Butterfinger announced the winner of the “Nobody’s Gonna Lay a Finger on my Butterfinger” video contest on Thursday. Of the 4 finalist videos, here’s the one that came out on top:
First Place. Prize: $25,000
Now, when the voting period ended I predicted that the posted scores would change dramatically before the winners were announced because Butterfinger would check for vote fraud and throw out multiple votes that all came from the same IP address. Well….I was half right. The final vote counts are now very different than what they were when voting ended. Except, ummmmm, everyone’s vote totals went UP and not down.
Each of the four finalist videos each have at least 1,000 more votes today then they did when the voting ended. The vote buttons were removed from the site when the contest closed so there’s no way people could have somehow been casting votes since then. (Click here to see the Butterfinger vote totals as they were on September 23rd and click here to see the vote totals as the are today.)
So what happened? Why did the winning video, “Butterfinger Phone App” have 12,974 votes on September 23rd but now has 16,556 votes on October 4th? Where did 3582 new votes come from in that time?? I actually don’t think anything shady went on with the vote. Now that I see that it was a massive blow out (the 2nd place video has 13,626 votes) I think the chance there was large-scale fraud by any of the contestants is slim. Without the aid of some kind of voting program there’s no way to generate that many fake votes. So Beardy decrees this to be a clean win for Butterfinger Phone App.
But the question remains; why did the vote totals jump after the contest ended? My guess is that votes in different parts of the country were registered on different servers. So in the last 2 weeks, Butterfinger had to seek out every vote and add it to the total. That’s a really crappy way to run a vote though. Youtube sort of works that way (ever wonder why your view count only goes up in big jumps after you hit 300 views?) but youtube tabulates its info from all its servers a few times a day. Why wouldn’t the butterfinger vote work the same way? Would butterfinger withhold votes on purpose to keep the contest competitive? On the day that voting ended, the first and second place videos were only separated by less than 700 votes. How did that slim margin turn into a 2928 lead for Butterfinger Phone App? This does seem sort of shady and I think it might have been an intentional tactic on Butterfinger’s part. Whatever the case, I suspect the jumping Butterifnger scores will always remain a video contest mystery.
