Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired social movie discovery site Flixster. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site Flixster acquired from News Corp. last year. Under the terms of the deal, Flixster will continue to operate independently and will expand its services beyond movie discovery. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Warner’s interest was originally reported by AllThingsD in March, and the price of the site was valued at between $60 million and $90 million. Flister has raised a total of $7 million in funding. → Read More
There has already been plenty of data out there suggesting that Apple had a monster holiday season. We’ll know for sure in a few weeks when they announced their earnings. For now though, we have to go by what third-party developers are seeing when it comes to app download numbers. And one company, Flixster, has given us some key details of how their mobile installs broke down from Christmas to New Year’s.
Flixster was able to hit a big milestone just in that one week span: just over a million installs on mobile devices. Of the 1,027,000 total installs during the week, 51 percent were on the iPhone, 30.1 percent were on Android devices, 10.5 percent were on the iPad. 7.9 percent were on RIM, and 0.5 percent were on Windows Phone. → Read More
A tipster today emailed to point out that Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein gave his own app a five star rating on iTunes, and then went on to trash the competition. Both Movie Night Out and Showtimes got one stars. “It tries to do too much and fails,” he said of Movie Night Out. And Showtimes “does not include a full list of movies – just the current ones.”
Frankly I don’t give a damn about that. If a CEO wants to trash his competition, I’ll just give him a high five for being up front about it and actually doing it under his real name.
But damn there’s something really disturbing in that screenshot showing his ratings (embedded below). In addition to fluffing up Flixster’s ratings and trashing his competitors (all a-ok by us since it’s under his real name), Greenstein takes a moment to write an impassioned review/love letter to 22 year old pop singer Vanessa Hudgens. I emailed Greenstein about it: → Read More
It was almost exactly two years ago that Flixster bought one of the original popular movie apps for the iPhone from a college sophomore. Now, two years later, their Flixster iPhone app is the top movie application on the platform. It’s also the top movie app on the Android and BlackBerry platforms as well. All told, the app has just crossed a massive 20 million installs.
What’s perhaps even more incredible is that among these users, 70% of them are active in the past 90 days. CEO Joe Greenstein credits the companies combination with popular movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (which they acquired from News Corp. in January). → Read More
Update CEO Joe Greenstein got back to us. He says, “We actually have not raised any new money recently.”
Movie ratings site Flixster raised issued $12.5 million in new shares funding, according to an SEC filing. The last time Flixster raised money was a $5 million Series B in April, 2008. The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $19.5 million.
Flixster operates both a Web site and a companion iPhone app, which is the most popular movie app in the App Store. The iPhone app lets consumers find nearby movies, add their ratings, and buy tickets. In January, the company bought Rotten Tomatoes from News Corp for an undisclosed sum. The combined reach of the two movie review services is 30 million people, according to the companies. → Read More
Forget the Academy Awards and the professional movie critics. Flixster users reviewed movies 55 million times in 2009, says the company, and they’ve released the top movies based on those ratings. At the top is Avatar with a 92% like rating (compared to 83% for the critics). Second is Star Trek with 91%, and The Blind Side comes in third with 90%.
The year’s lowest-rated movies were Whiteout (35%); Year One (32%); Dragonball Evolution (30%); Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (30%); and Transylmania (25%). I’d add Transformers 2 to that list of terrible movies, which is the top grossing film so far this year.
Here are the top ten: → Read More
Flixster, a social networking site for movie fans, is doing pretty well for itself in the mobile space. Name any smartphone platform, and there’s a good chance that the Flixster app has spent some time on it’s top download charts. iPhone? Yep. BlackBerry? Yep. Android and Palm webOS? Double yeps.
Earlier today, the company shared with us the news that they’d crossed over a fairly monumental landmark, along with the details surrounding updates for their apps on both Android and BlackBerry OS. → Read More
We just received word that tonight at 9pm PT Flixster will roll out its integration of Meebo Community IM, which adds instant messaging-like chat functionality to any website.
Out of 19 total launch partners, a couple more will push their implementations live over the next two weeks, then a large batch of partners will launch theirs in early 2009. We don’t have any word yet on which partners will be next and exactly when they plan to launch.
Watch a demo video of Flixster’s integration below: → Read More
Movie focused social network Flixster acquired a popular iPhone application called Movies.app (iTunes link) last week, and has re-released the application this evening. As far as we know, this is the first acquisition of an iPhone app. The price isn’t being disclosed. Movies.app was created by Jeffrey Grossman, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University. The application lets users find show times, watch trailers and get maps to local theaters and has been downloaded 250,000 times. Flixster has updated the app to give users full access to their database of 70,000 movies, so users will be able to look up older titles while at Blockbuster, etc. In the next version users will also be able to link their Flixter accounts to the application. Grossman will join Flixster as an consultant while attending school. He just got a heck of a resume bump. Flixster itself continues to do well. They’ve presumably recovered from the IAC acquisition train wreck that occurred a year ago (IAC reportedly walked away from a nearly closed deal). According to Comscore Flixster now has 6.5 million monthly visitors to its website and 13.6 million across its network (website plus Facebook and MySpace apps). They’re at about 250 million monthly page views if you include the Facebook/MySpace apps. CrunchBase Information Flixster iPhone 3G Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Update: Our live notes from Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote are here. Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here. Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example – Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications. Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event. We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute – perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday. Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
MySpace is rolling out a couple of announcements this morning a day ahead of Facebook’s F8 developer conference. The first is confirmation of our story that they are supporting OpenID, although they aren’t releasing any details (It’s our belief that they will first issue OpenID IDs, and possibly become a relying party later). The company is also announcing the launch of two new Data Availability integrations: Flixster and Eventful (we built what we believe is the first Data Availability app last month). MySpace is also making a core policy change to Data Availability. Previously third party services were not allowed to store any MySpace user profile information at all – they simply requested it from MySpace, used it to create a web page and then dumped it. Now MySpace is allowing 24-hour caches of profile information, and permanent caches of certain “core elements” of a user profile. Screen Shots: CrunchBase Information MySpace OpenID MySpace Data Availability Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The much anticipated IAC/Flixster acquisition isn’t going to happen, we’ve heard. The two parties got very close to a deal. Then, says a source, IAC summoned Flixster to a meeting in New York where they were told it wasn’t going to happen. Why fly the company all the way to New York just to reject them in person? It seems like the polite thing to do would have been to just tell them by phone. The reason for the change of heart? The price, rumored to have ballooned to $200 million or more, just wasn’t supported by Flixster’s declining unique visitor numbers – Flixster went from a high of 12 million monthly uniques in May 2007 to just 6.8 million in December. And IAC chief Diller’s ongoing battle with stockholder John Malone may have caused them to be more cautious with acquisitions. Whatever the reason, Flixster’s back on the market. With such a hefty price tag, however, they may be there for a long, long time. CrunchBase Information Flixster Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
In late October we reported on well placed rumors that IAC was in talks to acquire movie-centered social network Flixster. Those discussions reportedly stalled, likely over IAC’s preferred deal structure (partial buyout with an option for the rest) and/or Flixster’s declining traffic and visitor count. Now perhaps, those discussions are back on track. One source says the deal is done. Another says the parties have been in serious discussions over the last couple of weeks and are “very close,” but no deal has been closed. Both agree the price is over the $150 million being discussed last year, and may be as high as $200 million or more. The deal is being structured as a cash plus earnout transaction. Flixster had an up and down year in 2007. They started off strong (“growing like a weed“) and have grown to 43 million user home pages. Traffic grew to 12 million unique worldwide visitors and 358 million page views in May. But it has fallen since then. In November, Flixster had just 8.2 million visitors and 139 million page views (source: Comscore). Over 1.2 billion movie reviews have been written by users. Those declining visitor and page view numbers don’t seem to be a concern to IAC, according to our sources. They just like the company and its loyal users. Flixster, based in San Francisco, raised $2 million in funding in February 2007 from Lightspeed Ventures and a number of angel investors. I’m expecting to hear more news in the next couple of weeks. With the current information we’ve received, I put a over-under on a deal getting done with IAC at about 66%. CrunchBase Information Flixster Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Fast growing movie-centered social network Flixster has been making the rounds with potential buyers, we’ve heard from multiple sources. And IAC may have submitted a letter of intent in the last week or so. The San Francisco based company has had a meteoric rise since launching in January 2006, although Comscore suggests growth has stagnated over the last few months – worldwide unique visitors went from just over 12 million in May 2007 to just 8.4 million in September, a drop of about 30%. Compete and Alexa show a similar decline beginning in May, but with a subsequent full recovery and then some. IAC’s offer, we’ve heard, may value the company at $150 million. However, IAC has a tendency to do complicated investment deals where they get a minority or majority stake in the business v. an outright acquisition. They own a majority stake College Humor/Vimeo (same parent company) and GarageGames, and a minority stake (rumored at 25%) in iLike through an investment by subsidiary Ticketmaster. Flixster may not be very interested in a partial buyout, but interest from IAC could lead others to enter a bid, too. More on this as it develops. CrunchBase Information Flixster CollegeHumor Vimeo GarageGames iLike Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Recommendation based social network Trusted Opinion has raised $1.3 million Series A, although the investors are not being disclosed (we did ask). Palo Alto based Trusted Opinion offers community based product ratings and recommendations in a social networking setting. The focus is on friends recommending things to friends, such as movies and DVD’s. The company added support for Netflix queuing in July, allowing members to port recommendations into Netflix. Trusted Opinion has dumped the awful logo Michael noted in February, and with a some-what better new look has grown to 350,000 registered members and is adding 3,000 new members a day. Trusted Opinion’s service overlaps with a number of other social networks and other startups including Yelp and Flixster. CrunchBase Information Trusted Opinion Yelp Flixster Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. → Read More
After reporting that Flixster closed a highly competitive venture round earlier today, I did some digging on available growth statistics for the service. According to recent Comscore data, Flixster has had a terrific period of unique visitor and page view growth over the last several months. Alexa and Compete also show a solid growth trend. Comscore data graphs are below. They show Flixster growing from 4 million to 31 million monthly page views from March – December 2006. In that same period, unique visitors grew from 328,000 per month to just over 1 million. Comscore generally under reports younger, smaller sites, but the trend is clear. Flixster is still a small social network, but the growth trends are way up and to the right. Venture capitalists, not surprisingly, like to see this in a potential investment. → Read More
Flixster, a San Francisco based social network where users rate and discuss movies, closed a round of financing today with LightSpeed Ventures. This was a small round of financing – $2 million or possibly less, but there was apparently heavy competition from Sequoia Capital in the deal (and possibly Kleiner Perkins). Flixster has recently seen very heavy user registration and page view growth, so a sub-$10 million valuation, which this deal almost certainly was, could be considered quite cheap. There are also rumors that major studios got involved in the Flixster bidding as well, either as an investment or an outright acquisition. Look for an announcement in the coming weeks. Update: Comments from founders in the comments (on their way to Aruba apparently) confirming the deal, and traffic stats in this post. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
