Impact of electronic word-of-mouth on box office revenue: An empirical study based on web crawler technology

Under the booming movie market and the rapid increasing popularity of social media in China, consumers are willing to share shopping information and online reviews on web sites, which would undoubtedly affect the box office revenue. Therefore, electronic word-of-mouth(e WOM) as an effective marketing tool to boost sales has attracted much attention in the recent years and is worth studying. This study picked movie as research object and crawled website data of 400 movies from Douban to study the impacts of eWOM on box office revenue by PYTHON. Through multiple regression analysis, this study surprisedly reveals that box office of low-rated movies is not necessarily low. The empirical analysis results shows that the volume of e WOM can increase the box office revenue, while the valence and rate extremism have negative impacts. The strange phenomenon of “high box office but low eWOM” reveals the unhealthy phenomenon of today's fan economy to some extent; both movie reviews and comments on the website have positive impacts on box office but the latter is even stronger. This study enriches the empirical researches on e WOM and movie marketing, also concludes with some managerial implications and practical suggestions based on the research findings.