Which Fringe venues have got tongues wagging?
With the wealth of data that's coming in from our daily Trends analysis, we got to thinking: Which Fringe venues have booked the most-talked-about acts this year? If you had to spend the whole Fringe at only one venue, where would give you the best bang for your buck? Here, we take a dive into the data and find out.
We took our database and ordered it by venue, filtering out smaller venues with less than ten shows (don't get us wrong — we're all about those small venues here at Fringebiscuit, but we found that those with very few shows on their roster were skewing our analysis). We looked through our entire dataset (beginning before previews on July 10th) and analysed the Daily Mentions, Mention Share and the Positivity Share for each venue (see here for an explanation of how we calculate this). We knew this would skew things in favour of the really big venues with hundreds of shows, so we figured we'd also calculate a weighted version of Daily Mentions to control for the number of shows at each venue (Mentions per Show). So, without further ado, here are the top ten rankings as they stand (ordered by Daily Mentions):
Pleasance. Daily Mentions = 78.2, Mentions per Show = 5.7, Mention Share 25.8%, Positivity Share 25.4%.
theSpace. Daily Mentions = 25.9, Mentions per Show = 1.4, Mention Share 8.6%, Positivity Share 9.3%.
C venues. Daily Mentions = 22.2, Mentions per Show = 2.8, Mention Share 7.3%, Positivity Share 8.4%.
Gilded Balloon. Daily Mentions = 19.3, Mentions per Show = 2.3, Mention Share 6.4%, Positivity Share 5.8%.
Greenside. Daily Mentions = 18.2, Mentions per Show = 2.1, Mention Share 6%, Positivity Share 5.8%.
Underbelly. Daily Mentions = 18.2, Mentions per Show = 1.7, Mention Share 6%, Positivity Share 7.4%.
Laughing Horse. Daily Mentions = 14.7, Mentions per Show = 0.7, Mention Share 4.9%, Positivity Share 3.8%.
Assembly. Daily Mentions = 12.3, Mentions per Show = 1.1, Mention Share 4.1%, Positivity Share 4.1%.
The Stand. Daily Mentions = 8.3, Mentions per Show = 1.1, Mention Share 2.7%, Positivity Share 2.1%.
Summerhall. Daily Mentions = 8, Mentions per Show = 1.7, Mention Share 2.6%, Positivity Share 2%.
So — way up top is the evergreen Pleasance, grabbing a whole load of share in the conversations and positivity out there in Twitter-space. It's unsurprisingly up there as a big venue (with 259 shows this year according to our data), but it's not the biggest venue at the Fringe; that honour goes to theSpace with 383. What's striking, though, is the Mentions per Show metric — the Pleasance is really striding ahead here, suggesting the acts they're booking are really causing a stir. It seems as though C venues and Guilded Balloon are also worth a look — coming in second and third respectively in terms of Mentions per Show, Twitter users clearly feel these venues are booking some quality shows, too.