Having looked around, it seems pretty hard to get any definitive voting figures for BB/CBB and that makes it difficult to say just how many votes a contestant needs to survive an eviction vote.

There are a few figures about for the show when it was on C4, but given the relative drop in audience these seem pretty unhelpful. The closest I have come is a figure of 700,000 votes for the entire series of CBB a couple of years ago - the story related to an upsurge in voting after the introduction of the App (up 400,000 from the year before)...

Now, forgive me for some amateur maths, but if we say there were 7 eviction votes in that series, that is 100,000 votes per eviction. i think this would be weighted quite heavily towards the final or specific votes (two big characters up against each other etc) so maybe the votes could be as low as 10,000 for a specific week. Split between a number of HMs this could mean quite a small number of votes per person...

Sometimes I wonder if some HMs might actually get zero votes - I mean, who would actually vote, let alone vote to save Daniel Baldwin or the like? What is a good number of votes?

If you had 100 friends/relatives and you were on the show, if they each vote ten times that's already 1000 votes - could you survive in CBB with a fanbase of 1000 hardcore fans? I guess, yes - for a while at least. Maybe with 1000 affluent fanatics you could win the whole thing.

Are voting figures freely available - Do the bookies know? Is that the reason James is odds on favourite and Clunjy Rimine are 16-1? Is that based on actual votes from the previous weeks? Does any of that account for multiple voters?

And finally, if the vote counts are low, what's to stop the production team chucking a few hundred votes someone's way in their lunch breaks?

Anyone?

I've always wondered if the hardcore, smaller group of voters (spending maybe £50 each) can outvote the larger group of casual voters who only vote once or twice.

Be great to not only know the voting figures but the unique votes too

you'd think it would be broken down somewhere - and I guess they have to declare how much money they make off it in some way - but maybe they keep a tight lid on it so that it doesn't appear ridiculous on the slow weeks?

Just found this from DS around the start of C5s tenure -

Your Reference: VA/924549/TD (Please quote this reference in all further correspondence)


Date: 15th September 2011


Dear

Thank you for your recent enquiry.

Unfortunately, we have no plans to reveal the voting figures for Celebrity Big Brother or Big Brother. We are sorry if this comes as a disappointment to you.

If there is anything further we can help you with, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you for your interest in Channel 5.

Yours sincerely

Terry
VIEWER ADVISOR

So I guess there is no way of knowing unless they have done a u-turn since.

They decided to give us figures in BB13 and everyone was happy and interested in the figures, then they stopped.

Back in the day, 5m+ used to vote in finals without question. Now, on a regular series, I'd be surprised i'd 20,000 vote and I'd be surprised of 50,000 vote in the CBB series.

But you never know, there are countless "i'm voting for...." things on social media, battle between supporters etc... so there seems to still be interest in voting, so I don't know.

I do know that BB12 was quite high despite its low ratings due to the credits and I remember people buying hundreds of credits for Aaron every week

bb3 was the most voted series i think, there was about 20 million votes across the whole series with 8.6 million being cast in the final!

Yep, now they'd be lucky to get 10% of that final only amount (860,000) in an entire series.

to be fair though big brother was brand new back then and a much bigger beast...

True but in BB5 where it was already 5 years old, it was getting a lot of votes. Michelle's eviction had around 2m votes I think and 3.9m voted for Nadia over the other 3, so the final votes would have been around 6m I think.

And in BB7, 1-2m people were voting per eviction.

It was post BB7 where it dropped like a rock. Between BB7 and BB8

I guess everyone on vanilla BB has friends and family who will support them. That would mean a few hundred votes at least. Someone like Daniel Baldwin - I can't imagine his friends/family are able to vote, or would not think in was needed, or would "lower" themselves, so that leaves you with actual fans (who has a picture of Daniel Baldwin on their wall?) or fans of the show who he can win over and convince to vote for him. Maybe in a 1 Vs 1 he would get a fair few, but with how it was this year it could have been next to nothing.

Tonight, you could have James with a load of individual votes (relatively) against Chloe/Stevie with less individual voters voting multiple times...

The odds put them at opposite ends of the scale, but how do the bookies know?

Thanks to all for the figures re previous series

Back in the day the numbers seem big enough to have covered up most anomalies?

Exactly, James leading the poll with 30% generally may have more individual fans, but Clovie with 5% may have more hardcore fans. People vote James once, but each person votes Clovie 6 times, then Clovie would win.

If it was "one vote only from each landline/mobile, Chloe and Stevie wouldn't have a chance.

Amazing that people waste hard earned money voting "knowing" that the show is half rigged from the off.

pretty sure it was down to the racism row, people were disappointed channel 4 didn't step in. I always wanted to know how many voted in the jade vs shilpa eviction, nearly 9 million tuned into her eviction interview the highest on record for cbb. Im sure a lot of people must have voted...
6.4 million voted in bb5 final

Those figures are pretty impressive - especially when you start totting up the £££s

I guess they have lost a huge slice of revenue since the show's heyday. Maybe they have Emma Willis on minimum wage now?

here are the voting figures of the first five finale's...
bb1-7.5 million
bb2-7.3 million
bb3-8.6 million
bb4-4.3 million
bb5-6.4 million

Yeah pretty sure the Top 4 of all time (ratings):

1. BB3 Final- 10.01m
2. Jade's eviction (cbb5)- 8.8m
3. BB7 Final- 8.2m
4. Tim's eviction- 8.0m

It's funny that one of the worst HMs ever has the crown of highest rated eviction ever (bar Jade). I mean, Tim....

Thanks for that. Interesting that despite BB4 getting the same ratings as BB1 and BB2 (HOW? It was so dull), people obviously didn't care much as it lost 50% of the previous years figures for voting.

bb1 final was watching by 9.9 million viewers...http://www.theguardian.com/media/200...s.broadcasting
bb5's final got more than bb7 final (8.98million)

Did they? Oh, I had a feeling BB1 final was on the high 7s side in overnights and BB5 was in the high 7s too.

i think his eviction was only high due to the fact it was near the end and more and more people were tuning in. If it had been earlier in the series then no way would his eviction have that many viewers...

bb5 was the second highest averaging series after bb3...