Movie Trailer Views on YouTube and Box Office Revenue
This article investigates the correlation between the number of views a movie trailer gets on YouTube before it opens in theaters and the opening weekend box office revenue for the movie. Since 2017, data has been collected for 421 movies, resulting in a correlation of 0.86 between trailer views and opening weekend revenue. This correlation demonstrates how movies with larger promotional budgets can increase their revenue through advertising their trailer on YouTube to get more views, exemplifying the idea discussed in lecture of the rich getting richer. Since these movies can spend more money to advertise, they can increase their opening weekend revenue more than other films, giving these higher-budget films a distinct advantage in producing revenue.
Furthermore, as we discussed in lecture, the number of views on YouTube videos follows a strongly skewed power law distribution. This essentially means that there are many videos with a small amount of views and a relatively small amount of views with a large amount of views. If we were to define a function of the number of views a video has, the function would follow some kind of exponential decay very closely. This is also evident from the scatterplot created from the data collected from the 421 movies, as the plot density with respect to the x-axis (which measures views) decreases rapidly as the number of views increase.