After thinning out the 37 entries in two semi-finals throughout this past week, the 26 songs for the grand final of the Eurovision Song Contest on May 11 have officially been decided. The contest, which will be held for the 68th time in Malmö, Sweden, is broadcast not only on the web but also on the public media channels of the corresponding markets. There, the final shows regularly claim a significant market share. According to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), last year's final had a market share of 40.9 percent. While online engagement is reportedly on an upward trend, the draw of watching European countries compete on a musical stage on linear television seems to have faded since the coronavirus pandemic.
Data from the EBU shows that over the past ten years, viewer numbers hit a peak in 2016, with 204 million people tuning into the semi-finals and finals. The 2020 entry of the contest, which wasn't a contest at all and rather showed the planned participants' songs and gave background information on them, only drew 73 million viewers in front of their TVs. In 2021, the show returned to its regular programming and, fittingly, regular number of viewers. These past two years, however, viewership has dipped significantly, shrinking by 12 percent between 2021 and 2022.
The reasons for this are unclear, as is the answer to the question of whether the Eurovision Song Contest grand final on Saturday can again boost the viewership numbers on the participating broadcasters' channels. What seems rather certain though, at least in the minds of bookmakers, is this year's winner: According to average winning odds from 17 betting sites analyzed by eurovisionworld.com, Croatia's Baby Lasagna and his song "Rim Tim Tagi Dim" have a 37 percent chance to win as of May 10, 2 PM CET, followed by Israel's (26 percent) and Switzerland's (11 percent) entries.
