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Popularity

Popularity is a fairly important metric here on TMDB. It helps us boost search results, adds an incredibly useful sort value for discover, and is also just kind of fun to see items chart up and down. You can think of popularity as being a lifetime popularity score that is impacted by the attributes below. It’s calculated quite differently than trending. Each model builds their popularity value slightly differently. Here are some of the attributes we use for each media type.

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Movies

  • Number of votes for the day
  • Number of views for the day
  • Number of users who marked it as a favourite for the day
  • Number of users who added it to their watchlist for the day Release date
  • Number of total votes
  • Previous days score

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TV shows

  • Number of votes for the day
  • Number of views for the day
  • Number of users who marked it as a favourite for the day
  • Number of users who added it to their watchlist for the day
  • Next/last episode to air date
  • Number of total votes
  • Previous days score

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People

  • Number of views for the day
  • Previous days score
There is no API to explore this data right now but it is something that would be a lot fun to dig into. The daily file exports do however, contain the popularity data so there is a record of the values starting on April 28, 2017. Trending is another type of popularity score on TMDB but unlike popularity (discussed above), trending’s time windows are much shorter (daily, weekly). This helps us surface the relevant content of today (the new stuff) much easier. Just like popularity, we track trending scores for movies, TV shows and people.