Flixster is a social movie site allowing users to share movie ratings, discover new movies and meet others with similar movie taste.
Flixster operates four main properties: The destination website at Flixster.com, a Facebook application, a MySpace application & a Bebo application.
Site statistics
As of 21 April 2008, Flixster's home page boasted the following statistics:[1]
- User Homepages: 54,662,523
- Movie Ratings: 1,590,679,419
- Quiz Questions: 4,147,781
- Movies: 39,096
- Actors: 157,446
- Photos: 1,552,933
- Videos: 397,077
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.[2] 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.[3]
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[4].
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 [5], 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[6] compared to over 8 minutes a year before.
The Flixster application in Facebook, called "Movies", claims over fifteen million users,[7]. Actual daily active users is considerably less than the total, and has been steadily dropping:
| Date |
Active Daily Users |
| December 4, 2007 |
>800,000[8] |
| June 19, 2008 |
482,542[9] |
| July 15, 2008 |
412,401[10] |
This is a common trend among Facebook applications, attributed to what has been described as "app fatigue".
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."[12].
Although Flixster claims this procedure is an industry standard used by other services[13][14][15][16], 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."[17]
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?" [18], " Is Flixster Using Deceptive Viral Practices?"[19], "Stop Spamming My Friends"[20], "Flixster = bad" [21].
At one point email from Flixster to Hotmail users was being filtered and deleted as spam.[22]
A Google search on the words "flixster" and "spam" yields 57,300 page results[23] as of 13 September 2008. However, this is actually a low number compared to that of other social networking sites: "MySpace spam" yields over 9 million [24], and "Bebo spam" displays 3.1 million[25].
Flixster's on-site messaging and privacy policy states that Flixster does not retain email account logins and passwords, and only uses the information provided to help users to invite their address book friends.[26] However, there is no independent verification that this stated policy is being followed.
Applications on Other Platforms
In June 2007, Flixster created the "Movies" application on the popular social utility, Facebook.
Flixster released an application on MySpace in March 2008[27]. As of July 2008, the app has 3,923,506 users,[28] making it the second most popular application on the MySpace platform[29].
In addition to the Facebook and MySpace apps, Flixster has also developed a Movies application for Bebo[30].
References
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