Category: Site News

After a year absence due to Covid the regular weekly competition is back, bigger and better than ever. And this series really is the biggest as one of you will be winning a huge £500 Amazon UK voucher!

To get involved all you have to do is join the discussion over on Facebook or Twitter each week. One person every week on each network will win a voucher worth up to £100. But this year there is a twist!

Winners can choose to keep their prize. Or they can hand it back for a chance to win the big prize at the end of the series. The choice will be entirely yours……

Boring Legal Bit

1. This competition is open to all UK and Republic of Ireland residents barring any close family members or friends of the promoter.
2. The competition will run from 25/09/21 to 18/12/21 inclusive. These dates are provisional and may change depending when the 2021 series of Strictly airs
3. Each promotional period will run from Midnight Saturday until the following Midnight Saturday with the exception of the final week which will run on the day of the final only.
4. Each social network has their own pool of prizes which initially comprise of 4*£10 Amazon UK vouchers, 4*£20 vouchers, 2*£35 vouchers, 1*£50 voucher and 1*£100 voucher. Prizes will be randomly allocated a week by means of random number generator and different value prizes will be available to be won each week and on different social networks. Participants can keep track of the available prizes using the matrix below. The promoter also reserves the right to offer spot prizes at his discretion on the social networks and these will be subject to the same terms including the chance to reject the prize for a grand prize draw entry. Alternatively spot prizes may award direct entry into the grand prize draw without offering an initial prize.
5. Entrants will be required to comment on the respective social networking profiles in order to enter including the tagging of the profile where required and the use of any hashtags detailed on the social networking profiles.
6. Entrants will be required to be liking or following the respective social networking profiles in order to be eligible to win a prize
7. Each week one entry will be selected as a winner on each social network, contacted on that social network and offered the randomly allocated prize for that week or the chance to enter the prize draw at the end of the series for a chance to win a £500 voucher
8. In the event the promoter believes that an entry is not eligible for reasons of their location, they aren’t following or liking the profiles or for any other reason a redraw will take place
9. Should a winner decide to enter the grand prize draw their original prize will become forfeit
10. Each winner will have 7 days from the point that they are contacted to communicate their decision to the promoter. Should they fail to contact the promoter or provide any details requested to allow prize fulfilment in this time the prize will be forfeit and will not be offered to another participant
11. The first decision received by the promoter as to whether a winner wishes to take the prize or enter the final draw will be considered the final decision and no change of mind will be permitted
12. During the weekend of the final a winner will be selected at random out of all comments received during the final day on each social network. These winners will not be offered a prize but will earn a place in the grand prize draw
13. The winner of the grand prize of a £500 Amazon UK voucher will be selected at random out of everyone who chose to reject their original prize for a chance to enter the draw and the final two winners from the day of the final and will be selected as soon after the final as possible. The exact format of the grand prize draw will be confirmed separately to entrants in the draw
14. Prizes will be paid out in batches. Any prizes won during September or October will be paid by the end of November. Any. prizes won during November will be paid by the end of December. Any prizes won during December including the Grand Prize will be paid by the end of January 2022. These are the latest dates in which prizes will be paid out and prizes may be paid earlier at the promoters discretion
15. The promoter reserves the right to amend these terms and conditions should he be required to for any reasons out of his control or withdraw the competition for the same reasons. This includes but is not limited to reasons relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, the withdrawal or suspension of the social networking profiles or alterations to the format or length of the 2021 series of Strictly by The BBC.
16. Should the promoter be required to invoke clause 15 above and is unable to offer the grand prize any participant affected by the changes who previously rejected a prize will have their earlier prize reinstated and paid out using details previously supplied
17. Should the promoter be required to invoke clause 15 above and alter the length of the competition, prizes will be removed at random from the prize pools to accommodate this
18. Any personal data provided by a winner will be processed in accordance with your rights under GDPR and only used for the purposes of prize fulfilment and only shared with Amazon UK for the same purpose.
19. The promoters decision in all aspects of this competition is final and no correspondence will be entered into
20. This competition is promoted by Dave Thorp t/a The Strictly Spoiler (https://www.strictlyspoiler.com)

Prizes still to be won (correct as of Week 12)

Number of people in the Grand Prize Draw – 10 (correct as of Week 12)

Well it’s that time again. This series has flown by, partly due to it being 4 weeks shorter, and its time that I do my annual post talking about the year for The Strictly Spoiler and thanking those who have contributed to another successful year for this site.

Like most of this year it’s been an odd one due to the ongoing pandemic. I’ll be brutally honest, going into this series I was panicking somewhat. The loss of 4 weeks of the series meant I’d potentially lost 1/3 of my annual income before the series even began. There was uncertainty around whether a spoiler would be possible in the event of no audiences and I was bricking it. This is my job, it’s a commercially run business that generates the majority of my annual income over the space of 3 months normally and like so many others I was worried about my livelihood.

The series began and it was looking like things would be as normal. There was an audience and a mole approached me for the first elimination. Then Boris dropped a bombshell with lockdown 2.0 (and later lockdown 2.1). Audience moles were gone for at least 4 weeks (actually 5).

I’d been preparing for this however. I had a plan! Which brings in the exit poll. I’ll be talking more about that in a bit. But during the first week of lockdown 2.0 something wondrous, magical and amazing happened. Two people approached me with access to a reliable, confirmed source of the spoiler. I can’t talk too much about where these sources are obtaining the spoiler from other to say it is cast iron, guaranteed and impossible to be incorrect. Frankly these two people have been absolute godsends and mean it is now possible to get a confirmed spoiler even with no audience, no moles and no other form of leaks. Which helped out no end.

Without these two people we wouldn’t have had confirmed results for most of this series and to show my and the community’s appreciation I’ll be sending one of them a little Christmas gift and the other one declined a gift but accepted an offer to make a donation to a charity of their choice for which they selected Cancer Research UK which I am obviously happy to support especially with the difficulty some people are having accessing cancer treatment at the moment due to the NHS’ priorities being elsewhere.

Moving on I want to talk about the exit poll. I freely admit it’s been hit and miss. This was to be expected and most of you who actually read my content rather than skipping to the good bits will have seen countless warnings all over it. That didn’t stop some people on my social channels, and even some groups I’ve worked with previously, just looking at the bottom two and taking it as read that those were the results that I was putting forward without taking the context into consideration. Most of you got it though and understood that it was a prediction, a guide and something to keep the really impatient people content until Sunday lunchtime when the confirmed results tended to appear. Those of you who looked at the bigger picture would have gotten more out of the exit poll and seen that even when it was wrong, the other participant in the dance off was usually hovering just above the drop zone.

So thank you to those of you who took the exit poll as it was intended. It was an experiment that worked some weeks and didn’t work others (which was expected) and in the end it became redundant because I was obtaining confirmed results elsewhere anyway.

I also want to take a few moments to talk about the various monetisation methods available on this site starting with the adverts. No one likes adverts but they are a necessary evil especially on high traffic sites like this one as the servers required to keep it operating most of the time don’t run cheap. In addition as I’ve mentioned before this is my job, I receive the bulk of my annual income during the three months, well two months this year, that Strictly is on for and nearly all of that comes from the adverts. I don’t talk too much about how much I make from this site for obvious commercially sensitive reasons however it’s taken a long time to get to the point where I can take a full time wage, albeit at more or less minimum wage, from this with 2019 being the first year that happened.

So when the pandemic hit and Strictly was announced to be shorter if it ran at all I was panicking! So many people have had their livelihoods ruined in 2020 and I was worried that I would become another statistic. And whist I have earned less this year than 2019 that loss isn’t the 30-40% I was projecting at the start of the series but is now projected to be more like 10-15% depending on how the final spoiler weekend goes.

In addition this year saw me strike my first advertising deal directly rather than just having the usual google ads. You will have no doubt seen adverts for my friend Ewan’s Eurovision Podcast all over posts this series and hopefully a few of you have gone to sign up to listen to his insights on Eurovision. I know a lot of you on Twitter have enjoyed my commentary over the years and I’m sure you’ll enjoy Ewan’s too especially since he actually gets to go to the song contest! So please check it out and thanks Ewan for your support this series! You can also follow him on twitter if you’d like to check out his Eurovision and other ramblings.

Moving onto donations and this is another revenue stream I thought would dry up this year with the way things are and with many people out of work or furloughed. As always I stress that donations should only be done if you can afford it and there is zero obligation on anyone to make a direct financial donation and in 2020 that’s more important than ever! This site remains, and will always remain, free to access.

The donations help me out with my ever spiralling hosting costs which this year have been crazier than ever with me needing to run my servers at high power levels on a Sunday now as many of you realised that it was only on Sunday mornings that confirmed results were coming through. This year they’ve also helped with my cash flow a bit as normally I’d receive a decent payment from my google ads in November but this year the first decent payment will be around Christmas due to the late start. In addition my hosting bill for November was an eye watering £550 this year when in previous years they have been more like £330 so thank you to everyone who has supported me this series.

If you want to get a last minute donation in, want to buy me a pint (when I can actually go to the pub – damn you tier 3) or a Christmas Present, or just want to thank me for continuing to produce a spoiler for you in what has been a difficult series you can do so using THIS LINK or using the button below:

Next there’s the patreon page that I launched in 2020. There’s currently 10 of you on there which is 10 more than I was expecting with nothing more than a warm fuzzy feeling on offer. For obvious reasons I haven’t had the time to put as much into that page as I should have as my focus has been on continuing to operate in lockdown, however it is near the top of my list of priorities of things to work on and I’ll be looking into what I can offer through that besides the warm fuzzy feelings during 2021. If warm fuzzy feelings are your bag you can still sign up to the page here!

Finally there’s energy switches. These are something I started doing last year as my energy supplier at the time did referrals and my current one does them too so I’ve been pushing them. And you guys have responded this year. Enough of you have switched earning both of us £50 in the process that my energy bills are now fully paid up for the next year which when I receive the bulk of my earnings while Strictly is on is a big deal as its allowed me to set my direct debit at £1 and have one less bill to worry about going in to 2021. So a huge thanks for those of you who have switched. If you still want to get involved there, potentially save yourself a fortune, earn us both £50 and join a Which Recommended supplier you can do so using my magic link! Please ensure you complete the switch through the link and don’t just get an email quote which you return to later as neither of us will get our £50 if you do that. Also don’t forget to enter their competition to win an electric car if you have switched. You should find it on your account dashboard and may have got an email about it this week too.

So that concludes another year for the Strictly Spoiler barring the final elimination this weekend and of course the final next weekend. All that remains is for me to wish you all as merry a Christmas as you can have in the current climate and hopefully 2021 is a vast improvement on 2020.