Xie Wenyuan and the other industry veterans might not have specialized in animation, but their assessments of this kind of "popularity" and "buzz" were entirely consistent.
The big-data feedback they reviewed was professional-grade, on a completely different level from Chu Ge's casual daily searches. If they said the animation would be a hit on release, it would be a hit. There was almost no doubt about it.
But! Early buzz and marketing were only one side of things. What mattered more in determining an animation's success was its quality.
Otherwise, it would only attract fleeting attention. People might quit before even finishing the first episode, cursing all the way. At most, they might give it two or three episodes out of goodwill, but if it wasn't good, they still wouldn't keep watching.
Film, television, and novels differed greatly from music in one respect. A song only took a few minutes to listen to. As long as you liked the singer, you could finish it even if it wasn't good. Even with paid songs, most people could afford two or three yuan a track. That made music charts relatively easy to climb. Even so, a bad song still wouldn't enjoy lasting popularity, and the signs would be quite apparent in its long-term figures.
But films, shows, and novels required a sustained commitment, so they needed even more to be compelling in their own right. Their performance was hard to prop up through fans alone. Even fandoms wouldn't support their idols without limit, forcing themselves to watch an awful show from beginning to end, or paying for it without even watching. Ultimately, very few people could do that, and they couldn't keep it afloat.
That was why popular idols and famous authors still flopped when their work fell short. Popularity's main purpose