An interesting article posted in June of 2018 indicates that the power law can be observed in a number of forms of media, with some displaying a steeper curve than others. It is interesting to observe these distributions that can be modelled with math exist in the real world. For example, observe how steep the graph showing success of video game publishers is:
The success of video game publishers is measured by their total global sales, and it is clear that that a select few have lots of success while the rest have very little. In comparison, other forms of media are not as punishing to those less successful, like with song artists:
The curve here is far less steep, indicating that it is easier to get one of your songs to stay on the Billboard Hot-100 for a couple weeks than it is to be a successful video game publisher.
The article also discusses the 80-20 rule, also knows as the Pareto Principle, and looks at how much success the top 20% of entries for each industry have.
It should be noticed that these numbers are related to the steepness of the graph, as one can see that the top 20% of game publishers own 97.69% of all the success in the industry, hence the extremely steep curve. On the other hand, the top 20% of songs only hold 38.88% of the overall song success. It was no accident that I chose those two specific charts earlier in the article. In fact, the tail of the songs chart actually does not follow the power law, which make it even more interesting that out of all the forms of measuring success in the media industry, the number of weeks a song stays on the Billboard Hot-100 is the only one to not follow the power law distribution. Some industries also follow the 80-20 rule very closely, such as success of movie directors:
This curve looks far more like what I expect to see when I think of the power law.
This obviously relates to the entire discussion of the power law from lecture as well as whether or not success depends on simply being lucky or being first, as the information above would suggest that early success is very important in the world of media, although less important for songs than it is for video game publishers.
I chose to write about this article because most of what we see in today’s world is a product of the media industry, and so I thought it was interesting to see how closely success in this industry follows the power law distribution, as likely no movie director or book author is thinking about it when creating their work, and yet it shows up anyways. We were shown an example of this in class with the experiment carried out, but this is a far more recent look of the topic, and I thought it was worthwhile to post.
https://medium.com/@michaeltauberg/power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c