Rate & Predict American Idol

Spending more time on screen doesn’t necessarily lead to more popularity, but spending very little time on screen does seem to translate to less popularity.

By counting the number of Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers that each contestant has amassed on their official American Idol-based accounts, we can roughly measure each contestant’s initial popularity.  Below is a quick-and-dirty graph, ordered from fewest minutes on screen (Paige Miles & Joe Munoz) to the most (Michael Lynche).

The 3 Idols with the least amount of screen time (Paige, Joe, and Michelle Delamor) also have the fewest number of fans & followers.  But for the remaining 21 contestants, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between screen time and popularity.

John Park, the 4th least-viewed contestant, has the most Facebook Fans and the 2nd most total followers.  Meanwhile, Michael Lynche, the most viewed Idol, ranks as the 18th most popular of 24.

This is all pretty intuitive: it’s hard to be a fan of someone you haven’t seen, but once you’ve seen someone, you can decide whether you like him or her.  It doesn’t necessarily help if you’re shown more, but it definitely hurts if you’re not shown enough.

Of course, this simple analysis might not be indicative of future voting.  The data represents only about 60,000 fans, a tiny slice of the 30 million weekly viewers.  Also, this will be biased toward the Internet geeks (like me), which might not necessarily be representative of the entire American Idol voting population.

So if you happen to like Paige, Joe, or Michelle this week, and want to see them perform again, you should probably vote for them, because they’ll need the help more than the others.