Voting for a change on BB

I am indebted to http://www.bigbrotherxtra.co.uk/?p=2639  for the following:

"Some 1.5 million votes were cast during nine weeks of Big Brother, 47 per cent of which were through the Big Brother Facebook app.

Channel 5 received around 500,000 votes for Celebrity Big Brother through its telephone services.

Big Brother contributed to a 25 per cent boost in Channel 5′s evening audience while it was on air.

Nick Bampton, the commercial sales director at Channel 5, said: “We took a risk in changing the voting mechanism. Integrating Facebook is a UK first and we’re pleased it has generated a substantial uplift in votes cast.” **"

CBB is only of passing interest.  500,000 votes at 36pence = £180,000 for 3 weeks voting (although the take for C5 may well be a bit less).  BB is a bit more interesting to conspiracy theorists though.

• BB ran for 9 weeks during which time there were 15 housemates (2 of whom walked out).

• 12 were voted out (8 on a weekly vote and 4 on the last night) leaving Aaron the worthy or unworthy winner depending on which camp you belonged to.  The votes were reopened after each eviction on Final night and after the mid week eviction in week 9.

• Viewer numbers were normally below 2 million and generally at 1 million or less.

• Effectively then, viewers and FB voters got to vote for 12 evictions.  They are never going to release the total numbers cast per eviction so I will assume that they were constant.

• Figures for phone votes for the whole series (53% of 1.5 million) = 795000

• Figures for FB votes for the whole series (47% of 1.5 million) =705000

• The total money spent by viewers and FB voters was probably as low as:
  Phone £286200 (795000 x £0.36) + FB  £49350 (705000 x £0.07) (the lowest cost of FB votes was 10 cents or 7p)

Gives a grand total of £335,550, although not all that cash was going C5's way.

You could of course block vote FB credits to the total of 500 per week. Interestingly enough, that total of FB votes (705k) could be achieved by only 1410 bloke votes of the maximum permitted per week. Also of interest is the fact that FB votes brought in about 1 sixth of the vote revenue.

If the votes were spread evenly across all 12 evictions (unlikely, but we have to make a few assumptions if they won't tell us anything), then each eviction received (1.5 million/12 = 125,000) votes of which 66,250 were on the phone and 58,750 were on FB.

Try this for a conspiracy imagination:

Imagine that it was a four way eviction like the one when Harry (33/1) got evicted. Imagine also that it is fairly neck and neck so that each nominated housemate has exactly the same number of votes. Perhaps the total votes cast so far by 5pm Friday evening was 100,000 so each of them had 25000 votes each.  How much would have to be spent to get Harry out the door?
Well, it was vote to save so to get to the average vote of 125,000 another 25000 votes would have to be cast for the other 3 contestants which in FB terms is 50 Block FB votes delivered by 50 different accounts.  Total cost to the FB block voters (whoever they may be) is only £1400.

If you were a gambler attracted by the 33 to 1 odds on Harry being evicted you would only have to wager £42.42 to recoup that outlay if he was evicted.

Of course, you would need to know that the voting numbers were so low that you could 'invest' in FB block votes to the extent that you could change the outcome.  Perhaps you would need someone who had access to the voting totals?

The only really unanswered question in this for me is why are C5 persisting with this block vote, low cost, low profit option? It leaves them open to all sorts of conspiracy theorists like me.  And if it isn't a dark conspiracy then it does have the faint whiff of incompetence - rather like the whole series.

** It is difficult to judge where Nick Bampton gets his confidence in FB voting from.  It registered about 700k votes but it is hard to judge what impact that had on phone voting.