Digital Audience Ratings: Furious Facebook Activity Drives ‘Fast 7’ to Top While ‘St. Vincent’ Rides TIFF Wave

Each week Variety publishes ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR), a measurement of fan engagement across all the major digital platforms as it relates to film (see the TV version here). Provided by ListenFirst Media, DAR measures what entertainment content is resonating most across Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia combined. For more on the methodology behind DAR, scroll to the bottom of the article.

Insights:

• “Fast & Furious 7” topped the DAR chart this week, over seven months out from its release, thanks to heavy engagement on Facebook, picking up 4.7MM new likes and over a half million engagements on a single post celebrating their 50MM fans milestone.

• Leading up to “St. Vincent’s” world premiere at TIFF on Friday (9/5), YouTube activity landed the film a spot on both the Top 5 and Trending leaderboards. The official trailer was uploaded to The Weinstein Company’s YouTube channel in early July, but over 80% of total trailer views to date were received this week (+ 2.4MM). In addition to expected momentum heading into the festival, TIFF is recognizing Friday (9/5) as “Bill Murray Day”, which may be further igniting interest in the actor’s newest film and supporting the dramatic DAR growth.

• “Seventh Son’s” campaign reboot kicked off this week, after the distribution switch from Warner Bros. to Universal. The first trailer released via Universal & Legendary on 8/29 helped the film break into the top 5 films of the week. The official trailer upload has been viewed 2.7MM times to date and the view count is quickly growing.

Methodology:

ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) are a raw aggregate of daily engagements based on owned, earned and organic consumer behavior on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube. These engagements encompass metrics pertaining to audience growth, page/profile views, page-level and post-level interactions, hashtag volume and Wikipedia page views for all television program and film pages (which provides a proxy for organic search volume).

Organic conversation volume is calculated based on the use of official hashtags, as well as those hashtags submitted directly from programmers and distributors. Only hashtags where conversation can be isolated to a specific television program or film are included in the rating.

The Variety Weekly Top 10 and Trending Leaderboards for television represent the 7-day (Monday – Sunday) sum total of DAR for all episodic programming, in and out of season, from the most popular programmers (Broadcast, Cable, & Streaming Services). Sports, live events, short-form content and other non-episodic programming are excluded from this ranking cohort but available to be rated directly by ListenFirst Media.

The Variety Weekly Top 5 and Trending Leaderboards for film represent the 7-day (Wednesday – Tuesday) sum total of DAR for all US Domestic Films that have been publicly announced and slated for a commercial theatrical release. Films are rated daily from initial public announcement through 4 weeks post home entertainment street date. Festival films and other films not slated for a commercial theatrical release are excluded from this ranking cohort but available to be rated directly by ListenFirst Media.

For both television and film, the Trending Leaderboard surfaces the three programs or films that tracked the largest relative growth in DAR (from the previous 7-day measurement period), and are also in the top 25% based on absolute DAR.

ListenFirst monitors the official digital account owned by the program or film on each aforementioned platform (except for Wikipedia, where the title-specific profile is considered official). Only the U.S. version of a program or film’s digital presence is monitored; for platforms that support regional profiles like Facebook, the “Global” profile is considered the U.S. profile. Only profiles that can be attributed to the specific program or film contribute to the rating (i.e. engagements that happen on the profile facebook.com/LouieFX are tracked, while engagements that happen on facebook.com/FX are not). For YouTube, in addition to any program or film-specific presence, content related to the program or film in question that originated on the parent company’s official YouTube channel is considered.

For other questions pertaining to methodology, contact ListenFirst Media.

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