The X Factor final this weekend is one of the most hotly talked about topics up and down the country and it seems everyone has an opinion on who is going to win this year’s competition. Last year we correctly predicted that Joe McElderry would win the competition, this year the data suggests boyband One Direction will emerge as winners.

Looking at all searches over the last 12 weeks for the final four contestants, the clear favourite would appear to be Cher, followed by One Direction, Matt and Rebecca.

Rebecca is by far the weakest candidate online and looking at the search term variations for each of the contestants, Rebecca has the fewest number of searches online. Rebecca also has the lowest fanbase online of visitors to fansites and dedicated fan pages, making her the first candidate to eliminate from our predictions.

Although Cher seems to be leading the pack in terms of online interest, no other candidate divides online opinion as Cher does. Separating searches for Cher into positive and negative comments, you can see that Cher is the Marmite contestant of the competition this year with an almost equal number of positive and negative searches each week. Here positive search terms relate to searches for the singer or for songs they sang such as ‘cher lloyd stay’ whereas negative comments are either disparaging or inappropriate comments such as ‘cher anorexic’ or ‘cher naked pics’.

Cher was also the second lowest on the search term variation chart, and when you consider that she has the highest proportion of negative search terms, Cher is the second candidate to discount from our predictions.
That leaves us with a two horse race between One Direction and Matt. If we look at the positive searches only, Matt took an early lead in the competition but One Direction have consistently performed better than Matt. Both contestants are also showing positive growth going into the final week.

If we look at the demographic breakdown of the people that visit fansites dedicated to Matt and One Direction using Mosaic data, we can see that One Direction are more likely to receive visitors from the Alpha Territory, Ex Council Community and Career and Kids groups. Matt on the other hand is more likely to receive visits from the Rural Solitude and Active Retirement groups.

Visits to the X Factor site, the closest approximation we have to people who will actually vote for contestants are in the Alpha Territory, Suburban Mindsets and Liberal Opinions groups – the groups which most closely match One Direction’s fan base.
According to the latest odds from the bookies, Matt is the clear favourite to win, but based on our data, One Direction has more search term variations, more search volume, more positive searches and a closer fan base to the X Factor voting demographic. For all of these reasons, we predict that One Direction will emerge as this year’s winners of the X Factor.