‘Survivor’ 50 Audience Voting Puts the Fate of Contestants in the Hands of Viewers

Fan voting can be a precarious choice for businesses, production companies, and networks to rely on. On one hand, it's a great way to ensure a consistent return from customers/viewers and keep them engaged with your program or product line. But it also means that if the results are genuinely accounted, the company is stuck with the fans' picks.

But that's Democracy. It isn't perfect, but if it's what the people want and you promise to give them what they want, it should be honored.

Survivor 50 is also allowing fans to vote on several elements of gameplay for the season. And if you're wondering how to do that, we've got you covered.

The long-running CBS series is now in its 48th season since changing the reality television landscape forever. And now, viewers will get the chance to not only vote on key challenge and gameplay elements in the show's upcoming 50th season, as expressed by host Jeff Probst.

Fans will also have the chance to decide whether or not CBS will hold a live reunion show

This effectively allows audiences to function as producers of the show themselves. If you're interested in watching the latest season of the show and being involved in the voting process, you can head to Survivor's CBS web page here.

You may want to bookmark that link, too, as options to vote will appear throughout various points of the season.

Again, it should be mentioned that this voting is for Survivor 50, and not the current season of the show.

During the Feb. 26 airing of a Season 48 episode, viewers were able to vote on a series of different choices for Survivor 50. This included the following:

1. Tribe colors
2. Whether tribes will just be given rice, or if they have to work for it
3. Whether or not the fire-making competition stays at the final four, or if it's ditched altogether.
4. Selecting between the Fijian After Show pizza party extravaganza, or if the Los Angeles Live Reunion show makes a comeback.

What's more is that the Survivor 50 cast members aren't going to know what the outcome of the fan votes are until they're actually in Fiji and participating in the games.

Is this something you'd feel like participating in? Does it make you more excited for the upcoming landmark 50th season of the reality survival series?

There have been times when voting was left up to fans and it was evident that the network didn't really like the outcome of what the votes were. Like MTV's Wannabe a VJ competition that collected an assortment of different personalities in an on-air competition to see who would get a media gig with the network.

While fans voted for the eccentric Jesse Camp as their top pick, it was the second place winner, Dave Holmes, who seemed to impress executives. Holmes would go onto host several different programs at MTV and work with the network for years.

Camp ended up working alongside Carson Daly on Total Request Live for over a year, but it was Holmes who ended up enjoying a longer tenure with the company.

Mountain Dew also had a ruinous voting campaign called "Dub the Dew where folks got to come up with and name the brand's upcoming apple-flavored soda. The winning moniker was clearly not one any company would ever approve.