Voting Analysis - Looking at the Trends
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I've been taking a detailed look at the voting percentages released to see if anything interesting shows up.
This is a long post, so here's a summary:
Before we go onto the details, a disclaimer. There's a hell of a lot of factors involved in this, the songs, the performances, the contestants, the judges, the timing of the show, the themes, etc., etc. We can look to see if the overall trends suggest anything obvious, but it's hard to be conclusive about anything without taking everything into account. And who has time for that?
But having said that, first, here's the percentages, as given, as a graph.
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l506/Aengil/percentages.jpg
That doesn't really tell us much that isn't obvious from the figures. You would expect each surviving contestant's share of the vote to generally increase as other contestants exit the show, and that's what we see.
A problem we have is that we don't have raw voting figures, we only know how many votes were cast in total, we don't know how many were cast each week, so we don't know how many actual votes a contestant got in any given week.
What we can look at though, is how they did relative to the average each week. That is, when there's 10 contestants, the average share would be 10% each. If a contestant gets 20% of the vote that week, they got 200% (i.e. twice) of the average. If they get 5% of the vote that week, they got 50% (i.e. half) of the average.
If we look at those figures, we can get a real idea of whether a contestant was getting stronger as the weeks went on, or vice versa.
I see sofabet has also worked out these figures, but I've gone one step further and plotted it.
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l506/Aengil/relativepercentages.jpg
Let's run through what this shows for each contestant:
Matt: We see an overall decline, especially from week 8 onwards. What does this mean? Without the raw numbers, it's hard to say. But if there were the same, or more votes each week, it seems likely Matt's vote was staying fairly steady, i.e. he wasn't picking up additional votes, or at least, not compared to Rebecca. If voting declined overall, Matt was getting less votes while other contestants' stayed relatively steady or increased.
Or to put it another way, this is exemplified by comparing week 8 with the finale. In week 8 Matt got over twice as many votes as Rebecca, and nearly three times as many as One Direction. By the final - a couple of weeks later - he was getting just under twice as many as One Direction, and just a fraction more than Rebecca
Conclusion: Matt was popular (obviously, he won), but he wasn't exactly getting more popular as the show went on...
Rebecca: Very solid. She continually and steadily got at or above the average share each week, which suggests she was getting more popular week by week. In the end it was remarkably close - had the contest run for longer, the trends suggest she could have won it.
One Direction: You might think One Direction were doing OK from the percentages given, but as the relative percentages show, as the contest progressed, their performance compared to the average headed down. For the last few weeks they were getting less than the average and getting worse. Not really in it at the end.
Cher: Peaked in week 4 (when she closed the show with Stay) then dropped way off the pace, trending downwards and continually below average. With one exception - in week 8 when she closed the show again with Walk This Way her share of the vote rose sharply, taking her above Katie, Wagner, Mary, and One Direction. Either side of that, in week 7 and week 9 she was last. Did closing the show help save her? More on that below.
Mary: Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive. From an early high - topping the votes in week 1 - Mary's performance relative to the average declined each week, without exception. This suggests to me she had a strong initial fanbase which didn't really grow.
Wagner: This one's interesting. While consistently below the average, after starting in the mix of the pack at the bottom, he started trending strongly upwards from week 5 to week 7, but then tailed off slightly in week 8 when he opened the show and was eliminated. If that upwards trend had continued (granted, big if), he actually could have become a genuine contender.
Katie: Mostly up and down in the lower regions... er, maybe I should rephrase that. Variable performance, but consistently below average with one exception, week 7, when she came second in the voting behind Matt after she closed the show with Help. Then dropped back down to the share she had in week 6 and was automatically eliminated.
Paije: Also variable, but consistently below average. Trended up towards the end, but was overtaken by Wagner whose support was growing faster at that point.
Aiden: Sorry Aiden fans. He started off strongly, but trended continually downwards, was below average from week 3, and eliminated in week 6. Too different for the mainstream perhaps?
Treyc: Started off below average and stayed there. Showed a slight increase between weeks 3 and 5, but not enough to keep her out of the bottom two where she was eliminated.
The Rest: Not really enough information to say how the rest did, other than badly. John Adeleye was perhaps unlucky to be eliminated as early as he was. Personally, I suspect the song choice (Zoom? Really?) may have been a large factor there.
So having looked at all that, there is of course an obvious outstanding question. Does opening and closing the show really make a difference?
Well, we now have an idea of how contestants did, compared to the weekly average, over the course of the series. If we compare how the person who opened and closed the show did to how that person did on average over the series, we might be able to get an idea of whether opening or closing the show has an effect on voting.
If there is an effect, we might expect to see the person closing the show typically doing better than they do on average, and similarly the person opening the show typically doing worse. If there isn't an effect, we'd expect to see no real pattern at all.
So here's what we do see:
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l506/Aengil/openingclosingperformances.jpg
Well, that's pretty suggestive. The closing act did better - often a lot better - than they did on average every single week - up to week 8 (when the acts started doing two performances each, which you might expect to have some effect on this). Similarly the opening act did at best average but often worse than they did overall each week, up until week 8. (I've excluded the final from this, as lines being opened immediately and frozen during the show is a different scenario to the norm).
(Comparing to the series average is a pretty crude way of looking at this, it might be interesting to compare the opener and closers performances to their recent trend, rather than their overall average. E.g. Cher was doing badly in general when she closed the show in week 8, and while she still did worse than her average that week, that average was skewed by peaks in week 1 and week 4. Compared to the weeks around week 8, she did much, much better that week. Similarly Wagner was trending upwards before that week when he opened the show, and while he still did better than his average, he did worse than he had in the week before against the trend before that).
It's important to remember that this is just indicative at best. Correlation is not causation, and there are other factors - how popular the contestant is, how good their performance is, the quality of their song, all of which could more than counter any effect from opening or closing the show. It's possible that it's coincidence, that the closing act just happened to have a great song and/or performed exceptionally well each week, and vice versa for the opening act.
But taken overall, these results seem to indicate that opening and closing the show really does affect voting to some significant extent.
So there you have it. Hope that was interesting for someone. I should really get back to my day job now...
This is a long post, so here's a summary:
- Matt was of course popular, but didn't really appear to get more popular as the show went on, and quite noticeably so.
- Rebecca on the other hand did get more popular as the show went on.
- Opening and closing the show does appear to make a difference.
Before we go onto the details, a disclaimer. There's a hell of a lot of factors involved in this, the songs, the performances, the contestants, the judges, the timing of the show, the themes, etc., etc. We can look to see if the overall trends suggest anything obvious, but it's hard to be conclusive about anything without taking everything into account. And who has time for that?
But having said that, first, here's the percentages, as given, as a graph.
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l506/Aengil/percentages.jpg
That doesn't really tell us much that isn't obvious from the figures. You would expect each surviving contestant's share of the vote to generally increase as other contestants exit the show, and that's what we see.
A problem we have is that we don't have raw voting figures, we only know how many votes were cast in total, we don't know how many were cast each week, so we don't know how many actual votes a contestant got in any given week.
What we can look at though, is how they did relative to the average each week. That is, when there's 10 contestants, the average share would be 10% each. If a contestant gets 20% of the vote that week, they got 200% (i.e. twice) of the average. If they get 5% of the vote that week, they got 50% (i.e. half) of the average.
If we look at those figures, we can get a real idea of whether a contestant was getting stronger as the weeks went on, or vice versa.
I see sofabet has also worked out these figures, but I've gone one step further and plotted it.
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l506/Aengil/relativepercentages.jpg
Let's run through what this shows for each contestant:
Matt: We see an overall decline, especially from week 8 onwards. What does this mean? Without the raw numbers, it's hard to say. But if there were the same, or more votes each week, it seems likely Matt's vote was staying fairly steady, i.e. he wasn't picking up additional votes, or at least, not compared to Rebecca. If voting declined overall, Matt was getting less votes while other contestants' stayed relatively steady or increased.
Or to put it another way, this is exemplified by comparing week 8 with the finale. In week 8 Matt got over twice as many votes as Rebecca, and nearly three times as many as One Direction. By the final - a couple of weeks later - he was getting just under twice as many as One Direction, and just a fraction more than Rebecca
Conclusion: Matt was popular (obviously, he won), but he wasn't exactly getting more popular as the show went on...
Rebecca: Very solid. She continually and steadily got at or above the average share each week, which suggests she was getting more popular week by week. In the end it was remarkably close - had the contest run for longer, the trends suggest she could have won it.
One Direction: You might think One Direction were doing OK from the percentages given, but as the relative percentages show, as the contest progressed, their performance compared to the average headed down. For the last few weeks they were getting less than the average and getting worse. Not really in it at the end.
Cher: Peaked in week 4 (when she closed the show with Stay) then dropped way off the pace, trending downwards and continually below average. With one exception - in week 8 when she closed the show again with Walk This Way her share of the vote rose sharply, taking her above Katie, Wagner, Mary, and One Direction. Either side of that, in week 7 and week 9 she was last. Did closing the show help save her? More on that below.
Mary: Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive. From an early high - topping the votes in week 1 - Mary's performance relative to the average declined each week, without exception. This suggests to me she had a strong initial fanbase which didn't really grow.
Wagner: This one's interesting. While consistently below the average, after starting in the mix of the pack at the bottom, he started trending strongly upwards from week 5 to week 7, but then tailed off slightly in week 8 when he opened the show and was eliminated. If that upwards trend had continued (granted, big if), he actually could have become a genuine contender.
Katie: Mostly up and down in the lower regions... er, maybe I should rephrase that. Variable performance, but consistently below average with one exception, week 7, when she came second in the voting behind Matt after she closed the show with Help. Then dropped back down to the share she had in week 6 and was automatically eliminated.
Paije: Also variable, but consistently below average. Trended up towards the end, but was overtaken by Wagner whose support was growing faster at that point.
Aiden: Sorry Aiden fans. He started off strongly, but trended continually downwards, was below average from week 3, and eliminated in week 6. Too different for the mainstream perhaps?
Treyc: Started off below average and stayed there. Showed a slight increase between weeks 3 and 5, but not enough to keep her out of the bottom two where she was eliminated.
The Rest: Not really enough information to say how the rest did, other than badly. John Adeleye was perhaps unlucky to be eliminated as early as he was. Personally, I suspect the song choice (Zoom? Really?) may have been a large factor there.
So having looked at all that, there is of course an obvious outstanding question. Does opening and closing the show really make a difference?
Well, we now have an idea of how contestants did, compared to the weekly average, over the course of the series. If we compare how the person who opened and closed the show did to how that person did on average over the series, we might be able to get an idea of whether opening or closing the show has an effect on voting.
If there is an effect, we might expect to see the person closing the show typically doing better than they do on average, and similarly the person opening the show typically doing worse. If there isn't an effect, we'd expect to see no real pattern at all.
So here's what we do see:
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l506/Aengil/openingclosingperformances.jpg
Well, that's pretty suggestive. The closing act did better - often a lot better - than they did on average every single week - up to week 8 (when the acts started doing two performances each, which you might expect to have some effect on this). Similarly the opening act did at best average but often worse than they did overall each week, up until week 8. (I've excluded the final from this, as lines being opened immediately and frozen during the show is a different scenario to the norm).
(Comparing to the series average is a pretty crude way of looking at this, it might be interesting to compare the opener and closers performances to their recent trend, rather than their overall average. E.g. Cher was doing badly in general when she closed the show in week 8, and while she still did worse than her average that week, that average was skewed by peaks in week 1 and week 4. Compared to the weeks around week 8, she did much, much better that week. Similarly Wagner was trending upwards before that week when he opened the show, and while he still did better than his average, he did worse than he had in the week before against the trend before that).
It's important to remember that this is just indicative at best. Correlation is not causation, and there are other factors - how popular the contestant is, how good their performance is, the quality of their song, all of which could more than counter any effect from opening or closing the show. It's possible that it's coincidence, that the closing act just happened to have a great song and/or performed exceptionally well each week, and vice versa for the opening act.
But taken overall, these results seem to indicate that opening and closing the show really does affect voting to some significant extent.
So there you have it. Hope that was interesting for someone. I should really get back to my day job now...
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Comments
So to sum up.
Matt- Very popular. Very big and strong fan base.
Rebecca- Very likeable, she picked up huge amounts of extra votes from eliminated acts and from "new viewers" that watched the final.
1D- Just floating around the 3rd/4th positions
You could say Wagner was getting more popular, but maybe not the case considered there was less people. Its notable that if there was a bottom 3 every week, Wagner would have been gone early on.... he survived the last few weeks by an edge as he was pretty much always in the danger zone.
Aiden shocks me. His Mad World performance was only 4th (okay, there were 16 acts) but for huge praise, a favourite and the PIMP slot... wasn't too good... then he fell
Paige was very solid.
Cher not as popular as anyone thought at all. In week 1 she got 10%+ but then declined (excl Week 4's Stay)
Ta for doing all that work.
I liked both Matt & Rebecca but bemoaned on here the last few weeks that they had become slightly hit & miss.
That was more Matt than Rebecca.
His second song last week was a shocker. That would not get new followers. His core vote would have ensured they vote to keep him safe though.
Rebecca grew as the competition progressed. She benefitted from an overall poor standard though as she would possibly have gone 2 years ago against an overall higher standard of female vocalists Alex, Laura, Vickers , Ruth etc.
Thanks...the stats are more interesting than the actual competition
The stats seem to suggest there was no consistency in week on week voting for individual contestants i.e. no hardcore support but instead public voting was down to the song and performance. Ongoing loyality to an individual singer by the public appears, in reality, to have never existed.
Well done and thanks again.
So if i understand it right, the initial fans stuck with him, but as people were eliminated he didnt pick up their votes, suggesting the people who didnt really like him in the first place, didnt suddenly like him, or vote fore him when their favourite went out?
Thanks for taking the time to do this
the rebound vote, which applies to acts that have already been in the bottom two but also to acts that are always considered to be dangerous, e.g. wagner.
also the fact that the number of votes cast are bound to have risen as the series progressed with more votes towards the end coming from casual floating voters, that probably hadn't voted before, than from fanbases. also the votes cast in the final are another story altogether and can't be compared with the rest of the series.
My take on Matt is that he actually peaked in the middle - when he did 'First Time Ever I saw your face', 'Hit me baby one more time' and 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road'. He went downhill performance wise, not helped by his throat problems of course. And he didn't seem to pick up any support from that point onwards - it was, if anything, Rebecca who was picking up the slack from eliminated contestants.
By the end. Matt was basically 'hanging on' for the win - like a boxer who gets a big lead in the early part of a fight and is then clinging on in the last couple of rounds for the points victory.
even more impressive was that i read it all and understood it
Good sign for Matt as it proves he has a loyal fanbase rather than that he simply picked up votes from people who didn't have anyone else to root for and settled on him.
Week 8 when Matt did Nights in White Satin he polled more than Rebecca and 1D combined so I don't see where you're coming from. His vocal problems started that week and he performed below par subsequently, hence not picking up new voters. The old ones stuck by him and helped him to a deserved win. It's not his fault he was sick.
As a ONE D's fan... I'm actually very shocked to see how little support they actually had in terms of votes! Consideringthe large number of fans they were supposed to have, considering that One direction's facebook fan page had over 250 000 fans, Liam's facebook page has almost 400 000 fans, Zain's 110 000, etc... it looks like their so called fans were really STINGY and didn't actually pick up the phone to vote. The image of armies of girls spending their whole credit to vote for One D was actually just a dream....LOL
To me, i looks like One Direction's fans are ALL TALK and NO ACTION! As a member of their fan page, I'm very annoyed to read comments of girl moaning abou One D notining etc...
and I make sure that I reply by telling them to stop *****g crying and that they should have voted!
Honestly?? One D's fans are F*****G useless!
What a F*****G useless person you are
I'm sure they will be successful but an act aimed only at such a small demographic will not win a voting competition with 15m votes -its not Big Brother too many people engage
Although Matt was well in front for much of the way, i do actually think the final was winnable for Rebecca.
In votes purely between herself and Matt she only got 39.17 % of these before the first vote feeeze when Cher left ( that was on about 26% of the overall vote ). This was maybe much influenced by the pretty disastrous duet on the Saturday.
However, she later received 48,80% between freezes 1 & 2 and 47.85% after freeze 2. So not quite a majority of the Matt / Rebecca votes but challenging him strongly.
i would really take issue with another point : "If a group as popular as One Direction can't win the show it's hard to see a group ever doing so" That's such a weird circular staement. How do you mean as popular ? They weren't evidently that popular, that's why they didn't get a really high vote at any time. And i do think it should be possible to come up wuth a group that is truly more popular than this manufactured group with varying singing ability and little proper dance movement...