For a long time, the revenue figures of theatrical films have been posted by Box Office Vietnam (BOVN) on its website and used as reference figures by many media agencies and related units. Most recently, on February 21, the media agencies reported that the revenue of Tran Thanh's film "Mai" was over 400 billion VND, and the figures were referenced from Box Office Vietnam. By the afternoon of February 22, this system also announced that the film's revenue was over 410 billion VND.

But not everyone knows who owns or is behind this website and how it collects data to calculate revenue.

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Movie box office revenue is published on the website boxofficevietnam. Screenshot.

Accordingly, BOVN has a website with the domain name .com and information about the registrant is hidden. In addition, information about the company that owns this website is also not displayed; on the website, there is only the contact phone number and email of the administrator.

On the homepage, there is also only a very brief introduction to the website. Accordingly, “Box Office Vietnam analyzes box office revenue data across Vietnam to create a revenue ranking of movies currently being shown. We take data from the online ticket sales system (public) of cinema chains across the country, synthesize and analyze it into data. The data on BOVN currently reflects the revenue of major cinema clusters across the country.”

BOVN currently offers 3 membership packages, including a free package for readers interested in weekly box office totals, including details of total box office sales of each film; current day film rankings; last weekend film rankings. Next is the premium package priced at VND900,000/month, for individuals/organizations who want to dig deeper into box office data, and finally the business package, for film production units who want to follow upcoming films.

Although the company information could not be found on the website, from the Box Office Vietnam application, VietNamNet reporters were able to find out the name of the company that owns it, Betado, with the representative being Mr. Nguyen Khanh Duong. Notably, Mr. Nguyen Khanh Duong is also the owner of the website Comicola, the largest comic book publishing unit of Vietnamese authors today.

Accordingly, Mr. Nguyen Khanh Duong is the founder of boxofficevietnam.com, and the website was built in 2016 with the initial purpose of self-research when there were parties contacting him to buy his stories to adapt into movies.

Mr. Nguyen Khanh Duong said that right after its launch, BOVN started to count revenue from movies shown in theaters. The way to do this as announced on the website is to take public data from the ticket sales system of theaters and summarize it. At first, this statistics had many errors, but over time and the algorithm was adjusted and balanced, the data became more accurate.

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The revenue of the movie "Mai" was announced on the website boxofficevietnam at 4:00 p.m. on February 22.

Specifically, to calculate the revenue of a movie, BOVN will automatically scan public data from the online ticketing systems of cinemas. If the ticketing page shows that the theater is sold out, the system will calculate the revenue accordingly. BOVN will record what it observes, and anything that is not displayed on the ticketing pages of the cinemas will not be counted.

“Certainly, BOVN’s statistics cannot be 100% accurate, but the error is at an acceptable level. Besides, the managers of large domestic theaters also observe statistical data from the website, so if there are large errors, they will speak up and remind them,” said Mr. Duong.

In response to the question of why BOVN does not publicly disclose the measurement method for everyone to know, the founder of the website shared that he did not have time to write specifically, because he still had to run his main company, Comicola. According to him, BOVN is a project made out of interest and only done when he has free time, and does not have much time to spend on it.

Notably, BOVN's statistics were also retrieved by Amazon's Box Office Mojo system (USA), and Mr. Nguyen Khanh Duong shared that he still contacted Amazon to provide data to this unit. However, the system's representative in the US said that they do not control the data provided by other countries.

What do directors and cinemas say about Box Office Vietnam's revenue statistics? Directors and cinema managers said that Box Office Vietnam's collection of movie revenue statistics is the private business of this unit.
Did the theaters crash their websites to increase the popularity of the movies 'Mai', 'Dao, Pho and Piano'? This is a question that many people are asking in the context of Vietnamese movies like "Dao, Pho and Piano" and "Mai" paralyzing the websites of many theater systems.