Spring Break
Online ratings don't reflect reality
Issue date: 7/12/07 Section: Opinions
How do you choose which movie to watch on a lazy summer weekend?
I regularly consult the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com. This site is visited by 47 million people each month, and it contains over 78 million ratings of over 480,000 film titles by over 3 million voters. With such a booming vox populi, how can you go wrong?
But after enduring a highly-rated but deadly-dull "action" flick, I did a little research of my own into the imdb.com ratings. What I found exploded a couple of false assumptions I'd had about the Internet.
I guessed that the bad action movie was disproportionately rated by gung-ho guys who didn't mind the laughable plot and dialogue. The IMDB site lists votes by gender, and sure enough, almost 90 percent of the voters for that crummy movie were men. According to a 2003 Arbitron study, 51 percent of all frequent moviegoers in the United States are women. So clearly the voting on this particular movie was skewed by gender.
But then I computed the gender statistics for 250 of the highest-rated films in the IMDB catalog (minimum 1,300 votes per movie). This list includes classics from diverse genres, ranging from "The Godfather" to "The Lion King." Over 11 million votes have been cast for the top-250 list, equal to 18 percent of all votes on the imdb.com site.
What do you think is the percentage of male voters for all of these top 250 films put together? 50? 60? 70?
Not even close. Men cast 85.7 percent of all votes for the top-250 films on the IMDB Web site. Or, to view this from a slightly different perspective, none of the top 250 films was rated by equal numbers of men and women. Not even "Gone with the Wind," the biggest chick-flick on the list, with a voter split of "only" 68 percent men/32 percent women.
Branching out beyond the top-250 list, I searched in vain for a theatrical release with a 50/50 gender split of voters. No luck. "The Notebook" came closest, at 44 percent women. In contrast, Chuck Norris may be the best testosterone magnet. His mid-1980s action films attract as many as 32 male voters for every female voter!
What does this little statistical exercise tell us? For one thing, the Internet can give the illusion of universality when in fact its content is skewed by a small, vocal segment of the population. We see this in political "netroots" activism.
I was shocked that a database of tens of millions of votes would not "revert to the mean" and match the same gender ratio as the general population. Apparently, men are a whole lot more likely than women to go online and state their opinion of a movie they've watched. Lesson learned: A big sample isn't necessarily an unbiased sample. This is why polling firms randomly sample the population instead of asking for volunteers.
To the extent that these gender ratios are common across the Web, this is sobering news for women.
Every aspect of our culture is being filtered through the Internet today. Increasingly, the Web is reality. If that filter is 80-90 percent male, guess whose voice isn't a part of the new vox populi?
But before you American males get too smug, remember, it's the World Wide Web. IMDB also surveys their voters' locations. Only 43 percent of those 11-million-plus voters were from the U.S. For every true-blue piece of Americana like 1983's "A Christmas Story" (87 percent U.S. voters), many recent films reveal declining U.S. voter percentages around 35-40 percent.
Translation: while America may have invented the Internet, our slice of cyberspace will keep on shrinking as the rest of the world comes online. For those who care more about movies than geopolitics and gender, though, it all boils down to a kind of intellectual outsourcing. The movie advice you're getting online is coming from a guy who's probably living overseas!
- John Knox is an associate research scientist in the Faculty of Engineering and an instructor/adviser in the Department of Geography.
I regularly consult the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com. This site is visited by 47 million people each month, and it contains over 78 million ratings of over 480,000 film titles by over 3 million voters. With such a booming vox populi, how can you go wrong?
But after enduring a highly-rated but deadly-dull "action" flick, I did a little research of my own into the imdb.com ratings. What I found exploded a couple of false assumptions I'd had about the Internet.
I guessed that the bad action movie was disproportionately rated by gung-ho guys who didn't mind the laughable plot and dialogue. The IMDB site lists votes by gender, and sure enough, almost 90 percent of the voters for that crummy movie were men. According to a 2003 Arbitron study, 51 percent of all frequent moviegoers in the United States are women. So clearly the voting on this particular movie was skewed by gender.
But then I computed the gender statistics for 250 of the highest-rated films in the IMDB catalog (minimum 1,300 votes per movie). This list includes classics from diverse genres, ranging from "The Godfather" to "The Lion King." Over 11 million votes have been cast for the top-250 list, equal to 18 percent of all votes on the imdb.com site.
What do you think is the percentage of male voters for all of these top 250 films put together? 50? 60? 70?
Not even close. Men cast 85.7 percent of all votes for the top-250 films on the IMDB Web site. Or, to view this from a slightly different perspective, none of the top 250 films was rated by equal numbers of men and women. Not even "Gone with the Wind," the biggest chick-flick on the list, with a voter split of "only" 68 percent men/32 percent women.
Branching out beyond the top-250 list, I searched in vain for a theatrical release with a 50/50 gender split of voters. No luck. "The Notebook" came closest, at 44 percent women. In contrast, Chuck Norris may be the best testosterone magnet. His mid-1980s action films attract as many as 32 male voters for every female voter!
What does this little statistical exercise tell us? For one thing, the Internet can give the illusion of universality when in fact its content is skewed by a small, vocal segment of the population. We see this in political "netroots" activism.
I was shocked that a database of tens of millions of votes would not "revert to the mean" and match the same gender ratio as the general population. Apparently, men are a whole lot more likely than women to go online and state their opinion of a movie they've watched. Lesson learned: A big sample isn't necessarily an unbiased sample. This is why polling firms randomly sample the population instead of asking for volunteers.
To the extent that these gender ratios are common across the Web, this is sobering news for women.
Every aspect of our culture is being filtered through the Internet today. Increasingly, the Web is reality. If that filter is 80-90 percent male, guess whose voice isn't a part of the new vox populi?
But before you American males get too smug, remember, it's the World Wide Web. IMDB also surveys their voters' locations. Only 43 percent of those 11-million-plus voters were from the U.S. For every true-blue piece of Americana like 1983's "A Christmas Story" (87 percent U.S. voters), many recent films reveal declining U.S. voter percentages around 35-40 percent.
Translation: while America may have invented the Internet, our slice of cyberspace will keep on shrinking as the rest of the world comes online. For those who care more about movies than geopolitics and gender, though, it all boils down to a kind of intellectual outsourcing. The movie advice you're getting online is coming from a guy who's probably living overseas!
- John Knox is an associate research scientist in the Faculty of Engineering and an instructor/adviser in the Department of Geography.
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