A paper by a UC San Diego professor on the effect of an appearance of politicians on the show’s segment “Better Know a District” on their fund raising. The show gives a significant bump to Democratic congressmen who appear on the show — they earn 37% more than similar democratic congressmen who didn’t appear on the show. The analysis is merely suggestive of a causal link. The paper is written in ‘colbert style’ and is quite entertaining to read, and is a great resource about the colbert and its “disproportionate influence” in politics.
Another blog by juice analytics studied colbert’s influence on book sales. their analysis indicates that on-average, books sales increases by 10%, and that this effect comes from the increase in sales of pop intellectual book and liberal book authors that guest on his show. I’m pretty sure that if they study “The Daily Show”, they would get a TDS bump result as well.
I wonder how powerful this effect is vis-a-vis the authors’ other opportunities to market their book? From a professor in my school, i know that an appearance in either show was heavily encouraged by his agent.
Here is a video from AP about the same phenomenon and some choice words from the man himself.
