I’m kicking around an idea, and I’d like your thoughts.

 

You know how at the Miss America contest they do rounds of winners?

They eliminate a bunch of candidates and narrow the field, eliminate another bunch and then they narrow it down some more…

…until they have only a few contestants onstage waiting to see who won.

Can you see my evil grin?

Well I am doing that, but I am not letting the blog followers and others know that I’m doing it. I chose my group of finalists, and the celebrity judges are making their selections from that group, but the contestants don’t know where they are in the ranking.

I wonder if it would make it more exciting if I let everyone know who is a finalist before I announce the winners?

• Like, say on Sunday the 17th I said here are the X number of finalists,
• and then on Monday the 18th I said here’s who all won honorable mention – come back tomorrow (Tuesday the 19th) to see who got third place!
• And then on Tuesday, I announce third place…

And I say come back on the Thursday the 20th to see who won the top slot, as promised in our November 1 contest announcement, and on Thursday I announce the winners of second place AND first place, in that order.

I’m looking at my original announcement and I said “winners will be announced on or around December 20” – I don’t think doing it this way would change that.

Previously I’ve announced everything in one day. If everyone has to come at one time to find out who won, does that get more people tuning in because they all think they might have won? Or is it better to stagger it out, Miss America style?

So here’s the dilemma:

Right now there is a large group of people who don’t know if they won or not. As soon as I announce a group, say, of eight finalists, all the other contestants know they did not win first place because they weren’t named as a finalist. Do those people stop tuning in?

Or does the excitement get bigger because they know they didn’t win but they want to know who did.

And the blog followers want to see the competition unfold.

So more people come to see the number one choice.

In our prior contest, we had about 1000 total people came to the blog between the day I announced the winner and the next day when the winning story was posted.

If I stagger the winning announcements Miss America style, do we get more people tuning in? (Because there weren’t 1000 entries. Or 500, if they all came both days.) We might get more people, though, because the audience for the contest is larger than the pool of contestants – by a lot.

There’s a reason they do the Miss America contest that way.

American Idol, same thing.

Survivor.

Followers of the blog would be on edge for days.

Hmm…

* * *   TENSION       DRIVES       STORIES  * * * 

And we’re all about trying new stuff here…

There’s one issue. Views might be down because the 20^th is so close to the holidays. TV shows are in reruns during that time. We might get fewer views and think the experiment was a failure. This would have been the week to do it, starting a few days ago.

But, No Guts, No Glory.

What do you think? Go for it Miss America style starting Sunday, or do it all at once like last time?