The present invention relates generally to using social media to estimate interest in media events, and in particular to using social media content items mapped to time-based media events for generating metrics and ratings for time-based media.
Online social media services, such as social networking sites, news aggregators, blogs, and the like provide a rich environment for users to comment on events of interest and communicate with other users. Content items contributed by users of these social media services often include references to events that appear in time-based media such as television shows, advertisements, news reports, sporting events, movies, concert performances, and the like. However, while the content items sometimes refer to time-based media, traditionally there has been no way to aggregate the social media content items and associate them with those events, or with the time-based media in which those events occur.
Consumption-based metrics (CBMs) are available for much of today's broadcast programming. While such metrics provide information about how certain time-based media is consumed (e.g., the size of an audience of a particular television show), they do not provide any indication of the level of engagement of an audience or its level of response. In addition, CBMs provide no information about the virality of the time-based media, and little information about the depth and breadth of the viewing audience's interest.