Cool. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from former guests about the benefits of the Colbert Bump before this, but the folks at Juice Analytics have gone to the trouble of actually gathering a sample and working out some figures.
From Juice Analytics (some internal links omitted):
The Colbert Bump is Real, Colbert’s Nation Not What He Thinks it is
ChrisStephen Colbert has mentioned that he’s having trouble getting guests during the writer’s stike. We find this puzzling, given the supposed benefits of the Colbert Bump. Does being on the Colbert Show really provide a bump—a critical leap that vaults a writer, or a politician to superstardom?
We know that Colbert isn’t a big fan of “facts”, and only needs his gut to tell him the Colbert Bump is real. At Juice, we let the data decide what’s real or not, so our apologies to Stephen for not taking his word for it. Intrigued, Juice Analytics set out to find out the truth. We gathered data about Amazon sales rank for 20 authors that appeared on his show in recent months. How did those ranks change in the days immediately before and after the authors’ appearance on the show?
Hmmm, there might be something there but those sales ranks don’t tell us much. Fortunately for Stephen, some “eggheads” have worked out roughly how Amazon sales rank corresponds to actual book sales. We calculated the sales, and normalized the data so that the week prior to appearing on the Colbert Report was equal to 1.0. Here’s a picture.
That looks like a bump, Conan. In fact, being on the Colbert Report increases sales by 10 times on average. That bump doesn’t last forever, but, let’s face it, what does?
. . .
A lot more numbers and other details here at Juice Analytics
It might have been helpful if they had taken into consideration a few other factors; for example, the length of time the book had already been on the shelves may have affected the overall “bump” level (I’d guess that a lot of people who might have been interested in buying The World is Flat or Guns, Germs and Steel, for instance, had already done so by the time Friedman and Diamond appeared on The Report). And controlling for other influential factors might have been helpful, too; I recall, for instance, that Richard Preston had promoted The Wild Trees on The Daily Show not long before his appearance on The Colbert Report, so Preston’s sales may already have been “bumped” before appearing on The Report.
Still, it’s an interesting article, and it’s great to be reminded of many of these books and interviews. These numbers may be a little too fact-y for “Stephen Colbert”, but *I* liked reading about them.
I suspect that a 7 minute author appearance on a tv show with similar numbers and demographics would also result in a “bump.” An interesting comparison/control would be to do the same thing for authors who are interviewed on NPR. And then we’d find out if there’s a “Liane Hansen bump.”
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…and that sounds way weirder than I meant it to.
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I think it’s great that someone actually compiled real statistics about the “bump” — but, I have to say that the very first line in the original article is worrisome:
“Stephen Colbert has mentioned that he’s having trouble getting guests during the writer’s stike. We find this puzzling, given the supposed benefits of the Colbert Bump.”
Um, heeeeello? Do they not know there’s a strike going on? A writers strike? Do they not get that authors, or writers, don’t want to cross a picket line with other writers on it?
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@Lisa:
They’re aware of the strike, but they really don’t seem to grasp the concept that writers don’t want to cross a picket line of writers.
When it was first announced that Jon and Stephen were returning, I remember reading a bunch of articles which all predicted that the Comedy Central shows would have an easier time booking guests than the other late-night programs because they don’t rely on celebrity interviews. It didn’t even occur to these folks that other writers – particularly, the liberal, socially-conscious, and well-informed authors that generally frequent these shows – may not wish to cross a picket line any more than actors.
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So basically, Colbert viewers love to buy things on Amazon?
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@ Rebnej,
Point taken. I guess to writers (myself included) it seemed like a no-brainer. I guess to execs, maybe, it seemed less obvious. Hopefully, though, negotiations will continue into next week and the WGA will get the deal they deserve, so all this strike nightmare-ness will go away SOON!
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@Rebnej: You basically nailed it. It didn’t occur to us that writers wouldn’t cross that picket line.
We were totally focused on trying to see if the bump existed, not on diagnosing Colbert’s guest difficulties.
Thanks.
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@ Chris Gemignani,
Sorry about that…I did think finding the data to prove the effectiveness of the bump was pretty cool. Didn’t mean to offend…
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I understood the problem with getting writers to cross the picket line and was interpreting Chris’s intro paragraph (along with most of the article) as a joke. Maybe we should leave the humor to Colbert from now on :)
I’m with Lisa on getting this resolved soon, hopefully the WGA gets a good deal.
@dustdevil: good point, we cranked this out pretty quickly, but there do seem to be bumps of varying sizes for other shows…imagine the “Oprah Bump”
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It looks to me like they’re going at this from the wrong perspective – the Colbert Bump seems to be very good at getting writers from rank 10000 to rank 1000, but not very useful beyond that.
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Very interesting study!
“Liberals and high-minded egg-heads do better than popular or conservative books. ”
This makes perfect sense to me since the majority of TCR viewers are most likely fairly liberal and are already well informed. Popular books are not going to be as affected by the Colbert bump since sales are already up and the people who are likely to buy those books may already own them.
Even though he is in character, fans can tell when Stephen is interested in a topic or genuinely likes an author. Stephen, the man, tends to be interested in the kinds of books which had the most bump. I’m sure this affects sales too.
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I posted a follow up here for the Napolitano appearance:
http://www.datawrangling.com/the-colbert-bump-in-amazon-data.html
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