Twitter: A Film Exec's Dream Box Office Prediction Tool?

With the way the film industry has been in the past few years, and the loss of revenues due to online piracy, movie studio execs love it when they can predict box office sales. There are a variety of ways that have been used in the past, but in recent years, speculation is that social media will be a good weathervane. That Twitter in particular is an accurate forecaster of box office sales has been confirmed in an 8-page report by two HP Labs researchers.

Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, from the Social Computing Lab at HP Lab’s Palo Alto, CA, location, set about in their paper to show “how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes.”