USA Today’s Idol Meter Debuts, But Not Great For Predicting Results
March 22nd, 2010 - kp No CommentsUSA Today’s Idol Chatter blog recently debuted their Season 9 “Idol Meter”, which is described as “a pseudoscientific fast-track formula to gauge each singer’s momentum”. The meter gives a score to each contestant out of 100 possible points, based on 8 different variables.
While I applaud the efforts of the USA Today crew, and because my site has many of the same intentions, I find the meter to be a little clunky. It’s great that they have 8 variables going into their equation, but unfortunately I don’t understand the logic behind the scoring system.
For example, a positive comment from Simon is worth 9 points, but one from Randy, Kara, or Ellen is just 3 points. I understand the assertion that Simon has more influence on voting than the other judges, but 3x as much influence? I’m skeptical.
Same for the “online buzz” metric, where you receive either 14, 10, or 5 points for a high number of Google searches or tweets. Sounds great in theory, but we’re assuming the Internet population is an accurate reflection of the American Idol voting base. And if we’re going to be looking at Twitter, we have to take into account that teens don’t tweet as much as adults do.