Sometimes having competition is a good thing, but if you have seen the ratings for American Idol lately, you may think it is better to have an obvious more popular winner than such an even, close competition. Case in point is looking at the DialIdol raw numbers for Season 10 and 11 when at the Top 3 it was pretty obvious who the winner for the season was, and who the two contestants competing for second place would be:
Last season by Top 3 week it was pretty obvious that Phillip Phillips was unstoppable and it was a battle between Jessica Sanchez and Joshua Ledet for second place. Just look at the over 2,000 busy signals for each of Phillip's phone lines compared to only about 1,000 for Jessica's and several hundreds each for Joshua's. It was pretty obvious what the order would be for them last year.
Top 3 week during Season 10 was interesting in that the contestant with the largest number of power users of DialIdol was not the most popular contestant! Haley Reinhart actually had a lot more DialIdol votes cast for her then Scotty McCreery, but he had twice the number of busy signals per phone line as Haley, so it was pretty obvious he was coasting to victory. It was again a battle between Haley and Lauren Alaina for second place.
And this year, with my one hour after show numbers the busy signals pale in comparison to the last two seasons. In fact the DialIdol voting is a lot lower than it was last week! An hour after the show there have only been about 10,000 DialIdol votes cast this week compared to over 30,000 at this point last week. Are people not as interested in voting now that Amber Holcomb has been voted out of the group? I am curious why it has dropped so much this week compared to last week.
If we tally up the number of busy signals for each contestant this week the count is indeed pretty close and not all that high so far:
1) Kree Harrison: 68+53+77 = 198
2) Angie Miller: 77+54+19 = 150
3) Candice Glover: 62+55+16 = 133
Last week at this point Kree had 342 busy signals and Angie had 195 (Candice had 37.) I suppose now with three lines each it is spread out more so there may be fewer busies.
However, if you compare the percentage of the voting lines that are red this season compared to the last two, it is obvious that many people are just not voting by phone any more (or are they just not voting at all?) The time when a contestant might have hit 2,000 busy signals may well be over. I thought having 822 busy signals in total last week was a lot, but contestants like Scotty and Phillip hit over 2,000 busy signals on just one of their phone lines in previous seasons!