Flixster

Flixster, Inc.

Foundation date	June 2007
Headquarters	San Francisco, CA
Key people	Joe Greenstein (Co-founder & CEO); Saran Chari (Co-founder & CTO); Steve Polsky (President); Shelby Huston Haro (VP Sales;
Industry	Film, social networking
Owner	Time Warner
Employees	75[1]
Slogan(s)	Watch movies. Tell friends.
Website	flixster.com apps.facebook.com/flixster
Type of site	Social Networking

Flixster is an American social movie site for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies. The site allows users to view movie trailers as well as learn about the new and upcoming movies in the box office. The site is based in San Francisco, California and was founded by Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari in 2007.^[2] Flixster has been the parent of website Rotten Tomatoes since January 2010.^[3] Flixster, including Rotten Tomatoes, was acquired by Warner Bros. on May 4, 2011.^[4]

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.^[5] 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

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,^[8] down from over 16 page views per visit in May 2007. The average user stay per visit was down to 3 minutes 19 seconds in May 2008,^[9] 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.

Flixster Collections, a desktop application featuring a content discovery and management system, began open beta testing on July 29, 2011.

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^[13] place the Movies app as the #9 most-used entertainment application on Facebook, but ranked at only #92 overall.^[14]

Marketing practices

Flixster's growth has been described in the trade press as attributable to "its aggressive viral marketing practices",^[15] including "the automated selection of your email account's entire address book in order to send a Flixster invitation to all of your contacts."^[15] Although Flixster claims this procedure is an industry standard used by other services, 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."^[15]

As a consequence of its policy of emailing users' entire address books with advertisements for the site, the website has been criticized on numerous Internet blogs.^[16] At one time email from Flixster to Hotmail users was being filtered and deleted as spam.^[17]

Around August 2012, the Flixster website stopped allowing public access. Viewers must log in using a free account or Facebook.

Other supported platforms

Recently, Flixster has begun allowing users to watch movies on several different platforms via UltraViolet.

Social media platforms

Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut

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. Furthermore, all offered social media integation and mobile app is offered free-of-charge, allowing more users to download its application.^[18] The first of these applications was released in June 2007 on the Facebook platform. In March 2008, a MySpace app.^[19] followed, which had 3,923,506 users^[19] as of July 2008. This made it the second most popular application on the MySpace platform.^[20] In addition to the Facebook and MySpace apps, Flixster has also developed applications for Bebo^[21] and Orkut.^[22]

Mobile and desktop platforms

Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows Phone

In August 2008, Flixster released an iOS application,^[23] which allows users to access movie showtimes, reviews, and trailers. Furthermore, this iPhone and iPod app for Flixster is the number one movie application yet.^[18] Flixster has also released apps for Android mobile phones, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry phones.^[24]

In August 2010, Flixster hit 20 million combined mobile application downloads and has ranked as the top movie app on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.^[18]

Flixster has released a Windows 8 app.

Other

An iGoogle gadget^[25] with similar functionality was released in October 2008.

References