Ign, Flixster | featured news

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.

Look, it's a big muck shot of your editor. That's a caricature of me drawn by an artist from CPU magazine for an interview I did in 2005 regarding IGN's acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes. It's an interesting read, in light of today's announcement, because it talks about the struggles during the internet crash, the IGN acquisition, and the future plans for Rotten Tomatoes (and myself). Rotten Tomatoes has user ratings now, but still no critics matching, and film school for me is still being pushed back.