LOS ANGELES — Movie critics are about to lose one of their more avid online fans.
MovieReviewIntelligence.com, an Internet site that aggregates reviews from dozens of newspapers, magazines and Web publications, will cease operating at the end of April, its editor and publisher, David A. Gross, said on Thursday.
“We just don’t have access to the big networks” of Web viewers needed to sustain the site, Mr. Gross said in a telephone interview. He referred, for instance, to movie-oriented sites like Rottentomatoes.com, a review-oriented service that was bought by Warner Brothers in 2011 and has a major presence on Apple’s iTunes.
Mr. Gross, a former marketing executive at 20th Century Fox, started Movie Review Intelligence in 2009, at a time when professional film critics, threatened by layoffs and newspaper closings, were thought by some to be a vanishing breed. The site took a sophisticated approach to its data, looking at trends among national, alternative, and regional press, and using complex graphics to spot the strengths and weaknesses in films.
Through it all, Mr. Gross took a strong stance in behalf of critics, who, he maintained, have continued to affect the reception of movies, even as social media and mass marketing often seemed to override judgments about quality.
“Reviews are more influential now than ever before,” Mr. Gross said in a farewell statement he expected to post on his site.
He added: “As moviegoers see more reviews at the point of the movie transaction—the mobile ticket purchase, the pay-TV download, the computer streaming—we will continue to see better reviewed movies over-perform at the box-office, and poorly reviewed movies under-perform.”
After founding the site as an independent venture, Mr. Gross searched in vain for a business ally that might give it the reach of a powerhouse like Amazon’s film data service, IMDb.com. (Another competitor, Metacritic.com, also produces scores based on reviews of games, television shows, and music.)
Since initiating coverage in June of 2009, Movie Review Intelligence analyzed the reviews of about 3,125 movies, Mr. Gross said. It has been attracting about 400,000 hits, and 85,000 visitors, each month.
Asked about his plans, Mr. Gross said he expected to become a consultant — and perhaps to sleep in occasionally, instead of waking up to collect overnight reviews.
“I get up at 4 a.m. to make sure we’re current,” he said.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/movie-aggregation-site-to-close/?partner=rss&emc=rss