Imagine what it must be like to release your next film or song to the world and then have to sit with your fingers crossed hoping that the public like what you’ve been working on…
I personally think it would be scary stuff but boffins (sorry, highly intelligent researchers working for search firm Yahoo) believe they have one way of predicting the future.
They have decided to put the magic 8 ball back in their top draw in the office as they now claim that web search terms are a good predictor of the success of films, songs and video games even weeks ahead of release.
And they are not the only ones as a similar study conducted back in April this year showed that the number of mentions of a film on social networking site Twitter could predict its opening box-office take.
So, how did this prove this theory?
Earlier this month, a specific team of know-it-alls compared the total number of searches containing a given term, such as the title of a soon-to-be released film, determining how much that number correlated with the film’s success on release.
They decided to carry out the same process with all of the songs that were currently on the US’ popular Billboard 100 music chart and also with the up to the minute video games that had been released.
And guess what?
Their theory proved correct as in all three cases, the correlations were classed as ‘strong’. If the specific song, game or film was one of the top searched terms, it was a good enough predictor of its future success – even as much as six weeks ahead of time – impressive ey?
Study co-author Jake Hofman said: “In principle, these companies are sitting on their ability to predict consumer behaviour that could be used for their own benefit, or sold – the interesting question is whether this data should be restricted.
“In life, it’s not so interesting sometimes to predict the future, but to know what to do once you know what the future will look like.”
Wonder if they can predict tomorrow night’s lottery numbers….
