Digital Audience Ratings: Shyamalan Thriller Pays a ‘Visit’ to Top Spot, ‘Sicario’ Hits #2
Each week Variety publishes ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) – Film, 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 – Film 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.
 Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) – Film | ||||||
Weekly Top 5 | Wednesday Aug 26, 2015 – Tuesday Sep 1, 2015 | |||||
RANK | LAST WEEK | FILM | RATING(000) | |||
1 |  | – |  | 6,534 |  | |
2 | | – |  | 3,296 | | |
3 | | – |  | 3,005 | ||
4 | | – |  | 2,561 | | |
5 |  | 1 |  | 2,200 | ||
– |
Key | |
| First time on the chart |
 | Pinnacle Rank |
– |
Trending | Wednesday Aug 26, 2015 – Tuesday Sep 1, 2015 | ||||
FILM | RATING(000) | % CHANGE | |||
 | 279 | +37,259% | |||
| Sicario | 3,296 | +6,150% | ||
 | 173 | +2,885% | |||
Insights:
Three new September releases debuted on the DAR-Film leaderboard this week thanks to a series of new TV spots. With theatrical releases just around the corner, “The Visit,” “Sicario,” and “The Perfect Guy” took the lead, while “No Escape” dropped down to No. 5 after a mediocre opening weekend.
“Star Wars” reappeared on the leaderboard after ranking as the most engaging film of the week on Twitter, Instagram, and Google+. “Star Wars” earned over 1 million engagements on Instagram alone this week due to the popularity of new video posts and early promotion for the upcoming Force Friday.
The upcoming high school football film “Woodlawn” released a new trailer this week that also ran in theaters ahead of “War Room.” The increased exposure both online and offline boosted the film’s Digital Audience Rating by over 37,000%, topping the trending leaderboard.
Jason Klein is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ListenFirst Media, a data and analytics company providing insights for brands. ListenFirst aggregates data streams from a wide range of digital, social, and traditional marketing sources to help brands optimize business performance.
Methodology:
ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) – Film 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 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 distributors. Only hashtags where conversation can be isolated to a specific film are included in the rating.
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.
The Trending leaderboard surfaces the three 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 film on each aforementioned platform (except for Wikipedia, where the title-specific profile is considered official). Only the U.S. version of a 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 film contribute to the rating (i.e. engagements that happen on the profile facebook.com/ArgoMovie are tracked, while engagements that happen on facebook.com/WarnerBrosPictures are not). For YouTube, in addition to any film-specific presence, content related to the 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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