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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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Movie Tickets - Reconciling Web Visits with Box Office Dollars

June 16, 2009

As we discovered in yesterday's post, the demographics of web visitors by site and industry are constantly changing. I ran into this same phenomenon this morning when analyzing visits to the top movie ticket sites (e.g. Fandango and Moviefone).

According to IMDb's Box Office Mojo, year-to-date box office revenue for 2009 at $4.6 billion, puts this year ahead of last by 10.7%. Based on the chart below I was expecting box office numbers this year to show a steep decline.

movie tickets 2.png

So why the discrepancy between visits to movie ticket sites and actual ticket sales which should show some correlation? I checked the demographics of visitors to these sites for the four weeks ending June 13, 2009 to the same week in 2008.

The change in movie ticket site demographics could indicate that this year's movie-goers are less likely to check online movie ticket sites versus a year ago. Closer examination of the demographic change shows that higher income visitors are declining in year-over-year visits while lower income visitors are increasing. We know from previous analysis that affluent Internet users exhibit more cost-savings behavior then their less affluent counterparts. Could that be the cause of divergence between visits and dollars?

Posted by Bill Tancer at 01:34 PM | (1) | (0)
In Categories Entertainment