Vulture.com Launches Vulture Anticipation Index, Powered By Trendrr
Vulture To Gauge Enthusiasm For Everything Pop Culture
Today, New York Media announces the launch of the Vulture Anticipation Index, a ranking of anything and everything that people are most excited about in the entertainment and pop culture realm.
The Vulture Anticipation Index is the first of its kind, measuring the amount of advance buzz that upcoming movies, books, TV shows and entertainment events are garnering throughout the blogosphere and on Twitter. Every hour, the Vulture Anticipation Index tracks the latest Internet activity on thousands of terms relating to announced but unreleased entertainment fare. Using a proprietary algorithm to determine excitement about each item, the Index re-orders the rank of the list based on relative activity during the past 24 hours. Because the Index is focused on advance interest, items are removed from the list once they pass their release date: an album that is released on Tuesday will no longer be tracked on Wednesday. The Vulture Anticipation Index uses technology from Trendrr.
Users will be able to view the top five highly anticipated events on Vulture’s homepage, and then can click through to see the full list, with the ability to sort by category. Additionally, the items can be viewed over time to see how anticipation has increased or decreased from a day or week ago. For example, users can view a 7-day view of the Index, showing rank based on relative activity in the last 7 days.
“The Vulture Anticipation Index tracks buzz before it happens,” said Michael D. Silberman, General Manager of Digital Media. “Using our proprietary algorithms, we’ve developed a unique method for understanding and ranking the relative excitement about upcoming movies, TV episodes, music releases, books and more.”
“We are thrilled to power Vulture’s smart parsing of the social web. The Anticipation Index is pure info porn,” added Mark Ghuneim, founder of Trendrr.
Bravo is the Vulture Anticipation Index’s launch sponsor.
Vulture launched as nymag.com’s culture blog in April 2007 and traffic has grown rapidly. Since January 2010, pageviews have more than doubled and unique visitors have increased by 89%. In January 2011, unique visitors hit 2.9 million and page views reached 18 million (source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, January 2011)