
Twitter Predicts Box-Office Sales Better Than a Prediction Market - alexjmann
http://www.fastcompany.com/1604125/twitter-predicts-box-office-sales-better-than-anything-else
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hnsummary
Article Summary:

Two researchers at HP Labs have discovered that you can use Twitter mentions
to predict how well a movie will do in it’s first couple of weeks more
accurately than any currently used methods. The researchers monitored movie
mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million different users over a three
month period. The tweets were regarding some 24 different movies including
Twilight: New Moon.

They used “buzz” to measure how the first weekend would perform and then used
tweets with reviews from people who saw the movie to predict how well the
movie would do in the second weekend.

This method was 97.3% effective at predicting first weekend performance which
is better than the currently used Hollywood Stock Exchange which is 96.5%
effective.

[http://hnsummary.com/2010/04/02/twitter-predicts-box-
office-...](http://hnsummary.com/2010/04/02/twitter-predicts-box-office-sales-
better-than-a-prediction-market/)

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gyardley
The biggest problem with the Hollywood Stock Exchange, if my memory's right,
is that it's not for real money. If there was a way to make some meaningful
cash off of it, the Twitter data (and a lot of other data sets) would have
already been factored into the HSX prices by smart people trying to make a
buck.

~~~
adg
This is going to happen soon:
[http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/01/business/AP-US-
Be...](http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/01/business/AP-US-Betting-on-
Box-Office.html).

~~~
mnemonicsloth
Unless the studios can stop it:

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/masking-movie-
manipula...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/masking-movie-
manipulation.html)

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rajat
Could it be as simple as not enough people really engage in the prediction
market as they do on Twitter? In particular, the diversity of people engaging
in Twitter is probably far greater. The ability to make accurate prediction
relies primarily on sufficient diversity, especially when it's something as
mass market as a movie. I know, of the people I regularly encounter, probably
around 30% tweet, and less than 1% engage in any kind of a prediction market.

I hadn't even heard of the Hollywood Stock Exchange until now.

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jonknee
> To predict first weekend performance, they built a computer model, which
> factored in two variables: the rate of tweets around the release date and
> the number of theaters its released in.

Oh so this is to predict how well something will do _after_ it's already doing
it. The prediction markets work well _before_ release. The only use for
studios with this data is how widely to market/distribute the movie and any
results from Twitter come after said marketing/distribution (and is likely
actually a result of it).

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thejash
In the actual paper, they clearly state that their predictions for the opening
weekend are based ONLY on the tweets that occur BEFORE the actual release. But
I generally agree with you--prediction markets will be useful even months
ahead of time, tweet rate is probably not.

~~~
toby
They still seem to have created a model that fit the outcomes. There's no
cross-validation here (since there's only two data points).

The real question is whether they can take this fitted model and apply it to
future movies.

~~~
hazzen
Go figure: by counting how many people are excited for a film the week before
it opens, you can estimate how much money it makes. Even if the model is
perfect and works everytime, it is not giving you any useful information.

If the prediction can be moved from one week out to a month or more out from
the release of the film, there may be actual applications. For instance,
helping theaters decide which movies to show and on how many screens, or how
many weeks to run a movie for.

~~~
robryan
Problem is though that I doubt there would be much chatter that far out for a
method like this to be overly useful. Chatter is usually the result of
advertising with movies so being able to use it to predict things like what
kind of advertising spend to use would be hard.

Even without practical information it is still a good demonstration of the
type of information that can be extracted from twitter that would have been
very hard previously online.

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emanuer
The story reminded me kind of the old "bean jar" experiment
<http://www.jstor.org/pss/4479031> Isn't it amazing that you can effectively
estimate all kind of information by people randomly guessing, as long as the
sample is big enough? Scientists are just starting to tap into the data of
social networks. In a few years our twitter / facebook profiles might be able
to predict the economic growth, or the stock market.

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jerf
So, in a month, after the prediction market reacts to this news and starts
incorporating the data, what then?

The world is not static.

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goodside
The arbitrage opportunity might well persist indefinitely, only because the
people with the analytical skills to correct it don't care about winning play
money on a fake stock exchange. The authors obviously found it more worthwhile
to publish a research paper than to start a make-believe hedge fund.

~~~
jerf
I agree with you entirely. I was more making a point about the results;
thinking of them statically is a mistake. If it were for real money it
wouldn't persist very long at all.

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robryan
I think it terms of sentiment, the IMDB average rating can be a great way of
capturing that easily. I'd imagine the sentiment detected would highly
correlate with that rating.

