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"Avatar" still leads, blogs make up biggest block of Best Picture talk

by Eric Melin on March 4, 2010

I’ve been writing about Spiral16’s ongoing 2010 Oscar study this week. We are measuring the power of online buzz about the Academy Awards and by Sunday night, we’ll know if the amount of online chatter for the top three contenders had any connection to the ceremony’s Best Picture winner.

Two things about the way Spark is collecting data:

1. The search terms we used were the titles of the nominees and the words “best picture” to narrow the focus to sites that are discussing the nominees only in relation to the Oscars’ top prize. (To find out how to build better queries yourself, see Monday’s post.)

2. We are monitoring all Internet URLs in general and not merely social media websites. That way we can cast a wider net and see how press coverage and blog comments play into the scenario. There are a lot more contributors to online buzz than just social media websites.

Avatar is currently in the overall lead, so the graphic to the right represents the site type breakdown for URLs mentioning Avatar and “best picture.”

Below, however, we’ll combine the stats for all three movies and view the study as a whole.

This is how the breakdown of sites looks so far for frontrunners Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds It’s actually very similar to the Avatar study:

Blogs have accounted for 41% of the total URLs collected. This is where most of the conversation about these three nominees and the term “best picture” is taking place.

34% of the URLs came from News-oriented sites like the Los Angeles Times. Again, this is a pretty big share.

The Social category (Twitter, forums, microblogs) amounted to 18%.

(Twitter itself is the most influential domain in the entire study with a whopping 9% share of the total URLs in the study so far. Although its share of the pie may be small, it’s the biggest individual slice. This illustrates just how saturated the Web is with 2010 Oscar talk right now and how widely it is spread out.)

Shopping websites and reference sites like Wikipedia comprise the General category, which only amounted to 4%.

YouTube and other Video sites accounted for 3% of the total volume. YouTube itself is the second biggest domain in the study, comprising about half of all video sites.

Also, it’s important to mention that each of these samplings are being done independently of each other. This means that if Avatar is mentioned in the same post as The Hurt Locker, that URL will be accepted as a relevant result in the individual studies for each movie. That way, one film is not able to “steal any votes” away from another.

To illustrate just how widely spread out Oscar talk is all over the web, take a look at our 3D visual map of the Avatar study. The spheres represent URLs and the lines are links between them.

Green spheres have an average of positive sentiment, red are average negative, and gray are URLs with an average neutral sentiment.

This is a visual illustration of how many websites have Oscar talk related to these movies and how they all are fairly disconnected to each other. To explore a working Spark 3D Virtualization for yourself and see what this is really like, click here.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at sentiment—some specific overt stuff and how sentiment relates to the big picture.

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