Film industry press: The most shared articles

Feb 16, 2015

Last week I looked at the volume of articles published by major film industry news publications. This week I have built upon that information to uncover the film industry's most shared, liked and tweeted articles. I studied all 239,720 articles published by Deadline, the Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire, Screen International and Variety between 2012 and 2014. In summary...

Variety has the largest presence on Facebook while the Hollywood Reporter is most shared on Twitter.
"Dies" is Variety's 20th most frequently-used word in headlines, appearing in 2.5% of headlines.
In 2014, the Hollywood Reporter received an average of 97 tweets per article.
7% of the Hollywood Reporter headlines included the word 'exclusive', compared with 3% at Indiewire.
Variety published seven of the top ten most tweeted articles of the film industry press in 2012-14.
The most shared articles on Facebook have two major themes - death and politics.
Justin Bieber featured in the first and fourth most tweeted articles.
Jon Voight has the highest average number of Facebook shares of all writers
Only one in five of the articles shared/ liked by the film industry press received any Facebook comments

Caring who's sharing

Variety is the publication with the largest presence on Facebook. This graph combines article likes, shares and comments to generate a figure for 'Facebook activity'. In 2014, Variety stories received an average of 1,009 Facebook activities across all articles, compared with 854 for the Hollywood Reporter, 257 for Indiewire and 43 for Screen International.

Facebook activity of film industry press articles

As detailed at the end of this article, Deadline reorganized their site in August 2014 and their average Facebook activity for September to December 2014 was 743.

Tracking who's tweeting

On Twitter, the Hollywood Reporter just inches ahead of Variety, with a 2014 average of 97 tweets per article, compared with Variety's 86 tweets per article.

Average number of tweets for articles in the film industry press

What's in a headline?

I thought it would be fun to try and get a sense of what each site was publishing. The article text was too voluminous to study (the Hollywood Reporter articles came to 38.2 million words alone!) so I focused on the headlines. 7% of Hollywood Reporter headlines included the word 'exclusive', compared with 3% at Indiewire, 2.4% in Variety and 0.3% in both Screen International and Deadline.

Wordcloud from the headlines within the Film industry press

As you can see above, the word 'dies' is a popular word in Variety headlines. In fact, it is Variety's 20th most commonly-used word and appears in 2.5% of all their headlines.

Most tweeted articles in the film industry press

Variety has published seven of the top ten most tweeted articles of the film industry press in 2012-14, with the other three spots going to the Hollywood Reporter Justin Bieber features in the first and fourth most tweeted articles. [table id=51 /]

Articles most shared on Facebook

During the period I studied, actor Jon Voight wrote just two articles (identical pieces appearing in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety) and one of those articles is the second on the 'most shared on Facebook' chart. This means that Jon Voight is by far and away the author whose writing has the largest average 'Facebook share count' in the film industry press, with an average of 24,159 Facebook shares per article published. The second author on that scale is comedian Chris Rock, with 11,594 shares for his piece on race in the industry. The most shared articles on Facebook have two major themes - death and politics. [table id=52 /]

Most discussed articles

Across all publications, if an article was 'liked' or shared on Facebook, it received an average of 0.2 Facebook comments. Or, to put it another way, only one in five shared/ liked articles received any Facebook comments. [table id=50 /]

Most controversial articles

There were some articles which had a large number of Facebook comments but few 'likes' or shares. I have dubbed these the 'most controversial articles' as one would expect that if the commenters were all adding words of support then they too would share or like the article. [table id=49 /]

Notes

There are a few things to take into account with today's research...

At the mercy of Mark Zuckerberg and cohorts - The data for social shares comes via the APIs of the social networks, through which anyone can see how many times a URL has been shared, tweeted, etc. I have no way of verifying this information or knowing how complete it is.
Missing Deadline's - Prior to August 2014, Deadline articles seem extremely unpopular on all of the social media sites I researched (Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn). Assuming that they didn't just 'get good' six months ago, I have concluded from the data that they must have changed how their site is structured around that date. This means that the current URLs don't reflect the URLs that Facebook et al have data for. Consequently, I have removed Deadline from charts showing averages and it should be noted that they are most likely underrepresented in the top ten tables. (If anyone from Deadline can provide me with the old site structure then I would be happy to re-run the research to update the findings).
When is an article not an article? - Online journalism is much more fluid than print, as articles are often amended, removed and reissued in an altered form. I did my best to catch duplications, empty articles, etc. and as far as I can tell these make up a very small amount of the total articles. Some articles were added to and extended many times, such as this Deadline article which was updated 10 times. In my stats these appear as one article as I based the uniqueness of articles on the URL.