Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Election and Australian Idol Betting

November 22, 2007

This weekend there are two big events in Australia - the federal election on Saturday, November 24 and the finale of Australian Idol on Sunday November 25. Whatever your opinion on which event is of more significance, I thought I'd take a look at what the pundits are doing online.

A Hitwise search term suggestion report on the term 'betting' indicates that 'election betting' was the 5th most popular variation (out of 1586 terms), while 'australian idol betting' ranked at #13 for the 4 weeks ending 17 November 2007. To give some indication of the willingness of users to take a punt, a search variation report on 'election' shows that users were more likely to search for 'election betting' at #14 than 'federal election date' at #15 and 'election promises' at #26 out of over 7,000 search terms.

Sportingbet.com.au was the top website to receive traffic on 'election betting' and 'australian idol betting', receiving traffic on 62.79% and 44.35% of searches respectively for the 4 weeks ending 17 November 2007.You'll see in the chart below that while searches for 'australian idol betting' to Sportingbet.com.au increased prior to the finale last year, this year they have been overshadowed by searches for 'election betting' as we come up to the federal election.

I'm a gambling novice myself, finally entering a Melbourne Cup sweep for the first time this year, but I found it interesting that the odds favouring Australian Idol finalist, Matt Corby over Natalie Gauci (1.57 Corby vs 2.35 Gauci) were reflected by Internet searches. As we've used search data as a popularity proxy before, searches for Matt Corby were 3.8 times the volume of Natalie Gauci, w/ending 17 November 2007. Putting in the checks and balances of Bill’s Stacy Keibler correction coefficient, searches on 'Matt Corby' were directly relevant to the contest with the Australian Idol website receiving the bulk of traffic with 26.13%.

As to the federal election, based on volume of searches for 'john howard' vs 'kevin rudd', there is greater uncertainty as to who'll be elected to govern. The nature of searches for candidates during elections can be extremely varied - whether positive or negative.