Rotten Tomatoes Uses Facebook To Connect With Users In Real Time

With
Facebook’s help, movie-review hub Rotten Tomatoes on Friday debuted new social tools to facilitate personalized recommendations based on users’ tastes and reviews from friends.

The initiative
has been in the works since Flixster Inc. — owner of online movie community Flixster.com — acquired Rotten Tomatoes from IGN Entertainment at the beginning of the year.

“Flixster has been a
social movie discovery service since the beginning,” said Joe Greenstein, co-founder and CEO of Flixster. “There was a lot of technology work that needed to happen for us to fully integrate the new
site with our platform.”

In partnership with Facebook, Rotten Tomatoes is bringing Facebook’s instant personalization program to the site, which means users can see the opinions of their Facebook
friends immediately upon coming to Rotten Tomatoes.

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“This integration lets us instantly personalize Rotten Tomatoes for our users based on only their public profile information — nothing private
is ever shared,” Greenstein points out. “The benefit to users is that we’re able to sort through the billions of movie ratings and recommendations we have and instantly show them the ones that are
most relevant for them.”

For advertisers, the ability to personalize the site means Rotten Tomatoes can show more relevant ads based on genres and subjects, according to Greenstein. Also, “having
so many users be socially connected with so many friends … helps spread amazing word-of-mouth.”

Presently, Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes claim to attract over 30 million monthly visitors online
and via mobile devices.

Per the deal acquisition at the beginning of the year, News Corp.-owned IGN took a minority stake in Flixster, while Roy Bahat, president of IGN Entertainment, joined
Flixster’s board of directors.

The acquisition allowed Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes to combine their audiences for advertisers, offering greater scale, reach, and potential for cross-promotions
with ad sales across both sites.