Post by The Founder on Mar 4, 2014 0:28:03 GMT
To Poll or not to Poll?
If you have been participating in the E! Online Wild Card Round of Save One Show you'll have noticed that there doesn't seem to be a great deal of interest in the poll at present. A lot of people, including myself, voted in the first three rounds and it was exhausting and time-consuming and in spite of all of our efforts we still failed to qualify to Round 4, albeit quite narrowly. The competition left me feeling drained and deflated and therefore I can fully understand why most of the fan base have abandoned E! Online's Poll.
(1) Save One Show has come under heavy criticism, primarily because the last few shows, which painstakingly claimed victory after unflagging voting campaigns, were still cancelled regardless. This has left many feeling the competition has no real impact on the scheduling decisions of network executives. Essentially, it is not and cannot be effective because viewing figures, especially live views are what matter and not dubious polls.
(2) The competition's website also has no security to speak of, there are no captchas to prevent bot voting. E! Online vehemently denies that bots can make it past their security - they may be blocking votes when there are a suspiciously high number generated by a single IP address. However I noticed some suspicious anomalies in voting that do indeed point to bot use. It is quite easy to spoof an IP address these days and this may enable some botters to circumvent E!'s security.
(3)The poll has been branded a shameless attempt to attract traffic and generate revenue. The ambitiously named Save One Show poll has been running for several years now and generates major page views. If you are running Ad-Blocker or Ghostery script blocker you will have noticed some major activity on this site. The amount of advertising and tracking is simply unreal. All in all, it's a money making exercise by a company exploiting people's desire to see their favourite shows renewed. When you consider there are six rounds (including the wildcard round) of this competition, then you realise just how much revenue is generated each year. None of that money, might I add, finds it's way into studio or network hands. So how exactly are shows benefiting? The answer is that they are not.
I could go on but I don't want to bore you with any more details. Suffice to say that I don't think taking part in this poll is a constructive use of our time or energy. If you wish to pursue it, by all means, I appreciate your loyalty to the cause, but I think you are fighting a losing battle. CW executives are not taking note of where The Tomorrow People features in this poll but they will be keeping a close eye on how many live viewers there are each week.
Take care & #WatchTTPLive