'The Voice' was a Ratings and Social-TV Triumph but 'X Factor' Isn't? Guess Again

NBC's "The Voice" was a surprise hit in the spring -- and thanks to its highly integrated use of Twitter (tweets from judges frequently appeared on screen and backstage correspondent Alison Haislip sort of served as an on-camera Twitter jockey), it was widely considered a "social TV" triumph. Whereas Simon Cowell's "The X Factor" on Fox this fall is a ratings disappointment and people just aren't talking about it that much... right? Guess again. The truth is , "The X Factor" ratings have been solid if not spectacular -- and actually are not that far off from the numbers "The Voice" was doing in the spring: in the range of 12 million viewers per episode. The problem, of course, is that Cowell set up ridiculously high expectations for his show -- which he now realizes. "I'm not going to lie," he told the AP this week. "I wanted 20 million when we launched, but now I'm kind of back in the real world and I'm seeing this grow naturally. I'm as happy as I've ever been." The good news for "The X Factor" is that viewers who are watching the show remained hooked -- the show is holding on to its audience -- and they're incredibly engaged with it. Given that a huge part of "The Voice" story was its level of social engagement, we decided to compare its social-TV profile to that of "The X Factor." And so we asked the team at Ad Age 's editorial partner Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge-Mass.-based social-media analysis company that specializes in television, to dive deep into its comprehensive database of social-media response for both shows. The topline results are shown in the chart below. Some context: Stay tuned to AdAge.com for more data from Bluefin Labs. For more about Bluefin, visit their website. Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. Follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.

'The Voice' was a Ratings and Social-TV Triumph but 'X Factor' Isn't? Guess Again

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