Monday, February 18, 2008

Colbert Bump for Books

I love this type of real world data analysis: Juice Analytics has done some data mining on book sales following author appearances on the Colbert Report, and finds that the more liberal folks get a bigger sales bump! Not what might be expected, unless you expect that fans of the Daily Show watch Colbert-- which I would expect, despite Colbert's apparent right leaning.

Here is one of their graphs, normalized and aligned for when the authors so classified (by them) appeared and their change in sales figures inferred from Amazon rankings. They also cite an interesting academic study of whether used book sales cannibalize new book sales on Amazon, which finds they rarely do.

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1 Comments:

Blogger zia said...

This makes perfect sense. You do realize that Colbert is making fun of right-wingers, not actually one of them, right? It's a joke, not real. So most of the viewers are liberals and of course they would want to read books by fellow liberals. Colbert has developed quite a loyal following, so an endorsement by him is going to have a larger impact on viewers than another talk show.

2:31 PM  

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