Photo Time: Dude, Where’s My Car?

FameCast: Traffic and Auditing

Approaching the final leg of it’s Third Season, FameCast.com has been slowly becoming a player in online competitions for musicians, performers, dancers, filmmakers, and animation artists. It’s popularity has matched it’s rival-like site, MusicNation. The main difference between the two was the process of voting. MusicNation allowed artists and fans to vote for their favorite artists once per day during each competition’s season. FameCast, however, only allowed artists and fans to cast one vote per round for each contestant throughout a season.

This past October, FameCast changed its ways, and allowed its users to cast one vote per day for each artist they choose to vote for. Instantly, site traffic saw a major increase, and advertisers seemingly started to pop up all over the website. Once can only imagine the kind of Advertisment Revenue this has created for FameCast.

Daily Site Stats as of 11/2/07 for FameCast.com
Full stats can be found here

But just last night, the rankings had suddenly changed on one of FameCast’s ‘stages’, and a negative buzz is starting to fly around artists and fans on the site. Most of the buzz is coming from those who were directly affected by the loss of what FameCast calls “illegitimate votes”. Artists had dropped from a range of 10-17 ranks by around 6:00pm Eastern. Fans have start to bombard the forums looking for answers, and questioning FameCast’s own legitimacy. Part of FameCast’s current response states:

“…Please remember that if an Artist’s rank drops, this does not necessarily mean that the Artist has been falsifying votes, but that he or she may have received illegitimate votes from another source.”

In the end, is it completely fair for an artist to have no real control over their final ranking? Maybe not. But there are two questions I can think of that should be asked from both sides of the table. On the Fan/Artist side, will this issue be something that can be fixed in the future, thus eliminating the lack of trust this might create? On the side of FameCast, does the current “Audit Committee” method need to be changed, and is it going to directly affect the relationship between Site Traffic and Ad Revenue?

Personally, I’ve been involved in FameCast since its first Season. My band, Soundscape Soul performed in their Season 2 Finals. I’ve seen many positive results from our presence on the website. But we were one of the artists affected by the recent “Vote Audit” and therefore was taken out of the running on one stage, while having no options to fix the situation before it was done. We are still on another stage and planning on launching promotion campaigns for the next round, but I would rather see this current issue resolved and laid to rest.

What do you think about the recent “Vote Auditing” that just took place on FameCast? Do you think there’s a link between that and the need for Site Traffic? Will this affect that need? Sound off!