History
Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 12, 1999, as a spare time project by Senh Duong. His goal in creating Rotten Tomatoes was "to create a site where people can get access to reviews from a variety of critics in the US". His inspiration came when, as a fan of Jackie Chan, Duong started collecting all the reviews of Chan's movies as they were coming out in the United States. The first movie reviewed on Rotten Tomatoes was Your Friends & Neighbors. The Web site was an immediate success, receiving mentions by Yahoo!, Netscape, and USA Today within the first week of its launch; it attracted "600 – 1000 daily unique visitors" as a result.
Duong teamed up with University of California, Berkeley classmates Patrick Y. Lee and Stephen Wang, his former partners at the Berkeley, California-based web design firm Design Reactor, to pursue Rotten Tomatoes on a full-time basis, officially launching on April 1, 2000.
In June 2004, IGN Entertainment acquired Rottentomatoes.com for an undisclosed sum. In September 2005, IGN was bought by News Corp's Fox Interactive Media. In January 2010, IGN sold the Web site to Flixster, which produces the most popular movie ratings app for the iPad and other mobile devices. The combined reach of both companies is 30 million unique visitors a month across all different platforms, according to the companies. In May 2011, Flixster was acquired by Warner Bros.
Rotten Tomatoes users can create and join groups that allow them to discuss different aspects of film, and one group – "The Golden Oyster Awards" – has its members vote for their winners of different awards, much like the Oscars or Golden Globes. However, when Flixster bought Rotten Tomatoes, they disbanded the groups, saying: "The Groups area has been discontinued to pave the way for new community features coming soon. In the meantime, please use the Forums to continue your conversations about your favorite movie topics."
As of February 2011, new community features have shown up and others have been removed. For example, users are no longer able to sort out fresh ratings from rotten ratings, and vice versa.
Read more about this topic: Rotten Tomatoes
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