Hal Halladay of Know More Media, the blog network I belong to, wrote about American Idol yesterday; it seems that every year the audience gets bigger and in fact:
According to Nielsen Media Research, nearly 43 million viewers tuned in to the
last half-hour on Wednesday night to see if Taylor Hicks or Katherine McPhee would be crowned the new AI and receive a mandatory 15 minutes of fame. Forty-three million is just a few million short of the audience that tunes into the Oscars, which is the most-watched television event of the year behind the Super Bowl.
Let’s see what I can find out about the Audineces for American Idol and it’s stars like Taylor Hicks, Katherine McPhee and second season superstar Clay Aiken; this may be a long blog post (or broken out to two or three posts - depending on what I find out).
For one thing, there’s a fairly large base of searchers on MSN that have "voted" based on what they clicked on and when they clicked.
Clay Aiken was more searched in April and May 06 than Katherine mcphree, who ended up being the runner up in AI 5 which I covered the other day.
Now, maybe AI can fool with the phone calls (as they have been rumored to have done in the past), but they can’t fool, as easily, with the search results - and now that MSN is reporting them (as is Google Trends Ashlee Simpson Gets a New Nose, Using Google Trends in a Deep Dive of Ashlee Simpson’s nose and the DaVinci Code, Blogger Suggests Google Trends Pro Next, Google Trends - Kick Ass! and Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool now available outside of Adwords Accounts), I think it’s likely American Idol Execs actually now look at them also to decide who’s going to be the winner based on who’s more popular (who is more searched for). Just look at this:
Overall, American Idol searches peaked on Wednesdays (no surprise here) but let’s take a look at Taylor Hicks, Katherine McPhee and second season superstar Clay Aiken’s search trends.
Here’s Taylor Hicks’s Search Trend for May 06 - it builds every week, yes on Wednesday’s it peaks- this was an indication, already, that Taylor Hicks was going to win AI 5.
Katherine McPhee’s searches on MSN were rather flat, they peaked on Wednesdays and may have been somewhat affected by media appearances (which Google Trends is better at showing the Microsoft AdCenter) but clearly - searchers were not as excited about Katherine McPhee as Taylor Hicks or even Clay Aiken - who just appeared for one minute in the AI 5 show.
In fact, as soon as it was rumored Clay Aiken was going to appear on American Idol 5, there was almost as many searches for Clay Aiken on May 24th (~6500) as Taylor Hicks (~9500) or Katherine McPhee (~2250). Overall, there were over 100,000 searchers on American Idol on May 24th.
I’ll cover more in my next post on American Idol Trends.
