Flixster

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Flixster, Inc.
Type Private
Genre Movies
Founded June 2005
Headquarters San Francisco, CA
Key people Joe Greenstein, Co-founder; CEO
Saran Chari, Co-founder; CTO; Steve Polsky, President; COO
Employees 23
Slogan Watch movies. Tell friends.
Website http://www.flixster.com
http://apps.facebook.com/flixster
Type of site Social Networking
Available in English

Flixster is a social movie site allowing users to share movie ratings, discover new movies and meet others with similar movie taste.

Contents

[edit] Site statistics

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.[1] Alexa no longer (June 2008) provides numbers of daily page views, but the number of page views as a percentage has decreased by almost two thirds from mid-December 2007 to mid-June 2008.[2]

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[3].

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 [4], 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[5] 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:

Date Active Daily Users
December 4, 2007 >800,000[6]
June 19, 2008 482,542[7]
July 15, 2008 412,401[8]

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 November 2008, its 6.6 million monthly active users[9] place the Movies app at the #8 spot among most-used applications on Facebook[10].

[edit] Common Criticism

Flixster's growth has been described in the trade press as being due to "its aggressive viral marketing practices" [11], including "the automated selection of your email account's entire address book in order to send a Flixster invitation to all of your contacts."[11].

Although Flixster claims this procedure is an industry standard used by other services[12][13][14][15], 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 describe 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."[11]

As a consequence of its rise in popularity due to its policy of emailing users' entire address books with advertisements for the site, the website has been discussed on numerous Internet blogs. For instance, the discussions "Is Flixster a Big Fat Spammer?"[16], " Is Flixster Using Deceptive Viral Practices?"[17], "Stop Spamming My Friends"[18], "Flixster = bad" [19].

At one time email from Flixster to Hotmail users was being filtered and deleted as spam.[20]

Flixster is currently being filtered as spam with GMail.[21]

[edit] 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[22] followed, which had 3,923,506 users[22] as of July 2008. This made it the second most popular application on the MySpace platform[23]. In addition to the Facebook and MySpace apps, Flixster has also developed applications for Bebo[24] and Orkut [25].

In August 2008, Flixster released an iPhone app[26], which allows users to access movie showtimes, reviews, and trailers. An iGoogle gadget[27] with similar functionality was released in October 2008. Flixter has also released an app for the Android mobile phones.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Page view provided by Alexa
  2. ^ Alexa site traffic details for Flixster.com, June 18, 2008
  3. ^ Quantcast site traffic details for Flixster.com, July 15, 2008
  4. ^ Snapshot of flixster.com at Compete.com
  5. ^ Snapshot of flixster.com at Complete.com
  6. ^ Flixster for Sale (Again)? by Kara Swisher
  7. ^ Flixster application page at Facebook.com accessed June 19, 2008
  8. ^ Flixster application page at Facebook.com accessed July 15, 2008
  9. ^ Flixster application page at Facebook.com accessed November 7, 2008
  10. ^ Facebook application directory accessed November 7, 2008
  11. ^ a b c American Venture Magazine Flixster interview
  12. ^ Flickr Address Import Page
  13. ^ Bebo Address Import Page
  14. ^ MySpace Address Import Page
  15. ^ Facebook Address Import Page
  16. ^ Is Flixster a Big Fat Spammer? at Internet Patrol
  17. ^ Is Flixster Using Deceptive Viral Practices? at Slashdot
  18. ^ Stop Spamming My Friends at Facebook.com
  19. ^ Flixster = bad at livejournal.com
  20. ^ Google Answers question about about lifting blacklisting of Flixster by Hotmail
  21. ^ http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/is-flixster-a-big-fat-spammer-are-they-hacking-your-aol-or-hotmail-address-book/
  22. ^ a b MySpace Movies Application Homepage
  23. ^ MySpace Most Popular Applications Page
  24. ^ Bebo Movies Application Page
  25. ^ Orkut Movies Application Homepage
  26. ^ iPhone app store homepage
  27. ^ iGoogle Movies app homepage
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flixster"