The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

Hard disagree here. There are some good reviewers on there but you have to wade through a mountain of terrible one-liners from wannabe comedians. No matter how many of these users I block there are always more of them popping up. I wish they had a character or sentence length filter for reviews that could be toggled on, for those of us who aren't looking for a "Twitter for movies" experience.

IMDB offers both Pro Subscriptions. IMDB offers data licenses that the company claims are licensed "to a wide selection of businesses including movie studios, cable companies, websites, video retailers, software developers, electronics manufacturers, mobile applications, and more."[1]

IMDB offers advertising and has 250M visitors per month.[2]

None of these point to the likelihood that IMDB is a loss leader.

1 = https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/general-information/conte... 2 = https://advertising.amazon.com/channels/imdb

There's a crowdfunding campaign trying to raise $100,000 to make an offer to buy the site for some public governance structure, with no explanation of how they're going to get the money to buy Letterboxd.

This could be interesting if the group asking for $100,000 had any plausible plan at all to fund their purchase, but if there is such a plan I can't find it.

https://storywatch.org

Monetisation isn't currently a concern as we are growing insanely quickly but for a lot of these types of services, it's not as hard as it looks. MyAnimeList and fanfiction.net have all been around for decades, sustained purely by ads and low-hanging-fruit monetisation efforts. Enshittification is a risk but the market is a lot more liquid than most people think.

When people got fed up with Fanfiction.net and Wattpad /Tumblr, AO3 was born. The schism of SpaceBattle led to the formation of Sufficient Velocity and Questionable Questing. There are newer generation of VC funded apps like Lore Obsessed that's trying to do some sort of AI mashup of the fandom.com wikis.

The fact that the customers are so fickle and not particularly sticky compared to the users of other UGC powered social networks is frankly a pretty big problem (especially if you have don't have Amazon as a patron like Goodreads and IMDB). The type of artsy audience that makes up a large portion of the user base are a lot more sensitive to issues like public relations, reputation management, communication etc. There's this famous perfume aggregator+UGC reviews platform called Fragrantica that's allegedly haemorrhaging users because people claimed the owner was a Trump supporter. You don't really get the Twitter/Meta/Tiktok level of stickiness where corporate misbehavior at the executive level have muted impact on the actual day to day user metrics. This might seem like a feature until if you think about it, half the reason people use UGC platforms is because of other users do. It's tricky to get celebs and whale users if your audience tends to leave at the slightest hint of controversy. Controversy is often the lifeblood of this sort of communities; too little and you have a rather anaemic community (like a dead IRC or Discord server). Too much, and you get an exodus of users. So you end up having to take an active approach in day to day moderation. It's also why smart companies like Twitch keep around the "bad actors" and if you see Reddit r/ livestreamfail, the big streamers are often in trouble for petty crime, sexual misconduct, bad behaviour etc. It's precisely because of the engagement stirred up. If you ban every violator of the code of conduct permanently, you will just end up making competitor platforms like Kick the next dominant platform. It takes a very deft hand to run this sort of services.

There are also a lot of institutional risks around this sort of services. The recent LLM scraping boom and copyright office changes and AI data laundering rulings have made some things easier but the proliferation of KYC for anything vaguely adult has made others harder. I won't be surprised if non profit platforms like AO3 either move out of the states eventually or be forced to implement some of age verification (most likely client side device level attestation like what Meta/Zuckerberg has been pushing).