I was watching a Youtuber named Yellowflash and he was talking about how Superman and Lois has better ratings than Batwoman and Supergirl despite that fact that Superman and Lois has never trended on Twitter and the other two shows have. He was making the point that twitter popularity doesn't equal actual popularity.
It made me wonder if there is a business term for what you see corporations doing by catering to mythical audiences like gaming or comic book companies who think that it is ok to insult their male (especially white males) fanbase because there is some magical group of female gamers that will make them money?
I guess another thing would be the whole "male gaze" thing. Feminists seem so upset by the fact that men like seeing an attractive woman. I mean it is no secret that an attractive male or female lead is an easy way to get at least a little interest from the opposite sex.
But is there an official term from what you see companies do by putting way too much stock in what is trending online?
I don’t think so. Maybe like Stanford or some other tech-savvy programs have like adopted their own terms, but there’s nothing that I know of that’s reached common usage. It’s easy to forget that modern tech or Web 2.0 or whatever you wanna call it is incredibly new and the average 45-55 year old manager or business school dean types literally started his career before e-mail had reached widespread use. There’s still an incredible amount of snake oil marketing bullshit surrounding anything tech-related and imo once you start orbiting that tech-sphere, in any industry, you have too much to lose as a professional in discrediting the racket once you’re in on it.
The reality is that they’re just using / doing bad stats with an incredible amount of selection bias.