"It's Belgium vs. Greece in the Eurovision First Semi-Final YouTube Rehearsal Race.
The countries competing in the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest had their second and final rehearsal on stage in Kyiv, Ukraine Thursday and Friday. Now that a full day has passed since Latvia closed out the round, let's take a look at the YouTube data to speculate on outcomes this Tuesday.
First, it should be noted that Eurovision changed up how they presented the second rehearsal clips. Rather than a two-minute clip including staging and backstage moments, each performance was a 40-second snippet showing how the performance will look on TV during the show. It works as a teaser, as well as clearing up some concerns that may arise if there are weird camera angles from off-stage that wouldn't be part of the actual presentation.
Here is how the countries rank as of 22:35 Central European Time / 4:35pm Eastern:
- Belgium
- Greece
- Sweden
- Poland
- Portugal
- Azerbaijan
- Montenegro
- Armenia
- Iceland
- Australia
That's quite a changeup from what happened after the first rehearsal. Finland and Latvia have fallen out of the top 10, though they are both within striking distance of Australia. Belgium is solidly in first place, with Greece being the only other country to have more than 100,000 views at the time of this writing.
Another metric to consider is the combined viewership of first and second rehearsal clips. When those totals are ranked, these are the top 10 for the first semi-final:
- Belgium
- Greece
- Poland
- Portugal
- Sweden
- Finland
- Montenegro
- Azerbaijan
- Latvia
- Armenia
Iceland just misses this top 10 by about 8,000 views, but then it is a sharp drop to 12th place.((Australia)) It will be interesting to see if and how these datapoints correlate with the semi-final results.
Tomorrow we'll look at the second semi-final, which may have some shakeups of its own."