Correlations between user voting data, budget, and box office for films in the internet movie database

Max Wasserman, Satyam Mukherjee, Konner Scott, Xiao Han T. Zeng, Filippo Radicchi, Luís A.N. Amaral

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is one of the most-visited websites in the world and the premier source for information on films. Similar to Wikipedia, much of IMDb's information is user contributed. IMDb also allows users to voice their opinion on the quality of films through voting. We investigate whether there is a connection between user voting data and economic film characteristics. We perform distribution and correlation analysis on a set of films chosen to mitigate effects of bias due to the language and country of origin of films. Production budget, box office gross, and total number of user votes for films are consistent with double-log normal distributions for certain time periods. Both total gross and user votes are consistent with a double-log normal distribution from the late 1980s onward while for budget it extends from 1935 to 1979. In addition, we find a strong correlation between number of user votes and the economic statistics, particularly budget. Remarkably, we find no evidence for a correlation between number of votes and average user rating. Our results suggest that total user votes is an indicator of a film's prominence or notability, which can be quantified by its promotional costs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)858-868
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Volume66
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1 2015

Funding

The authors are grateful to the sponsorship from the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2014CB748500), the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (51125032), the National Science Foundation (51308215, 51401295), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (222201313001, 22220141416001, 22220141414011), International Cooperation Project of Shanghai Ministry of Science and Technology (14230710700) and the Chenguang Project of Shanghai Ministry of Education (13CG26).

Keywords

  • films (motion pictures)
  • meta analysis
  • online databases

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Library and Information Sciences

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