Every year one can take a quick a look at Internet activity and predict who’s going to win American Idol. It totally worked last year, with David vs. David, and years before that. This year, though the Internet bet wrong.
Looking back at the beginning of the season, the two finalists really did come from nowhere. Back in February, searchers pegged Danny Gokey and Alexis Grace as would-be finalists. While Gokey almost made it, it came down to the acoustic soul of Kris Allen and screamqueen Adam Lambert.
And it looks like everybody got it wrong, from the Internet to the judges. Lambert was clearly favored by the judges, even on occasions when he stepped far to the left of the right pitch. After a Allen’s tame duet early in the show with Keith Urban, Lambert got to be the new front man for KISS in full makeup—sounds like even the producers had favorites.
Hitwise reports searches for Lambert outnumbered Allen by five to one.
Biz360, analyzing social media data, also picked Lambert to win.
So did BettorsWorld, the first time they’ve been wrong—Allen beat the bookies!
Did anybody guess it right? Well, we did find one press release from ymarketing. Whatever they did—which they say was through a combined analysis of search and social media—they did it right. Ymarketing predicted Allen as the winner by looking at Facebook Lexicon, Google Trends, Google Insights, Compete, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as some unnamed data sources.
