Peering into Facebook voting with Telescope

Participation TV specialist Telescope implemented free online voting around American Idol for the first time this year using Facebook, and has since introduced paid Facebook voting on the Puerto Rican version. CEO Jason George (below) reviews the results.

Telescope has been managing online voting for several years here in the US, where the vast majority of reality shows offer the service free to viewers.

In March this year, we introduced online voting to the 800lb gorilla of the US market: American Idol. So we could verify eligibility, track usage and offer social hooks, fans were asked to log into their accounts through Facebook Connect before they could participate. They could then vote and share their choice with their network of friends by posting to their Facebook walls. The results were fantastic, helping to drive the season finale to a world-record 122 million votes across all methods and helping Idol and its vote sponsor, AT&T, to tap into the immense amount of 'chatter' generated by social networks around the show.

We've since evolved the platform by integrating a payment solution that enables our clients to launch online voting on their international reality formats where carrier billing has until now been the only significant way to monetise viewer voting. But whereas all the online trials in Europe seem to have focused exclusively on Facebook Credits for payment, we have chosen to integrate a number of different platforms to enable consumer billing.

With this type of paid voting in its infancy, our view is pretty simple: why put all our eggs in the Facebook Credits basket while we're still learning about voter behaviour in this environment? Additionally, Facebook Credits has not been tested in important areas such as throughput and latency, and penetration is still relatively low among Facebook subscribers. Crucially, this approach allows content owners to keep all the traffic on their web sites - rather than drive viewers to Facebook - and utilise social networks for what they are best at: enabling fans to easily share their votes, views and preferences, thus virally promoting the show as well as the vote.

We launched our paid application with our long-standing client FremantleMedia, on Idol Puerto Rico (left) at the start of September. Viewers can pay via PayPal, credit card or Facebook Credits as well as being able to share their vote via Facebook and Twitter. Once they're over the barrier of registration, they have the option to save their details, enabling simple one-click purchasing.

We focused a lot of design effort on the unique benefits that online and social can bring to viewer voting, and one key advantage is the ability to create and use a direct opted-in relationship with consumers to incentivise loyalty and drive repeat purchase. At the moment we are doing this simply by offering 10- and 20-vote bundles, but in the future we see the potential for secondary revenue streams derived from the depth of data we can build up about our users and the opportunities this raises for both consumer products and targeted advertising revenues.

After seven weeks of voting, the results so far have been fascinating. Here are a few highlights:

• I cannot give exact breakdowns of vote numbers because we are still mid-series, but the online volume is a significant proportion of total votes.
• 19% of voters share to their social network; those shares generate an average of five comments each from voters' friends.
• Average revenue per voter is over 10 times higher per week than the other method of entry, Premium SMS.
• In this particular territory, Puerto Rico, the pay-out is also 80% higher than Premium SMS.
• 97% of votes are cast through buying a vote bundle, and the vast majority of bundles are bought through PayPal or on credit card.