Searching around for something to write about today and it occurred to me that Compete.com could, with some limitations, be used to see how well a major movie being released is being promoted or watched online.  Take 3 current releases, Inception, Who is Salt (which might be a TV show for all I know) and The Last Airbender.

This approach doesn’t work for movies that Disney releases because they use two level deep subdomains to hang their movie site urls off of that Compete does not currently track.

I looked at daily attention and daily reach for the movies (we could compare up to 5 at one time – again, with the way the urls are written out – not every movie can be compared this way – unless Compete.com adds deeper Subdomain tracking).

In fact it looks like a lot of the media properties of Warner Brothers could be tracked in Compete including many popular TV/Cable shows

Which gets me to a point I want to make – the only reason analytics is interesting – I think – is that relates  back to a story – something we know about and want to measure – something we can make an emotional connection to (gee… that almost sounds like Art – like Paul Cezanne‘s famous saying about the only thing worth painting about is something he had an emotional reaction or connection to).

Most of the time, without that connection – it’s hard to see how the analysis is going to be all that interesting – but that’s just me.

Compete.com also has a Behavioral Profile for a “Movie Enthusiast” – you won’t be able to get to the url without the full Compete Subscription, though.

Here’s a breakdown of the Miscellaneous traffic that comes to this category – you can’t go down any further than this in a category profile currently – but I wonder if that will change in the future – my guess is it will.

Anyway, this post was more to spur a line of thought – I could spend more time on this post – and maybe I will, offline – and if I come up with anything further to say about tracking movies or media properties marketing promotions or popularity online – I will share it here.

The only thing I’d add is there’s a whole different analysis that could have been done in Sysomos or Radian6, etc, using these media properties – and it would be interesting at some point to superimpose them.