Flixster Growing Like A Weed

The growth in last few months is exponential. How did they manage to do this ?

This is something that IMDB should have done a long time ago.

A good niche and amazing growth! I guess getting big studios involved at the early stage did the trick for them.

Well Done Flixster!

Hey, everyone likes movies right. If there was ever a social niche crying out for something like this, it’s film. Everyone has an opinion about film.

Do they a competitor in this niche?

BlogVison is a alive.
Yes I know I left out the I.
Blockbuster is old and tired.
Amazing what 5 years can do.

This site is great. I just got sucked in for ~20 minutes when I just wanted to “take a look”. I especially hope it does well though, just so there’s a successful “-ster” site I can point to as proof that names really don’t matter that much — it’s all about what the site does for the use-ahr.

A friend sent me an invite to this site, then after Yet Another Sign Up it demanded my Yahoo email username and password - to which I refused and closed the page.

Later, I started getting junkmail from Flixster, even though I closed the account.

Web 2.0 phenom or just an old fashion trick to get you and everyone you know email address to send spam?

Isnt this like RottenTomatoes.com ?

As Todd said, gimme your email addresses so I can get more email addresses from your friends and all their friends too. That’s how. Awesome strategy.

This is a dumb investment. These guys are just a bunch of spammers, using the guise of a movie community.

They got the hits to prove themselves…their marketing works !! I have never used them, but that is some growth!!

I would just like to point out that I was the first to notice their EXPLOSIVE growth…check the first comment on the post about their funding.

Mike, you’re welcome.

Yet another company built off the back of copywritten material to draw in as many eyeballs to the site as possible. After you get the eyeballs and the VC money, plaster it with ads in a feeble attempt to monetize. Next, ensure you pay very little bandwidth costs by leeching off of youtube video servers and finally add a dash of network effects to lock those eyeballs into your “business model”. The originality of this team astounds….

Congrats to yet another web 2.0 company contributing to the bubble like times we now live it. I hope you get shut down by copywrite holders and/or youtube soon…..

How did they manage to get an exponential growth in last few months…. Any Idea? Tell us some tips …..

anyone have any idea why monthly page impressions fell by a third in two months (34 million in september 06 to 22 million in November 06) yet uniqie visitors increased by 20% over the same period? Also, if there are c. 10m users (see Flixster Home Page) but 1 million uniques per month, doesn’t that mean only 1 in 10 users actually visit each month?

while I have my calculator out…0.0003% of users commented on Night at the Museum - not sure what that says about usage, any thoughts?

Maybe the addition of AJAX to the site lowered impressions?

what is the model? advertising?

Also… how much content is too much? If you can’t get solid ratings and reviews that users value, how valuable is the context of the site?

Jaman has a twist on this for indie films.

paul- not sure how you are doing your math. i see
134k ratings for night at the museum (if you count
Want To See & Not Interested as ratings) and 8.5M
registered users (from homepage). isn’t that 1.5%?

still doesn’t sound that great to me…

but for comparison, it is 6x more ratings than
Yahoo Movies (24k)

Paul, I agree. I very much like the page, think it is well done and I wish it all the best. But I very much doubt the numvers. I counted the numbers of users online on flixster back in December a couple of times, I never saw more than 1500 - 3500 users online. Out of 10 Million? My experience from such communities show different relations of users-online/users. And also couldn’t figure out where this exponential growth in PIs or Unique visits comes from….search for the term flixster within myspace (well, myspace certainly be a big source of traffic) and the number of hits is ok but still not enough to make 10 Mio (!!!) users a number I believe in. I rather think they currently have between 300k and 1 Mio. users and use 5 and 10 Million just for marketing purposes…

I’ve seen some reports before suggesting that their growth is due to the fact that they almost force you to invite your friends (and provide login information for Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. so that they can invite your addressbook automatically). Haven’t signed up so I don’t know if that’s accurate but it sure would explain a lot if it is.

The two metrics that we don’t see in these stats and are more likely to demonstrate success (read monetization) are:

1. The average # of members online on a daily basis (vin above touches on that)

2. The time spent by the members on the site. Here, median is a much better indicator than the average.

The stats reported in MA’s blog don’t show us that. Jeremy Liew (from LSVP, one of the investors) might know for sure but he ain’t telling :-).

Thanks for digging up those great stats.

They have numbers on their side.

Today’s small social network is tomorrow’s multibillion-dollar acquisition.

Again, how is this not like Rotten Tomatoes? Other than the fact it looks HORRIBLE and rotten tomatoes looks good. Sheez.

For those of u that are complaining about their lack of their originality…u need 2 get a life outside of blogging. Quit hating and start doing something productive with your life besides sitting on your fat a$$ all day whining and moaning about other people’s venture!!!

If u’re so smart/creative then go start something!!!!

NeoTechie: just for reference, no social network has sold for $1+ billion (although you could theoretically consider YouTube a social network in some form). Obviously, it’s been reported that Facebook turned down a $1 billion offer, but when you look at the number of all the social networks versus how many have actually sold for a sum of note, the odds are against any startup, regardless of how many users it has. And there are a lot of social networks and Web 2.0 services that have good usage figures.

That said, they’ve got an interesting niche with some possible monetization potential. If the stats here are accurate and the activity levels are good, this has a chance at doing quite well, although I wouldn’t put my money on a billion dollar acquisition.

Drama 2.0 said: “just for reference, no social network has sold for $1+ billion”

Well, how about Mixi’s IPO on Mothers in Tokyo last year?

I got an auto-gen email from a friend to sign up for Flixster today. I clicked through to the site, entered my info, and it forced me to enter my yahoo email login. Then it imported all of my contacts and pre-selected them all to receive a request to join. I couldn’t un-select the few hundred contacts all at once, rather would have had to un-select each one individually. At this point, I closed the browser window. I suspect these sorts of aggressive “viral” tactics are how they grew so fast…

This is going to be dobizo.com traffic in a couple of months…bet that

You got me Drama 3.0. For what it’s worth, in an IPO, obviously not every share of the company is sold to the public. Mixi raised $93 million through the sale of shares and the market cap (i.e. total value of every share) was over $1 billion (not sure where it’s at now). If they sold every share, of course the price would drop. So it’s not entirely analagous to a $1 billion acquisition.

Nonetheless the point remains. With literally dozens of very popular social networks, even more decent attempts and thousands of wannabes (including those using third-party licensed software), the previous poster’s indication that these billion dollar deals are just happening left and right and that a decent social network with some nice growth is well on its way to a blockbuster M&A exit reflects the hype of Web 2.0 more than it does the reality.

Drama 2.0,

Ok, you got a point there.

BTW, are you the same person as Dead 2.0?

s - I was counting comments, not ratings, as comments take some degree of effort and so are an interesting measure of ‘involvement’ in the site. I agree with your view on the ratings though…

Everything depends on your financial clout and marketing prowess.

http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

Any idea what the exit strategy is for these guys? Eyeballs are great. Where’s the cash flow?

And the Flixster guys are leveraging the managed colocation of Unitedlayer to help their growth - in today’s internet growth, the less you worry about network and colo, the better…(shameless plug as they are a client) -

I think a site like http://www.dvdspot.com would be more successful and they are also growing very steadily with 10,000+ members now. I don’t think you need all this multimedia content to make the site successful. I think if DVDSpot could create an engine that can recommened other people’s movie collections that closely match to yours, then that would be more useful.

Growing like a weed is a good analogy, since the site has is a collection of co-opted (to use a nice word) UI and design elements. I’ll also knock it for having a leader who, perhaps unintentionally, uploaded a photo that resembles Ben Stiller’s character in Zoolander.

Then there’s accuracy. IMDB.COM still gets my vote for accuracy, but I will admit that IMDB needs to work on its community aspects. Then again, they are more geared toward the film professionals (of all levels).

A quick comparison of Harrison Ford’s profile on both sites shows a 10 film difference from IMDB (33 on Flixster and 43 on IMDB). There is even one non-confirmed film on Flixster that you can’t find on IMDB at all (which means it most likely truely is ficticious). Its definately not accurate and I guarentee that the celebs don’t actually monitor their profiles on Flixster.

i love it. i like to meet new people and to talk to theme.

You are in some fuckin crazy shit man!!!!!!!!!!

I LOVE FLIXSTER!

Flixter consumed a few friends last night, its growth an obvious sham; the go after your address book like a cheap can-o-spam-mail.

Then mail everyone on the list; and bingo you and your friends are now compromised….

BTW they offer up a dead-end location for their physical address:
Flixster Inc
208 Utah St 4th Floor
San Francisco, California 94103
United States
14155095639

which points back to another place (equally hidden)
OrgName: United Layer, Inc.
OrgID: LAER
Address: 1019 Mission Street
City: San Francisco
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94103
Country: US

Now look up their DNS (you’d figure right there on-site hmmm–WRONG)

Searching for http://www.flixster.com A record at dns4.nettica.com. [69.41.170.223]: Reports http://www.flixster.com.
———-and look stranger still they get DNS not in California but from a large domain hoster in TEXAS:

OrgName: 1-800-HOSTING, Inc.
OrgID: 1800H
Address: 3509 Oak Lawn Ave
City: DALLAS
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75219
————————but wait, who owns this DNS Server well gee nettica.com comes to us from————————-
CustName: Fresh Lab
Address: POB 268
City: Medina
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98039
Country: US

So then whats the real scoop and who’s hunting down your email address

I got a few “flixster invitation” emails from friends, and so I published something on my blog Proud Geek about Flixster “stealing” addresses from users. The blog entry is at:
http://proudgeek.wordpress.com.....er-me-not/

A few minutes ago, I got a comment on that blog post from one of the Flixster founders. The comment is below. Wanted to hear your thoughts about this.
———–
hi proudgeek,

just stumbled upon your site via technorati… I am one of the founders of flixster…

FYI, we absoilutely encourage new users to invite friends to the site (its about sharing movie ratings - not very useful without friends) - but we don’t force anyone to do so and certainly never “steal” addresses from anyone’s contact book. (We offer the ability to select friends to invite from your yahoo/hotmail/etc address book - but again, its optional and you get to choose who to invite and we don’t store your password at all)

Anyway - sorry to hear you had a bad experience. Feel free to ping me back by email if you have questions…

best,
joe

Anyone is a complete fool if theygive their email password to any random stranger. Totals idiots. You have no idea what they really do with these passwords.

This company reeks of sleeze, suckage and possible illegal activity.

They get you to invite your friends by including a script in the invitation e-mail that you didn’t want to recieve that sends the same invite to everyone in your email contacts.
It’s disguised in the invite as their homepage http://www.flixster.com.

I just posted an update to my Proud Geek blog — link below. Basically, I found that Flixster didn’t automatically log the user in and steal his/her address book. But I also decided that Flixster could be better about warning the user about the fact that his/her address book would be “harvested.” Plus, I found that even though the user could customize the Flixster invitation emails, the emails actually being sent out didn’t include any of the customizations. I also made some recommendations for improvements.

http://proudgeek.wordpress.com.....xster-mix/