UPDATE, May 26, 2009: Text votes may have been a minority, but the New York Times is reporting that AT&T may have swayed the votes in Kris Allen’s favor thanks to some freebies and voting tips to the Idol winner’s hometown fans. See: “AT&T May Have Swayed ‘Idol’ Results“

The numbers are out: A whopping 178 million text messages were sent on AT&T’s network during this year’s American Idol season. That’s double the number from last year.

But wait. Are people really voting by text? Look at Susan Underwood, the Brea resident, who won $5,000 in an AT&T-sponsored AI texting contest. She didn’t text the whole season, or use her AT&T cell phone, for that matter. While 178 million sounds like a lot, let’s take a closer look at that figure.

The 178 million includes all American Idol-related text messages during this year’s  season 8. That counts weekly trivia questions, weekly voting reminders, contest entries and questions submitted to AT&T hosted chats. And, reports AT&T, the number of users who opted in for weekly voting reminders was up 70 percent from last year. (Another factoid: fans who opted to get the reminders sent nearly twice as many texts than everyone else.)

Such messages probably made up a big part of the total number of texts (AT&T won’t break it down for me). But I’m guessing that votes still made up the majority of the 178 million texts — unless AT&T counts its January stunt to text a  ”significant number of its 75 million customers” that the show was starting up again (the stunt majorly backfired).

AT&T won’t break down the “fan engagement” numbers but the company does tell me that even texting results are handled by a third-party so no one at AT&T is privy to which singer might be in the lead.

By comparison, AI host Ryan Seacrest announced during the results show this week that the two finalists had attracted 100 million votes in a single night. That certainly gives the 181 million text messages some perspective. For the 2009 season, there were 624 million votes total, according to American Idol.

So, say 75 percent of texts were votes (a wild and generous guess on my part, I should add), that leaves 133.5 million votes via text. This would mean 21 percent of all votes came in via text.

The number of American Idol-related texts has definitely been on the rise, except in 2007 (year of AI winner Jordan Sparks), when AT&T did not report how many AI texts were sent. In 2008, AT&T reported a “record-breaking” 78 million text votes and compared results to the record-breaking 2006 season.

Of course, in earlier seasons, unlimited text plans didn’t exist so the number of votes should grow as consumers become less concerned a per-message fee.

If American Idol really wanted fans to vote by text, it would open texting to users of all systems and not just AT&T, the show’s “official wireless sponsor.” But chances of that happening? I’d say very low. AI’s a business and one that is likely unwilling to give up a lucrative sponsor in exchange for messaging egalitarianism. 

Anyway, I spent way too much time on this. Have a good Memorial Day weekend!

More on cell-phones:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.