Like most, I originally thought News Corp was acquiring Flixster. Instead, it was Flixster acquiring Rotten Tomatoes. I think it's a great fit. Rotten Tomatoes's aggregated critics ratings combined with Flixster's user ratings, Rotten Tomatoes's premium content combined with Flixster's user-generated content. The combined audience of 30M worldwide uniques definitely puts them up there with Yahoo! Movies and Moviefone, the second and third largest movie sites on the web respectively. IMDB is number one, by far. And it's gonna be tough for Flixster/RT to surpass them. When you search for a movie or celebrity, IMDB is usually the first result on Google (and other search engines); and that's the main reason for its dramatic growth in the last couple years. If Flixster/RT can become a more authoritative source than IMDB and surpass its rankings in search engines, then it can become numero uno. If not, being number 2 ain't bad.
The IGN Acquisition Made Sense ... Back in 2004
If you read my interview with CPU magazine, the IGN acquisition made sense back in 2004. IGN was the largest video game site on the web. Gamespot was a close second. Both companies thought they had gotten as big as they could get in the video games category, so they decided to expand into other verticals. Gamespot bought TVTome.com (which became TV.com) to fill the TV vertical. IGN bought Rotten Tomatoes to fill the movies vertical. Gamespot bought Metacritic shortly afterwards and went on to build a couple failed movie verticals (Filmspot.com and MovieTome.com). Filmspot.com has been scrapped and MovieTome.com doesn't seem to be going anywhere either. IGN tried to build its own TV vertical, but it just ended up being another menu item on their navbar. What this period proves is that it's really difficult to build a successful vertical internally; acquisition seems to be the better way to go. A bunch of corporate 9-5ers will never beat a bunch of hungry entrepreneurs working 24/7.
MySpace Changed Everything
When News Corp acquired IGN in 2005, it was still business as usual for Rotten Tomatoes. IGN left us alone. It was the meteoric growth of MySpace, which News Corp also purchased that year, that changed everything for Fox Interactive Media. MySpace was generating more than 1 billion pageviews per day. Compared to that, every other property in FIM just seemed insignificant. During a presentation about Rotten Tomatoes, Peter Levinsoln, head of FIM, said to me, "...so you keep running Rotten Tomatoes for a couple years, and it grows a couple million more users, what then?" Well, a couple million extra users would be a 60% increase of Rotten Tomatoes's U.S. users. That would put Rotten Tomatoes just a little bit closer to IMDB, Yahoo! Movies and Moviefone - the top three movie sites back then. Yahoo! Movies is the second largest movie site on the web because it's featured on Yahoo's homepage every Friday. Moviefone is third because of AOL. IMDB is number one because of Google. If you put Rotten Tomatoes in front of every user on MySpace every Friday when movies open, it will be as big as Yahoo! Movies. The only problem was MySpace wanted to build their own verticals internally without the involvement of other FIM properties; this way, they could keep all of the traffic. This plan failed miserably, resulting in a couple lost years that allowed Facebook to surpass them and become the top social network. Now, FIM is refocusing, and Rotten Tomatoes is the odd man out.
Flixster is not MySpace, but it's a great compliment to Rotten Tomatoes. Together, they can be a force to be reckon with in the movie content space, especially if MySpace finally incorporates data from the combined entity, like they say they will. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. I wish them the best.
