Celebrity Popularity Rankings
How do we come up with the monthly celebrity popularity rankings?
It's a secret. OK, it's not a complete secret. We can tell you some of what goes in to figuring out the rankings, but the exact formula we use is proprietary.
To figure out each celebrity's popularity on a monthly basis, we look at a number of things including:
number of internet searches for that celebrity
number of news items featuring that celebrity
traffic to and from websites featuring that celebrity
We plug those numbers into our formula, and we arrive at the "Celebrity Popularity Rating."
What does the rating tell you?
Because of the way we calculate the rating, you can use the popularity ratings to compare the current popularity of one celebrity to another. For example, if Celebrity A has a rating of 80 while Celebrity B has a rating of 40, then by doing the simple math, you can figure out that Celebrity A is currently twice as popular as Celebrity B.
Also, we have standardized the rating so that by comparing last month's rating to this month's rating, you'll know whether that celebrity's popularity is increasing or decreasing.
How often are the ratings updated?
The ratings are updated on a monthly basis. If ratings were updated more often, they would be meaningless because of the day-to-day fluctuations of internet traffic and news stories. For example, if an editor decides to hold a news story until Sunday instead of publishing it on Saturday, does that mean there's any real difference in popularity from one day to the next? Of course not...
Trends happen over time, and a single day or a single week just isn't a long enough period of time to tell the difference between a real trend and just an aberration. We've chosen a monthly cycle to be as accurate as possible in our trending.
Why don't you feature XYZ Celebrity?
It could be one of two reasons:
1) They just aren't that popular. Once you get below a certain threshold trying to assign a popularity rating is pretty much a guessing game. For example, if that celebrity is almost never in the news, is rarely searched for on the internet, and very few people have dedicated time to following their career, then there simply may not be enough data to generate an accurate rating. We're striving to be as accurate as possible, so if we don't feel there's sufficient information to get a true picture, we don't include them.
2) It may be an oversight. As hard as we try, it's entirely possible that we might overlook someone because they are new or just haven't hit our radar for whatever reason. If you feel that we're missing someone that should be included, please let us know.
