@MutantFairy_@musumeci29 breaking news: italiana si rende conto che Sanremo e' il "festival della canzone italiana" e non "il festival della voce italiana" ๐ซฃ๐ซฃ๐ณ๐๐ฅณ๐๐ค๐ซฅ๐ซฅ๐ถ๐ต๐ต๐คง๐ฎ๐ฉ๐ฎโ๐จ
@mein2pieces@esc_charts it's just that people didn't vote for it because it didn't stand out as a song in a competition more than a streaming song, a summer song. (which is not bad). people should've voted and that's it
@mein2pieces@esc_charts its*
what you're saying literally still doesn't make any sense. for your argument to be true, the televote should be bigger. it's the only thing that matches with streams. on top of that, you can't say the jury robbed it when the jury is higher than the tele
๐ฒ๐น INSIGHT: How many of Malta's YouTube views are real?
With over 19 million views across all official uploads of Aidan's "Bella", Malta boasts the second-most watched #Eurovision 2026 entry on YouTube, only after Italy.
It's no secret that Malta conducted an extensive promotional campaign this year, which included billboards in Lithuania and Hungary, buses plastered with "Vote for Malta" ads in Romania and Cyprus, and, of course, YouTube commercials featuring parts of the song's video and performances. In the first 11 days of May, these YouTube ads drove "Bella"'s total views from 2.3 million to 13.9 million.
Both videos of the semi-final and the grand final's live performances uploaded on the Eurovision's YouTube channel showed non-organic trajectories: both had extremely high views in the first few hours, despite a relatively low number of likes and comments, and then completely stalled. The grand final live performance has been stuck at 1.5 million views for six hours as this post is being written. Yet, it drew less likes and comments than Croatia's "Andromeda", the 19th-most watched grand final performance, currently with 240,000 views.
Of "Bella"'s 19 million YouTube views, only roughly 3.5 million, less than one in five, can be considered genuine according to the tracking model we've been using.
Malta's unprecedented promotional campaign resulted in 8 points from the televote in the Eurovision final--placing it in the bottom five from the public's point of view.
This isn't the first time Malta has been found using tricks to inflate their winning chances: in 2021, they were reported by French website Pure Charts to have spent up to โฌ650,000 on overhyping their entry by betting on it and making it the bookies' favorite throughout the build-up to the event.
In a unique moment of partiality from this account, we can only hope that no public money coming from Maltese taxpayers was spent on this.