Watching the Internet Watch the Oscars

Social media. It’s no secret that it has become a part of most everyone’s daily routine. There seems to be a new study every week analyzing what you shared last week, last month and last year. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

It becomes far more interesting to see what you are saying right now. Watching what the Internet is saying as it happens.

Take this tweet from Dave Karger of Fandango on Oscars night about the Common and John Legend performance of “Glory” from the movie Selma:

Karger’s sentiment was echoed by thousands more across social media, not just Twitter but Facebook, Instagram and Google+ as well. You probably read about that great performance the following day or if you had your Twitter open, you saw a few tweets about it.

We watched the Internet react in real-time. Here is what we saw live on nowOscars.com during that performance:

The above screenshot shows the huge spike in Selma content, 5x+ as much as any other Best Picture nominee during that time. No post-data analysis needed, look at the graph! Common and John Legend clearly brought the house (and the Internet) down, and moments later won the Oscar for Best Song.

We saw these stunning reactions to every major moment from the show by utilizing the award-winning n.io software (more about n.io). Millions of pieces of content were enriched into our dynamic data visualizations to highlight the trends from the Oscars in real-time. Check out the video below that recorded our Best Picture infographic page during the whole show:

Pretty crazy right? It’s not quite a timelapse, so we call it a videolapse. Throughout the video you can see a lot of different peaks as they relate to the Best Picture category.

We had real-time infographics for six of the major categories, Best Actress/Actor, Best Supporting Actress/Actor, Best Director and the crown jewel, Best Picture. The example on the left is from our Best Actor infographic that showed the moments before and after Eddie Redmayne won for his performance in The Theory of Everything (a similar spike happens on the Best Picture graph in the video).

We are tired of waiting for post-data analysis on our favorite topics or events so we are changing the way we get it. Stay tuned to niomedia.com as we continue to roll out new media innovations.