Earlier today, Jake Caputo created a website, Take My Money HBO that lets people tweet how much they would be willing to pay for a standalone HBOGO streaming service.
I was curious about what the average amount of money would be, so I wrote two small Python scripts that use the Twitter search API to retrieve the 1500 most recent tweets (the limits of the API) and analyse the average amount in those tweets.
There are limitations to this approach, since there are certainly more than 1500 tweets with this hashtag. I made the following decisions about how I handled the data:
- RTs were ignored, because I'm interested in each person's personal opinion.
- I looked for the phrase 'pay $' in the tweet, and extracted the number following the '$'. If there was no number following, the tweet was ignored (e.g. some people tweeted statements like 'I would pay $$$'.
- Money amounts >$50 were ignore, since some people tweeted statements like 'I would pay $1000000'.
Currently the script only returns the average amount and the number of data points available of the 1500 downloaded (after RTs, etc are removed).
Wednesday 5:10AM GMT/UTC +0:00 - $12.06, from 1063 data points.
Wednesday 5:24AM GMT/UTC +0:00 - $12.30, from 1071 data points.
These (very simple) scripts are released under the permissive MIT license, so download them, run them yourself, and modify them to extract more interesting data - e.g. draw graphs.
If you thought this was interesting, you can follow me on Twitter.