Inside Insights

Understanding, interpreting, and applying our Affinity Scores

You know that Ranker Insights can find the surprising fan affinities connecting the movies, TV shows, and celebrities that pop culture fans love most. But what do these affinities mean? How does Insights measure the strength of an affinity, and can it tell us more about why an affinity for two people, places, or things exists? Here we hope to answer some basic questions you may have about how Insights’ Interest Breakdown feature works so that you can better leverage our platform, whether you’re a critic using it to write a review of a new show, a marketer using it to identify new potential audiences for a Facebook campaign, or just exploring the potential applications of Ranker’s proprietary data.

Where Do I Find Affinities?

First, make sure you’ve found the right page for the item you’re researching. For the purposes of this example, we’ll take a look at the page for BBC America’s popular spy thriller Killing Eve. Feel free to click this link and visit the page for Killing Eve so you can follow along with us!

Your item’s taste affinities will be found in the Interest Breakdown section. Your item’s affinities will be organized into different categories like “TV,” “Films,” “People,” “Music,” “Books,“ “Fictional Characters,” and so on. At the top will be the category to which your item belongs, and the affinities in each category will be organized from strongest to weakest. In the case of Killing Eve, the top category is “TV,” and the items in this category with the strongest affinities to our item are Broadchurch (ITV), The Sinner (USA), Orphan Black (Space), and Big Little Lies (HBO).

The relative strength of each affinity is represented by its Affinity Score, the number beside each item in the Interest Breakdown section.

What Do Affinity Scores Mean?

An Affinity Score is the metric we use to evaluate the strength of a given relationship between two items. They are calculated based on Ranker and Watchworthy visitors who have voted on both of these items — the more people that vote similarly, the stronger the relationship. These scores can range from 999 to -100 and can run the spectrum from positive to negative.

A positive score (ranging from +1 to 999) is one where most voters feel the same way about both items. They may upvote both items or downvote both of them — the key is that they’re voting the same direction on both items: up/up or down/down. This is critical because an affinity between two items that are frequently downvoted by the same voters is NOT a negative affinity: a negative affinity is one where voters feel differently about two items.

For example, it could mean that people who like Killing Eve tend to dislike Lucifer on Netflix, or it could mean the converse, that those who like Lucifer tend to dislike Killing Eve. Or, in many cases, it can mean both: it makes intuitive sense that those who like the New York Yankees would dislike the Boston Red Sox, and that those who like the Red Sox also dislike the Yankees. That’s a negative affinity because people tend to feel opposite ways about both items — if Insights were to find that those who dislike the Red Sox also dislike the LA Dodgers, this would still be a positive affinity because it entails people feeling similarly about two items.

Let’s return to the example of Killing Eve. After clicking “Load all…” button at the bottom of the first category, we can see the full list of TV affinities for Killing Eve. Shows with very strong affinities like Broadchurch have high Affinity Scores like 818, while The Great has a more moderate score of 296. At the bottom are shows like Lucifer, which has a moderately strong negative Affinity Score of -49.

The tabs on the right of the Interest Breakdown section can filter affinities by adjective. The default option shows you a positive summary — an affinity under positive summary indicates that two items are viewed in a generally positive manner by the same voters. But adjective tabs can also show you more specifically whether voters consider two different items to share specific positive descriptors like smart, cool, funny, or attractive, or alternatively, negative descriptors like annoying.

Can I Learn More About Why Two Items Have a Affinity?

Yes! When you hover your cursor over a given item in the Interest Breakdown section, you should see a link that says “Why?” in the top right corner of the item display. Clicking that link will trace a given Affinity Score back to the Ranker and Watchworthy voting activity on which it’s based, which can often give you a sense of why two items do (or don’t) have an affinity in the minds of pop culture fans.

Sometimes, especially with strong affinities, there are a lot of different factors connecting two items. For example, Broadchurch and Killing Eve appear to be connected by voting activity on a range of different lists: people tend to vote for both shows on general lists like The Best Shows Of The Past 20 Years and The Best TV Shows To Binge Watch.

However, we can also glean some more specific things that draw the same voters to both shows: given that the same people vote for both Killing Eve and Broadchurch on TV Shows That Only Smart People Appreciate, we can conclude that both series tend to attract people who seek out cerebral stimulation from their television programming and think of themselves as being smart cookies.

In other cases, different items will have an affinity for different, specific reasons. For instance, Killing Eve and Fleabag are connected by our list of The Best Female-Lead Shows, despite the fact that Fleabag also shares space with Killing Eve on more popular lists like TV Shows That Only Smart People Appreciate. That suggests that the portion of Killing Eve’s audience that also appreciates Broadchurch is distinct from the portion that loves Fleabag.

Meanwhile, the connection between The Sinner and Killing Eve appears to be a little more basic: they’re connected by voting behavior on genre-based lists like The Best Psychological Thriller Shows and The Best Drama TV Shows Airing Right Now. That’s not all that surprising on its own, but taken together with our findings about Fleabag and Broadchurch, we can begin to piece together a more detailed picture of Killing Eve’s audience: it pulls in TV aficionados who love underrated gems like Broadchurch, thrill-seekers who are titillated by The Sinner, and viewers looking for more strong female leads in their programming.

If you’re a reviewer, you might use this data to support up your own ideas about whom a given TV show or movie is geared toward. If you’re a marketer, it might help you to pinpoint sections of your audience that you hadn’t previously identified. The potential applications for this information are endless — hopefully, this quick guide has given you the information you need to start finding your own.