Metacritic - The Grand Daddy of Mashups
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Metacritic, now a property of CNET, has been around
since before the last bubble burst. The site has a unique system for aggregating and
combining the reviews of movies, books, music and video games. This site is very
different from today's popular review sites, which thrive on communities and social
contribution. Metacritic's claim to fame is different, because it is an aggregator and
does not require any input from the user. It simply collects relevant content, organizes
it well and then adds a unique scoring system that turns metacritic into an instant
recommendation engine.
Even though metacritic is not new and is not based based on the latest trends, one look at its Alexa chart is enough to realize that the company is delivering a valuable service.
This is because we all love to find good information without exerting much (search) effort. Particularly if the information is quantitative, meaningful and of good quality, it's hard to resist. And that's exactly what metacritic is doing.
Review aggregator
The basic idea behind metacritic is simple - aggregate reviews from different sources and present them all in one place. For example, here is the list of reviews for Little Miss Sunshine:
This is just a simple aggregation of reviews from major movie critics across the Web (from newspapers etc). The value was there already, metacritic just brings it together in one place. However, metacritic also delivers additional value by turning the reviews into scores and then coming up with a cumulative score.
Metascores - the scoring system behind metacritic
In addition to the list of reviews, metacritic shows a score for each movie:
Here is how this score is computed. Each critic's review is given a score on a scale of 1 to 100. Then, since not all critics are made equal, the system assigns a weight to each critic. Finally, it computes the total score based on the weighted average of the individual scores. Here is how metacritic's scores should be interpreted:
Because the system pulls together all available reviews, the resulting score is a good indicator of what critics at large think about the movie. If you trust that metacritic has gotten rid of all bugs over the last 8 years, then the score should be a good guide for you.
Using Metascores to compare movies
Metacritic takes the scoring yet one
step further and turns movie comparison into an integral part of their user interface.
The sidebars of this site feature the most popular movies and recent movies, with their
scores. A simple red, green and yellow coloring system is an instant winner, as it drives
the ratings value across very well.
Overall, the site is very successful in aggregating a lot of information and presenting it in a clean way. Visualization techniques like heat maps are typically a challenge for the general public, but what metacritic does is so simple, that it is highly likely to be taken well. My only complaint about the site is the black background. No offense to the sites and blogs that use it, but there should be an option to switch to a more standard white background for websites.
Conclusion
Looking at metacritic made me wonder what are some other sites that spin the information in a similar way? After all, metacritic is really just a mashup. A mashup that aggregates available information and delivers additional value by uncovering hidden information. And this is the general principle that mashups should follow. Last week's winner of mashup camp 3, The Hype Machine, does a similar thing for popular music. In a way, TechMeme and Original Signal do the same thing for news. Which then brings us to Technorati most popular. So metacritic has been doing all along what we just recently got excited about - popularity based ranking. Except instead of the web, metacritic uses domain experts.
For a look at similar services, check out Techcrunch's An aggregate review of aggregate review services. Please tell us about your favorite aggregators.
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Metacritic is an example of what a mashup should be - a place that completely eliminates the need to visit the original sources of information, while providing new value by combining the information from those very sources. When you need to know if a movie, album or a game is good, you really only need to go to one place - Metacritic. The fact that it's not community based doesn't hurt it at all.
Metacritic has become one of my essential resources online. There are others doing similar things, but this site just nails it in terms of ease of use and accuracy. I can find an answer immdiately and I can usually trust it.
Although the review aggregation is useful, there are always certain genres of each category that I'll never be terribly interested in. What would be really great is a mashup of authoritative critical opinion a la Metacritic with social or algorithmic opinion / suggestion engines like last.fm, Pandora, or Amazon.
Combine all this into a simple personalized top 10 recommendations widget for my google or netvibes start page, and you've got me hook, line, and sinker.
One of the things I like about Metacritic is that it ISN'T a social engine. It aggregates "newspaper / magazine" style reviews. I don't think people go there to browse as much as to look up something specific....
Hmmm...I didn't like Little Miss Sunshine much. Not sure I can trust their movie reviews. :-)
David,
Actually, 80 in their system is not that high :)
Alex
Alex.
We're aggregating user reviews for mobile phones from a few different points around the web. It's still needs a lot of work combining foreign reviews with our own has definitely provided better choice for our visitors.
eg. http://www.cellphones.ca/cell-phones/phone-reviews/297/
Branden,
Your site look good and useful. What technology are you using to pull all of these reviews?
Alex
Your otherwise excellent piece seems to have missed the obvious point. The film business is a global one as is the internet. From my quick survey of metacritic all of the reviews are US-based (many of them local papers) - even for the odd non-US made film that creeps in. A superior service is provided by IMDB and others which offer collected lists of film reviews and predominantly feature respected film reviews from national newspapers from the UK and elsewhere.
Thanks for your feedback Alex. We're getting the data direct from the APIs provided by Amazon, Yahoo, etc. Next up is professional reviews or critic reviews which we're attempting to do with scraping.
Alex/Richard, we are building a review aggregator over at LouderVoice.
We will publish and aggregate hReview content to/from blogs and enable others to find and use those reviews. Our focus is on building the reputation of bloggers on their own sites rather than creating yet another content silo or faceless rating system.
We're currently in very early closed Beta testing but we expect to launch by the late-Q1/early-Q2.