Flixster

Company name	Flixster, Inc.
Company logo
Genre	Movies; Social media
Foundation	June 2005
Location city	San Francisco
Location country	CA
Key people	Joe Greenstein, Co-founder; CEO Saran Chari, Co-founder; CTO; Steve Polsky,President; James Smith, CRO Shelby Haro VP, Entertainment sales;
Owner	IBC Corporation
Owner	Time Warner
Num employees	32
Company slogan	Watch movies. Tell friends.
Url	flixster.comapps.facebook.com/flixster
Website type	Social Networking

Flixster is a social movie site allowing users to share movie ratings, discover new movies, and meet others with similar taste in movies. The site is based in San Francisco, California and was founded by Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari in 2007. Flixster has been the parent of website Rotten Tomatoes since January 2010. Flixster including Rotten Tomatoes was acquired by Warner Bros. on May 4, 2011.

Site information

Between November 2006 and January 2007, the number of daily page views by Alexa Toolbar users rose from fewer than 20 million per day to around 50 million per day. Alexa no longer (June 2008) provides numbers of daily page views, but the number of page views as a percentage decreased by almost two thirds from mid-December 2007 to mid-June 2008.

Quantcast.com reports that the number of global daily page views for Flixster.com peaked at 8,331,961 on January 23, 2008 and dropped to 1,325,685 by July 5, 2008.

The quality of these daily page views seems to be dropping as well. In May 2008 the average number of page views per visit reported by Compete.com was 5.1, down from over 16 page views per visit in May 2007. Average user stay per visit was down to 3 minutes 19 seconds in May 2008 compared to over 8 minutes a year before.

Flixster's Facebook application, called "Movies", has consistently been one of the most popular apps on the site. Daily user totals peaked in December 2007, and while they consistently declined through summer 2008:

This was a common trend among Facebook applications, attributed to what has been described as "app fatigue". Facebook no longer displays daily active use, but instead monthly active use. As of September 2010, its popularity has waned significantly, and its 2.98 million monthly active users place the Movies app at the #9 most-used entertainment application on Facebook, but ranked at only #92 overall.

Common criticism

Flixster's growth has been described in the trade press as being due to "its aggressive viral marketing practices", including "the automated selection of your email account's entire address book in order to send a Flixster invitation to all of your contacts." Flixster differs in that their system automatically selects all contacts in the user's address book and requires the user to manually un-select each address individually to prevent email from being sent in the user's name. Co-Founder Joe Greenstein has described the difference between Flixster and other sites as: "We make it easy to invite your friends. Other sites don't provide good ways for people to spread the word." "Is Flixster Using Deceptive Viral Practices?", "Stop Spamming My Friends", "Flixster = bad".

At one time email from Flixster to Hotmail users was being filtered and deleted as spam. Flixster is currently being filtered as spam with GMail.

In addition, in January 2010, Flixster bought the critic site Rotten Tomatoes and made several drastic changes to the site including making the homepage of Rotten Tomatoes mirror that of Flixster. The response from veteran users of Rotten Tomatoes has been overwhelmingly negative to the changes with most saying that they would like to have Rotten Tomatoes back in its original format. One veteran user even wrote a blog about Flixster that was based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem The Raven. "Respite - respite and nepenthe from memories of The changes from Flixster! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget these changes from Flixster!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore."

Applications on other platforms

Flixster has developed applications for several social networking sites. These apps have many of the same features as the main Flixster site, such as ratings, reviews, and user-generated quizzes. The first of these applications was released in June 2007 on the Facebook platform. In March 2008 a MySpace app followed, which had 3,923,506 users In addition to the Facebook and MySpace apps, Flixster has also developed applications for Bebo and Orkut.

In August 2008, Flixster released an iPhone application, which allows users to access movie showtimes, reviews, and trailers. An iGoogle gadget with similar functionality was released in October 2008. Flixster has also released apps for Android mobile phones, Palm Pre, and BlackBerry phones.

In August 2010, Flixster hit 20 million combined mobile application downloads and has ranked as the top movie app on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.

References

Category:Film websites Category:Social networking services Category:Social media Category:Android software Category:Time Warner subsidiaries