The Panda's Extremely Poor Simple Linear Regression Analysis: Do YouTube Trailer Views Correlate With Higher Box Office Grosses?

[filmlover]

2 minutes ago, John Marston said:

 

 

just not getting the same sense of excitement as Man of Steel or Suicide Squad. Trailer views are also well below it.  That's why I think it will open in the 80m range which would be fine

Because trailer views are always a good way to measure box office.

[franfar]

Just now, filmlover said:

Because trailer views are always a good way to measure box office.

Calling @WrathOfHan

[Brainiac5]

10 minutes ago, John Marston said:

 

 

just not getting the same sense of excitement as Man of Steel or Suicide Squad. Trailer views are also well below it.  That's why I think it will open in the 80m range which would be fine

The new way to measure boxoffice .

 Congratulations to IT as it should be the highest grossing film in 2017.

Edited May 15, 2017 by Brainiac5

[Jonwo]

2 minutes ago, Brainiac5 said:

The new way to measure boxoffice potential.

 Congratulations to IT as it should be the highest grossing film in 2017.

 

It's going to be a huge hit but nobody's expecting it to outgrossed the tentpoles.

[James]

7 minutes ago, John Marston said:

 

 

just not getting the same sense of excitement as Man of Steel or Suicide Squad. Trailer views are also well below it.  That's why I think it will open in the 80m range which would be fine

Actually overall trailer views are better than for MoS through the same point in time and much better when FB views are included in comparison and the comparison with SS is useless. SS holds the record for most trailer views in history before release (trust me on that, I followed them hourly in the months leading to the release ).

 

Using that same formula the TLJ teaser trailer views are lower than the RO teaser and about 1/3 of the first TFA teaser. Franchises (like SW or the overall DCU) get to a saturation point after the first few movies are released. The level WW is at is still very good and at this point I will be surprised if it doesn't top 100m. 

[Barnack]

5 minutes ago, Brainiac5 said:

 Congratulations to IT as it should be the highest grossing film in 2017.

 

Why ? Is has a high view count, but far from the biggest one, Spider man has almost 3 time is number of views:

 

http://www.boxofficereport.com/trailerviews/trailerviews.html

[grim22]

2 minutes ago, Barnack said:

 

Why ? Is has a high view count, but far from the biggest one, Spider man has almost 3 time is number of views:

 

http://www.boxofficereport.com/trailerviews/trailerviews.html

 

Views aren't just YouTube anymore, its Facebook as well. IT has 200M views on Facebook alone.

[James]

3 minutes ago, Barnack said:

 

Why ? Is has a high view count, but far from the biggest one, Spider man has almost 3 time is number of views:

 

http://www.boxofficereport.com/trailerviews/trailerviews.html

YT is not the only platform for trailers. IT is the most viewed trailer ever on FB with over 123m (it actually got that title in about 24h I think).

[WrathOfHan]

I only trust YT trailer views. Facebook views are helpful but very skewed due to autoplay.

[grim22]

Just now, WrathOfHan said:

I only trust YT trailer views. Facebook views are helpful but very skewed due to autoplay.

 

Even YT views are counted if the trailer plays as an ad before other videos (which is why trailers now have that 5 second teaser before the video).

[Barnack]

4 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

Views aren't just YouTube anymore, its Facebook as well. IT has 200M views on Facebook alone.

 

But isn't youtube views the one correlated with BO ?

[grim22]

Just now, Barnack said:

 

But isn't youtube views the one correlated with BO ?

 

Neither are correlated with the box office. There are a million factors which go into trailer views. The only correlation is that if views aren't good, the movie will have a tough time because that shows lack of interest to even see a free piece of marketing.

[TalismanRing]

18 minutes ago, Ohana said:

You should take into account 2 thing imo:
1. It will have massive women attendance, and women create less buzz imo than men on social media about their favourite movies
2. Nostalgia factor that will include many older ppl that aren't a part of the social media.
People that either experienced the late 70s show in their mid-20s or as kids 
Imo WW is gonna be a sleeping giant that woke up and no one can figure out how big it will be.

 

Women especially girls create A LOT of buzz on social media.  Just look at Beauty & The Beast, Hunger Games, Fifty Shades Of Grey or any of the Twilight movies. - or even how much they drove social media with Suicide Squad because of Harley Quinn.   Look at twitter or watch Tumblr and see how excited the core group - young women are for each film, tv show, actor, actress, music group etc. 

 

The older audience is harder to track since they are not as engaged on social media so if the audience is skewing older that will be harder to track.

 

19 minutes ago, Brainiac5 said:

The new way to measure boxoffice potential.

 Congratulations to IT as it should be the highest grossing film in 2017.

 

Trailer views are great way to gauge interest - especially if one breaks them down by genre and one looks at how trailer views grow or diminish with new trailers or closer to the release of the film.   Also on YT looking at likes and numbers of comments is helpful.  Yes there are aberrations and it's not dispositive but it's a very good data source.

 

Panda did a good breakdown of this - I want to say several months ago but it could be a year - time flies.

 

Edited May 15, 2017 by TalismanRing

[Barnack]

3 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

Even YT views are counted if the trailer plays as an ad before other videos (which is why trailers now have that 5 second teaser before the video).

 

I suspected that those 5 second teaser in a trailer must have had some technical reason, could they not do 2 versions thought, one for when it play has a ads and one when you actually go see the video directly ?

[Barnack]

1 minute ago, grim22 said:

 

Neither are correlated with the box office. There are a million factors which go into trailer views. The only correlation is that if views aren't good, the movie will have a tough time because that shows lack of interest to even see a free piece of marketing.

 

All study I have read on the subject show an extremelly strong correlation, R2 as high as 0.8 ?

 

I would be astonished if I would see a R2 of 0 between trailers views and box office, that sound impossible.

[Brainiac5]

5 minutes ago, TalismanRing said:

 

Women especially girls create A LOT of buzz on social media.  Just look at Beauty & The Beast, Hunger Games, Fifty Shades Of Grey or any of the Twilight movies. - or even how much they drove social media with Suicide Squad because of Harley Quinn.   Look at twitter or watch Tumblr and see how excited the core group - young women are for each film, tv show, actor, actress, music group etc. 

 

The older audience is harder to track since they are not as engaged on social media so if the audience is skewing older that will be harder to track.

 

 

Trailer views are great way to gauge interest - especially if one breaks them down by genre and one looks at how trailer views grow or diminish with new trailers or closer to the release of the film.   Also on YT looking at likes and numbers of comments is helpful.  Yes there are aberrations and it's not dispositive but it's a very good data source.

 

Panda did a good breakdown of this - I want to say several months ago but it could be a year - time flies.

 

It can be but not an exact measure.

1mil people can view a trailer 20 times each and it will gain 20mil views. 

Now there's a difference if you can say 100mil people viewed the trailer in 24hours rather than 100mil views.

We have no clue if those views are a big portion of people or a few guys watching the trailer over and over.

I understand that it can measure the Interest for a film but nothing that says it is accurate.

[Barnack]

Thanks for the mods to have shift the message here, and Panda for the graph.

 

Some general with the trailers views and more specific to the sample used.

 

1) Youtube Views are a pure worldwide metric (except if breakdown by territory), correlating with dbo could be misleading

2) I suspect it is better metric to evaluate the opening weekend performance than total run.

3) Using the Top 50 of one year, a small enough sample than starting with the answer could be misleading (maybe in a good way, using  the 700 movies released of the year would certainly boost the correlation between BO and views to at least a 60-80 R2 instead of 30-40, but not necessarily useful), but it is starting with the successful movie and looking amount successful movie, not what are the chance to open for a movie depending of is trailers views.

 

Using this very small sample size (that will make those trend really easy to calculate in the near future and track by year's the correlation strenght):

 

http://www.boxofficereport.com/trailerviews/owyoutuberatios.html

 

The R2 between trailers views and domestic opening weekend this year (available in that list) is at 0.6956

 

And that using domestic box office with all the noise of worldwide trailers views, an even stronger correlation must exist between domestic views and dbo.

 

I doubt any metric would have a much better than 0.7 correlation, the best one before we had trailers views was number of screen the movie open with I think.

 

 

 

Edited May 16, 2017 by Barnack

[The Panda]

1 hour ago, grim22 said:

 

Neither are correlated with the box office. There are a million factors which go into trailer views. The only correlation is that if views aren't good, the movie will have a tough time because that shows lack of interest to even see a free piece of marketing.

 

I'm going to disagree here.  A correlation between two variables can exist even if one of the variables isn't the sole cause (or even a cause) for the other.  There is a strong correlation between YouTube Trailer Views and Box Office Gross (Domestically and Opening Weekend).

 

I reckon there are for Facebook trailer views as well, but they're a pain in the butt to measure.

 

As I said earlier though, it's not a perfect metric for predicting DOM BO performance, but it works better than any of the other metrics I have tested (beyond "Is this movie a sequel to a 200m+ DOM grossing movie" dummy variable).  I also reckon if I go in and test WW numbers, the correlation will be stronger, I just haven't taken the time to do that.

 

This doesn't mean that a movie is necessarily going to gross more because its trailer views are higher though, it's a single factor to take into consideration when predicting a movie's opening.  In fact, the low R-Square from the model of just two variables points out that trailer views only explain a limited amount of the BO Gross (It also points out that I was looking at a limited number of datapoints).  But if a movie is garnering up lots of trailer views, it's a fairly safe bet the movie is going to do well, or at least it's a good indicator.  There's a few exceptions, such as Pixels or Max Steel for example, but that is expected with any correlation, outliers exist.

Edited May 15, 2017 by The Panda