Bachelorette motivations

The Bachelorette season is upon us again. I must say I enjoy the show. It advertises itself as a path to finding lasting love but its success record is less than impressive. And thus it satisfies my formula for great television:

Expectation fails to meet reality == great television

Some of the antics on the show also make me wonder how much of the show is scripted and which of the cast are looking for media exposure versus true love. Lets look at some data.

I wrote a script to aggregate data from the contestants’ Instagram accounts. Five of the 30 contestants either deleted or never had an Instagram account leaving us with 25. Of these I looked at total followers and number of Likes gained on their most popular post (to indicate newly gained followers).

It looks like Grocery Joe and mule wielding Blake Horstmann are crowd favorites, each gaining 10,000 additional likes on their most popular post. Kamil (who I can’t recall from the show), Colton Underwood and former Globetrotter Christon Staples have the largest following (at or above 100,000) out of the gate and may be looking to build their brands. Antagonist male model Jordon Kimball seems to have struck out with the viewers earning only 48 additional likes. Finally, there are some guys who appear to have modest followings so they may be there for the “right reasons”. Time will tell.

Enjoy the show.