How our polls work
What we measure
A Clapnumber poll measures what people visiting this page think, at the moment they voted. That is all it is. It is a sentiment reading of our own audience, not a prediction and not a count of the real vote.
How we count
You need an account to vote, and each poll sets how many votes one account may cast per day. We show the share of votes each option has, and we always publish the total number of votes so you can judge the sample for yourself. A poll with forty votes tells you very little, and we would rather you could see that.
How we pick who we think wins
On a running season we rank who we think is winning. It is our opinion, read from everything people say about the house over the last 14 days: viewers’ comments, reviewers, the news, Instagram posts, daily reads of the web and social media, and our own readers’ claps and votes. It moves every hour, and it is not the show’s vote. Here is the whole formula. An opinion nobody can check is not worth stating.
First, each thing said about a housemate counts for its kind, and these rules shape it:
| A comment, YouTube or Instagram | 1 |
| A reader's clap or vote | 2 |
| An Instagram post | 5 |
| A news article, per housemate | 20 |
| A reviewer take, per housemate | 40 |
| A daily web or social media read, its pick | 75 |
| A daily web or social media read, per housemate | 150 |
| Most a comment can gain from its likes (times) | 3 |
| Likes at which a comment reaches that cap | 100 |
| Most a reviewer can gain from their following (times) | 2 |
| Subscribers at which a reviewer reaches that cap | 1,000,000 |
| What an organised item counts for (share of its weight) | 0.25 |
| Days after which an item counts half as much | 3 |
| Days of items the standing reads | 14 |
| Most any one source counts for: the housemate it talks about most; everyone else by the square root of their share of that | 150 |
Then each housemate’s standing adds up good talk, bad talk and all talk this way:
+1Good talk: every warm item, weighed as above. Someone actively backing them.-0.75Bad talk, and being voted against. Counted against them, hard: the most-watched housemate in week three is often the one about to leave, and a model that read outrage as popularity would call that person the favourite.+0.15All talk, whichever way. Airtime is opportunity, but it is worth a fraction of active support.
We have never checked it against a finished season. We hold the winner of sixty-nine past seasons, but nobody measured attention while those seasons were running, so there is nothing to test the formula against. The first season we can honestly score it on is one we measure from the start. Until then it is an argument, not a forecast, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
What it cannot tell you
- Who the broadcaster will actually evict.
- How many real votes any housemate has received.
- What the wider public thinks. Our voters are people who happened to visit this page.
Anyone showing you a precise live count of the official vote is making it up. That data is not published by anybody.