As a number of fan clubs and sites (including ourselves) rate their top 10s for Eurovision coming up, a few trends are starting to appear consistently.
But is this a true indication of what the public think? Are fan clubs and sites the opinion of super fans (hello Valentina!). So we thought instead of looking at super fans we might cast our eyes over the Twitterverse and see what a mix of general fans think.
We spent far too much weekend time reviewing 50 random twitter users who had publicly declared their top 5s or top 10s. We collated the votes and here are the results.....
10th - Estonia 104 points
9th - Azerbaijan 104 points
8th - FYR Macedonia - 119 points
7th - Portugal 122 points
6th - Switzerland 125 points
5th - Bulgaria - 137 points
4th - Belgium - 137 points
3rd - Sweden 141points
2nd - France 232 points
1st - Italy - 308 points
So well at first glance not a lot of surprises. Italy wins, Belgium, Sweden and Bulgaria do well. However... France in second place comfortably in front of 3rd is interesting. Perhaps people new to the song aren't tainted by the revamp? Switzerland in the top 10 is a huge surprise to me personally. Though it has performed decently in the OGAE poll.
Some more interesting results come out of the full list:
*Greece is dead last with only one point
*UK is set to have one of the best performance in years
*Australia performs relatively ok in 15th *Germany is set to come last in the final for the third year running *Czech Republic finishes much higher than anticipated in 30th
Full list
1 Italy 308
2 France 232
3 Sweden 141
4 Belgium 137
5 Bulgaria 137
6 Switzerland 125
7 Portugal 122
8 Macedonia 119
9 Azerbaijan 105
10 Estonia 104
11 Israel 93
12 Denmark 90
13 UK 74
14 Iceland 68
15 Australia 65
16 Finland 64
17 Armenia 54
18 Belarus 52
19 Hungary 48
20 Serbia 45
21 Netherlands 42
22 Poland 40
23 Austria 39
24 Montenegro 38
25 Cyprus 38
26 Norway 36
27 Albania 29
28 Ireland 29
29 Romania 24
30 Czech Rep 22
31 Latvia 22
32 Georgia 19
33 Spain 18
34 Croatia 16
35 Ukraine 13
36 Slovenia 11
37 Malta 10
38 Germany 7
39 Moldova 7
40 Lithuania 5
41 San Marino 3
42 Greece 1