American Idol Winner

Many people are interested in TV shows, and some of the most popular have huge viewing audiences. Skip Atwater asked,

"Did you monitor activities around the final vote of American Idol? If so, will you post them on the web site? Apparently there were many millions of viewers and votes."

I had not been giving it attention, so I asked him when it was, and suggested that given the time of the show we could take a look. Skip provided the following information:

8 - 10 PM Eastern
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
American Idol on Fox TV
There were something like 63 million votes counted to
determine the winner. I would suspect many were watching.

The last 10 minutes of the show where they announce the
winner would be the hottest -- maybe.

With this information, I set up an analysis of the 8-10 period as an exploration, for the category of items with relatively personal interest or in this case a strong US centrism. The American Idol show finale is potentially interesting given Dean Radin's early results with Oscars. On the other hand, we have looked at Oscars a couple of times in the GCP data and they showed no effect.

In this case, we see a fairly persistent trend in the downward direction (positive trend is the standard prediction in the formal analyses) and the final value has Z=-1.259. The last 10 minutes have a similar character, also with a substantial negative trend.

American Idol Winner


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