Flixster, the social network for movie reviews, reportedly raises VC round
Flixster is a San Francisco Web site that lets you share movie ratings and reviews with friends.
It has reportedly raised a round of financing of $2 million or so from Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed Venture Partners, though we haven’t confirmed this. [Update: One authoritative, albeit off-record source tells VentureBeat the funding was more than $2M]
We haven’t mentioned this company before, but it is noteworthy for its scorching marketing tactics. By November, after just ten months of operation, it said it had signed up 5 million registered users, who had posted 190 million movie recommendations. It drove this with aggressive policies, such as automating a way to invite friends on your contact list with messages that reportedly weren’t necessarily always true. Upon signing up, Flixster engages you immediately, asking you to rate 50 films to determine your preferences, and offers you a profile with spiffy movie-star avatars and backgrounds — and thereby gathering quite a bit of data about you. It places your movie reviews to the “movies” section on your MySpace page.
Last but not least, there’s the gawk appeal that such a site has for young people: Page after page of good looking folks to look at.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
