Hollywood Thinks Twitter Could Predict BO

There’s a story in the LAT about Silicon Valley nerds who think they can more accurately predict how movies will do by the tweets about the films.

Jessica Guynn and John Horn write:

Want to know how “Clash of the Titans” will fare at the box office this weekend?

Check Twitter.

So say two Silicon Valley researchers who claim they have discovered a way to use the popular social media service to gauge real-time interest in movies and accurately predict how they will perform at the box office on opening weekend.

Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, two social computing scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto, contend that computational formulas using Twitter feeds can predict with as much as 97.3% accuracy how a movie will perform in its first weekend of release.

That’s all fine. But according to some other number crunchers, the average Twitter user is a 39.1 year old – 65% of Twitter users are over 35. And the age group who’s most likely to go to the movies? Not them. It’s 12-24 year olds making up the bulk of the seat filling.

So this new Twitter “oracle” thing will work if they track which movie the Twitter users are dropping their kids off at.

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