Flixster Hits 10 million Registered Users
Michael Arrington
40 comments »
You don’t see this every day. San Francisco based Flixster’s growth, which shot up late last year, shows no signs of slowing anytime soon.
Joe Greenstein, Flixster’s CEO, told me by email that they now have ten million registered users and up to two million movie ratings completed daily (380+ million movie ratings to date). That’s a lot of (very valuable) user generated data. Comscore continues to show a sharp rise in page view and unique monthly visitors as well. Compare the charts below (U.S. user data only), which show data through February 2007, to the December stats we published in February.
There have been some complaints about Flixster’s aggressiveness in getting users to invite friends to the service as well. Like all services, they have to be careful about where they draw the line.
Flixster’s revenues will start to increase as large and highly relevant movie marketing budgets start to really focus on this targeted audience. Fandango now claims to generate only half its revenue from ticket sales, the rest coming from advertising and other sources. Comscore says Flixster is already bigger than Fandango, and moving in the right direction v. IMDB (see last table below).
LightSpeed Ventures was very smart to invest in this company, which is still just seven people. They are now hiring three more. If you’re looking for a job in San Francisco, apply. This thing has liquidity event written all over it.
Mike - Wow, thx for the kind words!
All - Flixster is looking to add just a couple great people to our small team. If you like what we’re doing and enjoy the challenges and rewards of being a key part of a team that intends to fight hard to stay small - please take a minute to check out our jobs page and send us a note.
http://www.flixster.com/userAuth.do?aboutUs=
~joe
Great work Joe and team. I am a movie buff and have played around with several sites (whattorent, movielens, flixter and others) and was impressed from day one with flixter. My main draw was to identify less mainstream movies that I might like by seeing what others like me enjoy - it has worked fantastic. My long runs on the treadmill this winter have been a lot more pleasant as I enjoyed watching movies I had never heard of - KissKissBangBang and Lucky Number Slevin - being two recent examples. There is still a lot more they can do with this site, but for a 7 person team, what they built is awesome. I just hope that the ultimate acquirer does not screw it up - or let it stagnate. eGroups for example, seems worse now than before it was acquired by Yahoo a long time ago - when it was very cool and ahead of the curve.
I think they need to watch the marketing some. It’s great to see such growth, but at what cost? I was invited by someone I didn’t really know all that well, but joined anyway. I notified 6 colleagues and friends. They’ve all been continuously hit with followup emails, even the friends that didn’t ultimately register (emails like “you haven’t finishing registering yet! please come back and finish!”).
I’ve caught a lot of flack for inviting them in to this service because of their negative experiences with getting constant followups. What I was shown yesterday was that emails were being sent out from Flixster which looked like they came from me, without my consent. Perhaps I consented in the ‘accept these terms’ agreement - I don’t know. It still has felt a bit over the top.
This has been the only service I’ve promoted or recommended to people where I’ve had numerous, vocal and repeated complaints from my friends.
Amazing to see these numbers and growth, this is an example of the true spirit of Web 2.0. Streamlined, efficient operation with massive growth. Fine example of why so much VC funding is given to these startups. This is how its done! Good Job Flixster!
The good thing about this service is its subject matter will continually be giving Flixster more and more content.
The bad thing, yet another Web 2.0 social network. Eventually these social networks will likely be a Jeopardy answer in 10 yrs under the subject “Internet fads”
I have been wrong before, but im starting to get a social network overload.
Right - this is a spam site. It keeps sending emails to my friends without my consent and they are getting very annoyed.
They have gone way over the line.
Also - it is not how many registered users you have but the ones who are ACTIVE.
User Generated Content and other social computing methods are becoming more popular with each passing day. Say web 2.0 Revolution wouldn’t be wrong.
http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
Spamalicious! If I get one more email from them I’m gonna go Rambo on somebody!
I like the site, however I have reviewed 980 Movies (yes 980) at Netflix, is there a way to import all those reviews into the Flixster?
If Flixster likes to spam, they should hire Rajeev. He is the spam king!
I think it’s a good site, it’s basically like Netflix except open to the public, and you dont have to be “friends” with someone to see their data. I really think Netflix should have taken this approach, rather than having their system completely closed off to the outside world. Netflix is already really popular and successful, but if their system was open to all, they would naturally just get that many more paying customers using their service. Like someone else said here, i have tons of ratings and reviews on Netflix already, and don’t really want to have to start all over again at another site.
A great site.
I wonder what will happen, though, once the copyright owners of all those photos come knocking and ask to be reimbursed?
Spam gets where they are. It asks for your yahoo account and password and then takes all your yahoo contacts and email as if you were sending out.
10 million Registered goothe my site not is possibile????
Flixster is a fun site, but they do send a lot of emails. Recently, members have been contacting me to chat about things besides movies. It’s kinda fun to see a virtual community springing up in an environment focused on movies. I hope that as the system grows, people will continue sharing and being friendly to each other.
Does anyone know if IMDB is doing anything similar to Flixster. It would be a shame if the “big guy” stands on the shoulder of the little guy. Then again, it happens a lot in business.
Reality check:
I am exactly the type of person that this site is marketed toward. I like movies, I have an IMDB account, I have a NetFlix account, I buy and sell DVD’s from Amazon.com, I speak English, I read reviews before every movie I see, I actually tried to buy movie tickets online, I work full-time on an Internet-connected computer, and I have a more-than-fleeting interest in Web 2.0 startups.
I literally never heard of this site until I read this TechCrunch story. Yet, 10 million people have already decided ahead of me that they want to be members of this (English-only) site? I don’t think so.
From the posts above, my guess is that a lot of people signed up just to stop the SPAM. Their sign-up process is dead easy and there is no verification of any of the information (in particular, no verification that the user gave a valid email address). Basically, they built a “registered user factory” that happens to look like a movie site.
Contrast that with the ThinkFree posting right after this one. That post states that 10% of their 250,000 users visit the ThinkFree at least once a week.
My questions are:
(1) How many people visited the site after their initial sign-up visit? (How many people didn’t sign up just to stop SPAM?)
(2) How many users visit the site at least once a week or once a month?
(3) Why didn’t TechCrunch ask these questions to start with? And if they did, why not note that the company refused to disclose the information?
UNBELIEVABLE THEY STARTED THIS THING FOR $50,000
http://DEBTISDUMB.com
I’ve tried fandango but never flixster have to give it a good try…:)
as someone said earlier, it is how many active users they have.
When you see numbers growing the way the site is growing, it doesn’t matter whether users are that active or not. They’re getting free marketing and a huge amount of user generated content both of which are very valuable. From that base, they just need to build more features to improve retention and clean up their practices so they don’t dilute their brand.
I’m not necessarily defending anything they do, but it’s much easier to take a service with a ton of users and make it better than it is to take a good service and make it extremely popular.
A very innovative site, with a nice design and a good usability.
Brian’s comments is 1000% bang on. I’m positive their return traffic is not as impressive as this 10M registered user figure.
Compete.com says they have only 1.7M people as of Feb 2007.
I’m surprised Techcrunch didn’t drill down on this figure. I’ve also never heard of the site until this article - the figures simply sound too aggressive.
All of the above aside, good on the Flixster team for building such a feature-rich site on such a small team. The underlying premise is not rocket science, but the functionality they’ve built around the idea is pretty impressive.
How many of the 10m “users” are legit and how many are created by a random data load perl script into MySql?
This is a spam site. I’ve registered to check it out, and I’ve gotten at least one email every two days ever since.
Hey Drama - I did drill down, with the comscore numbers. They certainly don’t have 10 m uniques per month, but Myspace doesn’t have a unique = registered monthly number either. The key stats are those comscore numbers. Those trends are just amazing. Flixster continues to grow at a really amazing rate even though they are larger than most other movie sites already.
The movie recommendations suck.
What is so great about this site??
This has about as much revenue potential as Evite. Run run away.
This site is EVIL!
I just logged on, created an account and then wanted to add some friends. So, I clicked the Yahoo Mail account, and assumed that I’d be able to select who I invited. No… it just fired off a mass mail to hundreds (thousands?!?) of contacts with no warning/selection option?!?
What are you thinking? I would give $10 to be able to undo that action. It’s going to suck so many more people into the same behavior.
Joe (Flixter co-founder), you and your staff should be ashamed!
Dave
@ Dave -
Obviously that should never happen - Flixster always presents a confirmation screen where you select whom you want to invite if you are using an address book.
I just looked up your account and from our end it doesn’t look like you sent invitations to anyone at all. If you think i am wrong, drop me a comment at the URL above and we can figure it out.
Best,
Joe
Michael, the graphs are very misleading. The first two graphs have Flixter.com in red, but the third graph has IMDB.com in red and Flixter.com in green. When I first looked at the third graph I was thinking “Where is IMDB.com?” before I realized that the red line represents IMDB.com decimating everybody in this space. And, it also shows that IMDB.com is faster than all the others combined, even though it is already several times more popular than all of them combined.
Also, notice that the first graph and the third graph are graphing the same data. The first graph’s scale is set to exaggerate the recent alleged growth of Flixter.com–the growth looks huge in the first graph but basically just a blip in the third graph.
The other misleading thing about the graph is the omission of Amazon.com. If I want to read reviews of DVD’s, I am going to do it on Amazon.com and IMDB.com (owned by Amazon.com). If I buy a DVD, I am probably going to buy it from Amazon.com.
Also, why is IMDB.com fluctuating so wildly in the third graph?
i’m not surprised at those growth numbers…considering how much advertising the flix is doing - i see ads everywhere online as well as in the snail mail
Brian - I don’t think their misleading, you just have to read the legends.
These are comscore-generated graphs, so I have no control over the colors.
The users in the system are fake. See
http://www.flixster.com/user/w.....hTalk=true
All of the comments are from fake users.
As far as I know IMDB has all of that, but Flixster is still a huge success - why?
pingback from http://dotmad.blogspot.com/200.....rtups.html
OK — now I’m ashamed.
Flixster (Joe / others), I apologize. Wish I could pull my comment above.
Here’s what happened:
a) I quickly registered for your service and filled out the normal stuff in the new user pipeline
b) I clicked to upload contacts from an old Yahoo address book (i would have used my current Outlook list, but i didn’t have that option)
c) it gave me a message saying that I didn’t read fully, but that I thought said “none of your friends are current users”… so i just ignored it and typed in 3 friend’s emails
d) about 15 minutes later, i got a friend add from someone with my brother’s name, which is a fairly uncommon spelling (’Jon’) (note that i didn’t invite him directly, so i assumed that he was in the Yahoo email blast that I didn’t think I sent… or that I thought maybe I misread and that it HAD sent a mass mail without allowing me to check the people)
e) sooo…. i jumped to a bad conclusion that you blasted all of my friends…
After your comment, I called my brother and asked him if he added me, and he said “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. So, I realized that it was just a bad coincidence… that someone did a search on my last name right after I joined and added me as a friend, and happened to have my brother’s last name.
phew…
sorry…
Note to Self — you can’t retract comments on TechCrunch
p.s. I’ll buy you and any other Flixster’s a beer/coffee at Web 2.0 Expo as an apology…
House of fucking Cards.
No worries Dave. Really appreciate the follow-up post.
The engineers can have coffee - i’ll take the beer!
Best,
J
I’ve been on Flixster now for 362 days now and it’s developed so much
There have been one or two problems with Spammers and n00bs but it’s been fun
its agood site