The power of twitter on predicting box office revenues

Jeon, Jooyoung and McSharry, Patrick (2012) The power of twitter on predicting box office revenues. Preprint / Working Paper. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

Full text not available in this repository.Request a copy

Abstract

Over the last few years there has been an extraordinary surge of social networking and microblogging services. Twitter is a social network that focuses on social and news media. The Twitter data stream allows access to tweets, timestamps and locations of users. This enables us to capture the trends and patterns of rapidly evolving worldwide events. We use the Twitter data stream for the prediction of consumer preferences in the movie industry and estimate how successful the movie will be in the first and second weekends since its release date. The study provides evidence to suggest that frequencies of contemporaneous tweets and a consensus measure of public sentiment are useful for predicting box-office revenues, implying that any publicity is good publicity in word-of-mouth (WOM) and online viral marketing. Sentiment analysis based on tweets suggests that more extreme sentiment has more impact, and that the more negative the tweets about a movie are, the higher its revenue will be, in contrast with the classic theory of diffusion in news media.