Internet on searches for contestants. The thinking behind his approach was this: because Reality TV shows are essentially popularity contests, analyzing search behaviour is a great way of indentifying the most popular contestants. Last year was my first go at using this technique and I successfully predicted that Alesha Dixon would win Strictly Come Dancing. This year we’ll see whether or not that was beginners luck…

There first part of the process is to look at the volume of searches for each of the remaining eight contestants. As you can see from the chart below Diana Vickers is currently the most searched for contestant, last week receiving almost twice as many searches as her nearest rivals, JLS. The one candidate that is slightly under represented in this chart because of the obscure spelling of his name is Eoghan Quigg. However, even when I included more conventional spellings, such as ‘Owen’, he still lagged behind Diana Vickers.

UK_Internet_searches_for_X_Factor_contestants_diana_vickers_jls_eoghan_quigg_ruth_lorenzo_laura_white.png

Given that Diana Vickers is so far ahead of the pack, can we assume that she is the most popular and will therefore win? The answer is ‘no’ – it important to dig a little deeper in the data to test whether the people searching for her are: A. doing so because they like her and B. are the sort of people who are likely to vote for the X Factor. The first test is to look at the search term variations on her name, and the top 10 for last week are displayed in the table below.

diana_vickers_searches_x_factor_bebo_myspace_pictures_pics_fansite_youtube_dress.png

As you can see, last week UK Internet users searched for almost 600 distinct terms containing the words ‘diana vickers’. One of the key tests with searches for women is to make sure that there aren’t too many prurient searches, as people using terms such as ‘topless’, ‘upskirt’ and ‘nude’ are unlikely to be voting in reality TV contests! Fortunately there are none of these in Diana Vickers top 10 – terms such as ‘diana Vickers pictures’, ‘diana vickers pics’ and ‘diana Vickers dress’ are pretty innocent, and have pretty low volumes anyway.

That a number of the top searches for Diana Vickers that include variations on X Factor and the names of social networks is also encouraging. These searches are also reflected in the list of websites that people searching for ‘diana vickers’ are going to. Bebo is the top site, implying that she is building up a fan base on the most popular social network with younger users. The appearance of YouTube and Facebook in the top 10 further point in that direction, while seeing the Mirror and Sun is also a positive sign. The X Factor homepage is the fourth most popular destination for people searching for ‘diana vickers’; while hers is the most popular contestant name sending traffic to the site.

top_websites_for_diana_vickers_bebo_mirror_youtube_x_factor_facebook_sun_unreality_tv.png

The final test is demographics, and to do this we’ve compared visitors to www.diana-vickers.com – an unofficial fan site and the seventh largest recipient of traffic from searches for the name – with the X Factor homepage. Again, the news is positive: both sites received 55% of their traffic from female visitors, while the age ranges are also similar.

So, it looks like Diana Vickers is currently the front runner online and the Hitwise ‘favourite’. Of course, there are still a number of weeks to go and things could change, so consider this and interim prediction. We’ll make our final prediction when the field has narrowed a bit!

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