Lingo

Well, for those of you who wanted to see the the racers all dance that dance at the same time: Your wish has come true! Sort of:

Well, you know, it's one thing to run, it's another to dance with grace. She would have been judged on her dancing; she's not judged on her running. Except here, obviously.

I was really bummed to see these two go. There was something really appealing about Erin in particular on this race, for some reason. Something honest? Open? Vulnerable? Genuine? She seemed like a big fan of the show and was really enjoying herself. I don't know what it was exactly but she was one of my favorites. This is shaping up to be Trump's ideal version of TAR. "First, let's get rid of every team that doesn't have a white guy."

I believe Blair's excuse that she twisted her knee on the paragliding in Chamonix because Erin (of Team Clevver) said the same thing, and that she and Joslyn probably would have been eliminated soon after they did because her knee was so messed up. You can run short distances on a messed-up knee if you have to but it's pretty painful. Kurt, Ashley, and Sherry were really impressive at the dancing, and Dana was a natural of course. But Dana and Matt were so far behind at the beginning that I was beginning to wonder if they were going to be ironically eliminated in a leg with a dance task. This was before Tyler and Korey quit at the candy task of course. (BTW, I thought a Bald Snark was defined as switching at a detour twice. So the Dancers only did one-and-a-half Bald Snarks maybe?) I'm bummed RoosterTeeth missed out on that first place, but good for the Magicians. Honestly as irritating as Blair's voice can be, I hate Tyler's laugh more and was really hoping he'd be eliminated instead. And I don't want to see this race come down to two "alpha"-male teams dominating the whole thing. Amazingly tense finish, though! I was not expecting that.

My favorite moment was that tent ripping open -- unleashing a cloud of smoke -- and the reactions on the girls' faces to the ensuing accidents. I rewound it over and over as if it were a GIF (and I hate GIFs!).

Today I just noticed that Ilana shares the same last name with Kim Wexler on "Better Call Saul." Distant cousins? "The running is a metaphor." You don't say! Great episode. I dare say it was awesomesauce.

Hmm. I guess I'll have to rewatch. It felt too deliberate and drawn-out just to be part of the con, but then again, this show loves to pad out its air time.

Maybe so? I don't know, they made a point of them having the conversation while Kim was away though, as if Jimmy was doing something behind her back. Another thought I had was that maybe the mark was trying to horn in on some other business venture that Kim had mentioned, perhaps to hit on her, and Jimmy was trying to push him away to signal that she's "taken"?

I read this whole thread and didn't see anyone else bring this up. I was confused by the final scene in the 'con' but it seems I was the only one. When Kim goes into the bathroom, Jimmy talks to the 'mark' alone, and it seemed to me that he was trying to persuade the mark NOT to take the bait. Am I wrong about this? That's how I took it and I was surprised by it, because Jimmy up to that point seemed very enthusiastic by the idea of the con. I thought maybe he was trying to protect Kim from herself, which in itself was surprising to me, but later it turns out the mark DID take the con, and Jimmy asks Kim if she wants his help cashing the check, without any apparent hesitation. So I'm wondering if I completely misread that scene. If I did, I have no idea what the intent was.

I have a hard time seeing how this Jimmy's scheme could NOT blow back on himself and on Kim. It won't take a genius for HHM to figure out what Jimmy did, and if they completely lose MV and MV announce that they're going back to Kim, all HHM has to do is say that the saboteur shares an office with Kim. And then MV will stay the hell away from both HHM and Kim. And Kim's reputation will be sullied...again. Someone suggested they're putting drug-filled tires on the truck AFTER getting past the border guard, which ... how would that work? Doesn't that entail smuggling from the US TO Mexico? The hard part is getting the drugs into the US in the first place.

This video is interesting because it shows you how well the teams knew of each other before the Race began. To summarize, a lot of these teams weren't familiar to a lot of these other teams. So you don't have to feel bad about not recognizing them yourself!

Thanks. You should have seen my spreadsheet back in TAR's prime.... Thanks for the extra information. I can only plead ignorance. I started with the Parade article, which didn't mention any of the channels you linked to (except their main website roosterteeth.com, but I was limiting myself to public social media sites), and I didn't want to spend too much time trying to find all the relevant channels. But all the channels you mention have lower subscription numbers than the main RT channel, and as I said I went with the highest single channel. Though if you're saying I should have given Burnie and Ashley higher numbers as individuals, I can see that. P.S. 27 out of 40 votes so far for "never heard of them"! Oh you guys, you make me feel so young! I will love you forever.

ABOUT THE POLL: You may not know them by name, but if you remember ever seeing one of their videos at some point, then that counts as "familiarity". As for me, I've definitely hear of Tyler Oakley though I may have never watched one of his videos completely (he shows up in the "Best of YouTube" video at the end of every year). I've definitely seen Marty's flight video, some of Zach's trick videos, and probably at least one trick-frisbee shot video. I've never heard of "RoosterTeeth" but I think I've heard of the "Red vs. Blue" series they became famous for, and lately on TV I'm seeing commercials for their new "Lazer Team" series. I feel like I've seen that Vine of Cole egging his mother before, but I'm not sure. Pretty sure I saw Cameron's Obama impression too.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES: For most of the teams, there's one member who's obviously more famous than the other, and their numbers were higher than their partners across the board: Tyler, Matt, Brodie, Zach, Blair, and Cole, obviously. Burnie is definitely the most famous one on his team, though I think Ashley has more Instagram followers. With the Clevver girls, Joslyn had bigger numbers than Erin in every category. Interestingly, it's Darius rather than Obama impersonator Cameron who has most of the followers. It was a mix with Jessica and Brittany (though I think Brittany usually had more) and even with Marty (viral flight-attendant video on YouTube) and Hagan (young and pretty, active on Twitter and Instagram). It's probably fair to say that Burnie and Ashley are a good deal more famous than their final ranking above indicates. Putting them in at #3 may be a fair assessment. At any rate their fans seemed to be the loudest during the live Facebook feed of the first leg. With Erin and Joslyn I'm not so certain. What's clear, though, is that the "Instagram Models" were clearly just another excuse for the producers to once again have a "hot girl" team with no other apparent interesting qualities, just like they have every season (they're probably much more famous on the pageant circuit than on the internet). And that overall, the producers really had to dig deep to find 3 girl-girl teams that they could justify putting on this season of the race. Although, I bet a whole lot of you are more familiar with Marty's flight-attendant video than with any other team! Maybe I'll actually get around to watching some of those videos now.

OVERALL: So, how do we compare these across platforms? There’s really no obvious fair way to compare them, but I tried anyway. First I tried just averaging their ranks across the 5 websites. Ignoring the Parade data, I gave each website equal weight (which is probably unfair to the YouTube stars). To get the overall Youtube rank, I calculated the mean rank across the 3 YT lists. Similarly for Vine (giving a rank of 9 to those teams not on Vine). Then I averaged across the 5 websites. Here’s what I get: 1. Tyler & Korey: 3.4 2. Dana & Matt: 4.8 3. RoosterTeeth: 4.87 4. Kurt & Brodie: 4.93 5. Zach & Rachel: 4.97 6. Scott & Blair: 6.2 7(t). Sheri & Cole: 6.47 7(t). Clevver: 6.47 9. Cameron & Darius: 6.9 10. Burnie & Ashley: 9.6 11. Erin & Joslyn: 10.33 12. Jessica & Brittany: 10.8 13. Marty & Hagan: 11.27 However, mere rankings don’t really take into account just how much more popular one team is compared to the next team in the ranking (e.g. how Tyler has 7 times more twitter followers then the next highest team). So for my final ranking, I calculated for each list a score which is the fraction of the maximum number in that list (so e.g. Tyler gets a 1.0 on the Twitter list, while 2nd-place RoosterTeeth only gets 0.14 for having 14% of the followers). Then I calculated the average percentage across all 5 websites using the same procedure as above (dropping Parade, average across the 3 YT lists, etc.). This produces these “final” scores: 1. Tyler & Korey: 0.5867 2. Zach & Rachel: 0.3701 3. RoosterTeeth: 0.2538 4. Dana & Matt: 0.2305 5. Sheri & Cole: 0.2204 6. Clevver: 0.1501 7. Kurt & Brodie: 0.1448 8. Cameron & Darius: 0.1214 9. Scott & Blair: 0.0654 10. Marty & Hagan: 0.0290 11. Burnie & Ashley: 0.0190 12. Erin & Joslyn: 0.0033 13. Jessica & Brittany: 0.0030 … which suggests that Tyler Oakley is approximately 198 times more famous than the Instagram Models (probably an under-estimation). Whatever the case, we end up with a list that is … pretty close to the Parade list that we started with, actually!

7. TOTAL TWITTER FOLLOWERS (single account): 1. Tyler & Korey: 5,020,000 2. RoosterTeeth: 698,000 3. Scott & Blair: 625,000 4. Burnie & Ashley: 432,000 5. Kurt & Brodie: 387,856 6. Clevver: 193,000 7. Dana & Matt: 152,000 8. Zach & Rachel: 121,000 9. Sheri & Cole: 117,000 10. Cameron & Darius: 48,700 11. Erin & Joslyn: 34,700 12. Jessica & Brittany: 17,300 13. Marty & Hagan: 2,893 Almost all the racers have Twitter accounts. Of course they do. I think even Scott has one. Anyway, Tyler comes out on top by a HUGE margin, having more than 7 times as many followers as the official RoosterTeeth account. (Note here that Burnie’s account is comparable in size to the RT account.) Blair comes in a surprising 3rd (she also had a good many YouTube subscribers). The teams that are more known for their visual styles (frisbee, dancers, zach, cole, models) fall lower on this list of course. 8. FACEBOOK FOLLOWERS OR LIKES (single page): 1. Tyler & Korey: 2,913,140 2. Dana & Matt: 1,819,670 3. RoosterTeeth: 856,428 4. Clevver: 479,711 5. Kurt & Brodie: 378,678 6. Cameron & Darius: 204,943 7. Scott & Blair: 185,217 8. Zach & Rachel: 147,791 9. Sheri & Cole: 31,304 10. Burnie & Ashley: 14,709 11. Jessica & Brittany: 12,263 12. Erin & Joslyn: 5,110 13. Marty & Hagan: 1,696 FaceBook is of course unhip, not terribly popular with the younger crowd. Tyler still comes out on top, though. Some FB pages had “likes” and some had “followers”; I’m not sure what the difference is, but I wrote down whatever number I could find here. 9. INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS (single account): 1. Zach & Rachel: 11,800,000 2. Tyler & Korey: 6,000,000 3. Dana & Matt: 863,000 4. Sheri & Cole: 679,000 5. Kurt & Brodie: 551,000 6. Scott & Blair: 272,000 7. Cameron & Darius: 256,000 8. RoosterTeeth: 103,000 9. Erin & Joslyn: 87,900 10. Jessica & Brittany: 83,700 11. Clevver: 63,800 12. Burnie & Ashley: 46,900 13. Marty & Hagan: 6,257 Finally, we have Instagram, which is definitely the medium I’m least familiar with, having maybe almost never used it before this week. So I was a little surprised to find every team represented here. This is apparently Zach’s killer app, where his 6-second Vine videos have even more followers than they do on Vine for some reason. Note that Jessica & Brittany, the so-called “Instagram Models”, who have ranked in the bottom 3 on every other list, hardly do better even here, though they do beat out ClevverMedia. The other company RoosterTeeth also ranks pretty low here.

VINE: 5. TOTAL FOLLOWERS (best account): 1. Sheri & Cole: 6,600,000 2. Zach & Rachel: 3,800,000 3. Cameron & Darius: 3,000,000 4. Kurt & Brodie: 1,700,000 Vine, with its jokey 6-second video format, is not for everyone — I could only find accounts for 4 teams. But Vine is the primary claim to fame of teams like Cameron & Darius, so it seemed appropriate to include it. Here, Cole is the surprising king of the hill, having many more subscribers than even magician Zach. C&D only come in third, and the frisbee throwers last. 6. TOTAL LOOPS (across all videos for a single account): 1. Sheri & Cole: 3,056,073,132 2. Cameron & Darius: 1,635,175,789 3. Zach & Rachel: 1,291,637,404 4. Kurt & Brodie: 513,212,796 Yes, again we’re talking about billions of views (to be fair, these are 6-second videos that loop continuously). Cole is again on top, but somehow Darius comes out on top of Zach on this list. I also wanted to rank the teams by their most “viral” vine, just as I did with YouTube, but I couldn’t figure out how to sort the videos in any way, e.g. by view count. And I wasn’t gonna do it by hand. I couldn’t even find Cameron’s Obama impersonation vine, which I’m sure I’ve seen before somewhere.

YouTube! 2. TOTAL YOUTUBE CHANNEL SUBSCRIBERS (maximum among all channels) 1. RoosterTeeth: 8,480,573 2. Tyler & Korey: 7,978,040 3. Dana & Matt: 3,052,774 4. Clevver: 2,301,327 5. Scott & Blair: 1,754,359 6. Kurt & Brodie: 1,344,619 7. Zach & Rachel: 1,073,083 8. Cameron & Darius: 138,824 9. Sheri & Cole: 28,980 10. Erin & Joslyn: 8,784 11. Marty & Hagan: 7,545 12. Jessica & Brittany: 146 13. Burnie & Ashley: -* RoosterTeeth has the biggest channel here; note that I could not find individual YouTube channels for Burnie or Ashley separate from RT. Tyler is almost as big as RT. The dancers have less than half of Tyler’s count, but that’s still more than the biggest Clevver channel. 3. TOTAL VIEWS (across all videos of a single channel) 1. RoosterTeeth: 4,240,936,271 2. Clevver: 1,505,508,867 3. Tyler & Korey: 550,773,653 4. Dana & Matt: 460,274,135 5. Scott & Blair: 270,538,479 6. Zach & Rachel: 209,495,228 7. Kurt & Brodie: 177,521,986 8. Marty & Hagan: 22,911,733 9. Cameron & Darius: 4,287,437 10. Sheri & Cole: 1,669,037 11. Erin & Joslyn: 70,189 12. Jessica & Brittany: 26,634 13. Burnie & Ashley: - Yes, BILLIONS of views. Total views is perhaps more indicative of fame across a wider audience; many of us see the viral videos on YouTube but don’t end up subscribing to the channel. The order here is not too different though. 4. MAXIMUM VIEWS FOR A SINGLE VIDEO 1. Clevver: 52,599,556 2. Dana & Matt: 42,365,336 3. Zach & Rachel: 34,373,762 4. Kurt & Brodie: 30,094,909 5. RoosterTeeth: 25,303,550 6. Marty & Hagan: 22,247,771 7. Tyler & Korey: 10,751,635 8. Scott & Blair: 4,047,279 9. Sheri & Cole: 1,447,343 10. Cameron & Darius: 725,895 11. Erin & Joslyn: 28,406 12. Jessica & Brittany: 7,495 13. Burnie & Ashley: - Which team has the most “viral” video, or at least the most viewed one? Here ClevverMedia actually comes out on top. (I didn’t watch it, but it had something to do with Transformers 3. I don’t know if Erin & Joslyn were in it.) This is the list in which Marty shines brightest with her humorous flight attendant safety instruction video (the only thing this team is known for). Note that Tyler actually ranks pretty far down on this list. Making “viral” videos is not really his bag; his thing is … well actually I’m not really sure what he does. Slice-of-life videos? Well anyway the point is that his viewership is more stable than a single video.

So I should preface this post by saying I’m not here to worship, praise, condone, criticize, condemn, or insult this season’s crop of racers. This is meant as a neutral bit of research. I am merely curious about the fame level of these racers — especially compared to each other. E.g. who is the most “Internet-famous” racer? Exactly how much more famous is Tyler Oakley than the Instagram models? (I miss FameTracker!) This research was prompted by this parade.com article (http://parade.com/452080/joshwigler/the-amazing-race-see-the-full-cast-for-season-28/), in which each racer was asked how many followers they each have over all forms of social media. That’s a good first approximation of their fame level, but it depends on the racers’ own reports. Not only that, but the racers probably calculated their total followers by summing the followers they have on each platform, which assumes that they are all distinct followers, when more likely there is significant (if not complete) overlap. The same goes for teammates: the followers of each teammate probably follow the other teammate as well. So I decided to collect my own social media statistics and rank the racers according to what I found. These stats were collected on Feb 15-16. I looked at YouTube, Vine, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I could have looked at Google Plus and Snapchat too, but I wasn’t sure all the racers have accounts on these, and anyway I got bored. Note that in each case, I only report the MAXIMUM number I find between the two teammates (rather than the total, for example). E.g. for YouTube subscribers, I only report the subscribers for the teammate who has the most subscribers. And if a racer has, say, more than one YouTube channel, I only report the number for the most popular channel. Teams Burnie & Ashley (RoosterTeeth) and Erin & Joslyn (ClevverMedia) were scrutinized more carefully. With all the other teams, their fame is pretty much their own doing — they star in all their own videos, their faces are the primary public faces of their brands, and they’re pretty much solo (or 2-people) operations, or at least they’re presented as such. But Burnie & Ashley and Erin & Josyln are just a few of several public faces of the larger companies they represent. So it’s hard to ascertain how much of their followers really belong to them rather than the company itself — i.e. how much of the popularity of their channels can be ascribed to them. With Burnie, I feel more comfortable giving him full credit for the popularity of RoosterTeeth, because he’s a cofounder of the company and apparently kind of a big deal (judging by that airport scene). With Erin & Joslyn, it’s harder to say: it’s not clear whether they are a creative force behind the scenes of Clevver, or just presenters. So, for these teams, I actually present separate statistics (when I could find them) for both the team itself and the larger company they represent. I.e. I have separate lines in my tables for Burnie & Ashley and for RoosterTeeth, and for Erin & Joslyn and for ClevverMedia (which has 6 different YouTube channels, etc). So my tables actually have 13 lines! It’s a little confusing but I felt it was for the best. Now the stats! 1. TOTAL FOLLOWERS AS REPORTED IN PARADE I start with the self-reported estimated numbers from Parade. As mentioned above, I only report the highest numbers: 1. Tyler & Korey: 21,505,520 2. Zach & Rachel: 19,000,000 3. RoosterTeeth: 18,000,000 4. Burnie & Ashley: 15,900,000 5(t). ClevverMedia: 8,000,000 5(t). Dana & Matt: 8,000,000 7. Sheri & Cole: 7,500,000 8. Kurt & Brodie: 5,000,000 9. Scott & Blair: 3,475,000 10. Cameron & Darius: 3,000,000 11(t). Erin & Joslyn: 100,000 11(t). Jessica & Brittany: 100,000 13. Marty & Hagan: 10,000 It’s no surprise to me that Tyler Oakley comes out on top, but a bit surprising that “magician” Zach claims even more followers than RoosterTeeth. Dancers Dana & Matt are nearly as popular as ClevverMedia as a whole. Note that Erin & Joslyn admit having a small number of personal followers relative to ClevverMedia, while Burnie (understandably) takes credit for most of the followers of RoosterTeeth. Next post: YouTube.

Very reminiscent of Moonbeam City. I love it.

Don't forget that they allowed them to drive themselves during the first part of the final leg in Season 25. I don't get why it was allowed just that one time, and hasn't been done before or after. Is it much easier to drive in LA? (They were in LA right? But don't they end in LA pretty often?)

New thought: Has anyone ever been voted out by a single vote after an idol play before? That would be a case where EVERYONE in the tribe voted for one person -- except that person, who plays an idol, meaning his/her vote is the only one that matters. That would also be an interesting Survivor first.

Damn. I was really hoping for the other thing.

As far as I can tell, that hasn't changed at all. But the money that's given out each leg is rarely mentioned on the show these days, except sometimes when it's plot-relevant. Kelsey mentioned it a few times (in bonus clips)...but yeah, they certainly didn't shout it to the rooftops like J&D did. I think J&D got the "superfan" edit just because they won so many legs....like, what else could explain how well they were doing? J&D mention in a bonus clip that if they had given the cabbie that extra $100, then they would have had only $30 left, and they were worried that wouldn't be enough for the rest of the leg. K&J were in a similar boat, apparently. K&J gambled on paying, and won. J&D gambled on not paying, and lost. Nope, that was Chris. They've been together for 8 years, and Diana says at the end of the Race that they still as in love with each other as they did when they first met. I don't think anything on this race is going to break them up. Yeah, they can use whatever they have left over from previous legs as well as whatever they're given for this one.

Pretty sure the finale is next Wednesday, like it has been the last couple of seasons. Spencer must think he can beat Jeremy in the end. Most of them must think so. Why else does everyone want to align with him and yet no one talks about voting him out? We really have little idea of what people think of him as a threat because we never see anyone talk about him. But in terms of resumes, Spencer can say he's been on the winning side of most of the votes, and he's won 2 immunity challenges to Jeremy's zero. And he took out Jeremy's biggest ally (Stephen) and essentially replaced Stephen with himself with no repercussions. What does Jeremy have besides a questionable idol play, in Spencer's eyes? To Spencer he must not look like too big of a threat.