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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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John Sergeant and Strictly Come Dancing online

November 21, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, when we predicted that Diana Vickers will win X-Factor, I opened my blog post thus: ‘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’. I though that I was joking, but it seems that I under-estimated the importance of reality TV shows to the British public!

It seems like everyone – from tabloid newspapers to politicians – has an opinion on John Sergeant quitting Strictly Come Dancing. The ‘controversy’ has certainly had a positive impact on traffic to the Strictly Websites. As the chart below illustrates, the BBC show’s homepage overtook its ITV rival on Wednesday for the first time since September

UK_Internet_traffic_to_strictly_come_dancing_john_sergeant_x_factor_september_october_november_2008.png

One positive outcome from this episode is that it might make predicting who will win the show using our data a little easier. I must admit that we’ve been struggling a bit with the data this week, as it doesn’t point towards a clear front runner. The chart below illustrates the volume of UK Internet searches for all of the remaining contestants up until last week.

UK_Internert_searches_for_john_sergeant_rachel_stevens_jlisa_snowden_jodie_kidd_tom_chambers_austin_healey_contestants_strictly_come_dancing_2008_chart.png

As you can see, John Sergeant was clearly growing on the public but still placed behind both Rachel Stevens and Lisa Snowdon. However, once Bill Tancer’s Stacey Keibler Correction Coefficient is taken into account (i.e. beware searches for attractive women, as searchers may be interested in more than just the contestants dancing skills), things get a bit complicated. Included in the searches for these two women are enough ‘dodgy’ terms – e.g. ‘rachel stevens topless’, ‘lisa snowdon topless’, ‘rachel stevenms bikini’ and ‘lisa snowdon fhm’, as well as numerous variations ‘pictures’, ‘pics’ and ‘images’ – to raise concerns about their popularity simply as dancers.

Looking at the other contestants, searches for Jodie Kidd are decreasing, while the two remaining men sit at the bottom of the rankings. However, given that Austin Healey (a man named after a car!) and Tom Chambers (who to me looks like he’s just stepped out of a production of Bugsy Malone) have been consistently amongst the best dancers and both have ‘Granny appeal’ (very important, given the show’s demographics), they certainly can’t be ruled out either. Consequently I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait couple more weeks before we can make a confident prediction - but do keep an eye on the blog, as it will happen…

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