Popularity & Trending

Popularity

Popularity is a fairly important metric here on TMDB. It helps us boost search results, adds an incredibly useful sort value for discover, and is also just kind of fun to see items chart up and down. You can think of popularity as being a "lifetime" popularity score that is impacted by the attributes below. It's calculated quite differently than trending.

Each model builds their popularity value slightly differently. Here are some of the attributes we use for each media type.

Movies

Number of votes for the day
Number of views for the day
Number of users who marked it as a "favourite" for the day
Number of users who added it to their "watchlist" for the day
Release date
Number of total votes
Previous days score

TV Shows

Number of votes for the day
Number of views for the day
Number of users who marked it as a "favourite" for the day
Number of users who added it to their "watchlist" for the day
Next/last episode to air date
Number of total votes
Previous days score

People

Number of views for the day
Previous days score

There is no API to explore this data right now but it is something that would be a lot fun to dig into. The daily file exports do however, contain the popularity data so there is a record of the values starting on April 28, 2017.