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Scientists Predict Box Office Revenue With Twitter

by Terrence O'Brien on April 3, 2010 at 12:00 PM

Telling us that you can predict a movie's box office success using Twitter isn't going to impress us. Tell us that you can use it to predict ticket sales even more accurately than market-based tools like the Hollywood Stock Exchange can, and our ears will perk up.

Researchers at HP Labs discovered that by simply monitoring Twitter for mentions of particular films, and by then feeding those numbers into an equation, they could pretty accurately predict box office sales. But their mathematical wizardry got really interesting when they factored in "sentiment," or how many people were tweeting that 'Avatar' gave them a headache. By giving each film a rating based on how positive or negative attitudes towards a film are, an algorithm could parse the general attitude of tweets, and then factor those into the predictions for accurate results.

Once sentiment was considered, the resulting numbers were pretty much perfect. You can see in the chart above just how accurate the Twitter analysis was. Projected revenue is plotted on the X-axis, with actual revenue on the Y. You can also read the whole study here (.PDF) -- in all its math geek glory. [From: Technium]

Tags: boxoffice, Hollywood Stock Exchange, HollywoodStockExchange, money, movies, Predictions, socialnetworking, statistics, top, twitter

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