News Corp, Note From The Editor | featured news

Like most, I originally thought News Corp was acquiring Flixster. Instead, it was Flixster acquiring Rotten Tomatoes. I think it's a great fit. Rotten Tomatoes's aggregated critics ratings combined with Flixster's user ratings, Rotten Tomatoes's premium content combined with Flixster's user-generated content. The combined audience of 30M worldwide uniques definitely puts them up there with Yahoo! Movies and Moviefone, the second and third largest movie sites on the web respectively. IMDB is number one, by far. And it's gonna be tough for Flixster/RT to surpass them. When you search for a movie or celebrity, IMDB is usually the first result on Google (and other search engines); and that's the main reason for its dramatic growth in the last couple years. If Flixster/RT can become a more authoritative source than IMDB and surpass its rankings in search engines, then it can become numero uno. If not, being number 2 ain't bad.

Rupert Murdoch, and a couple of his fellow newspaper-owners, say that traffic coming from search engines and aggregation sites are worthless. They call it "drive-by traffic." These users only come, read one article and then leave. For an industry profusely bleeding users and revenue, you would think they wouldn't be so discriminatory when it comes to users consuming their content.