Type of site
|
Film review aggregator and user community |
---|---|
Owner |
Fandango Media (Warner Bros. Entertainment/Time Warner (30%) Comcast/NBCUniversal (70%)) |
Website | rottentomatoes.com |
Alexa rank | 594 (Jan. 2017[update]) |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | August 12, 1998 |
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator website for film and television.
The company was launched in August 1998 by Senh Duong and since January 2010 has been owned by Flixster, which itself was acquired in 2011 by Warner Bros. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Comcast's Fandango. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities, including Fandango. Since 2007, the website's editor-in-chief has been Matt Atchity. The name, Rotten Tomatoes, derives from the practice of audiences' throwing rotten tomatoes when disapproving of a poor stage performance.
From early 2008 to September 2010, Current Television aired the weekly The Rotten Tomatoes Show, featuring hosts and material from the website. A shorter segment was incorporated into the weekly show, InfoMania, which ended in 2011. In September 2013, the website introduced "TV Zone", a section for reviewing scripted TV shows.
Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 12, 1998, 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 U.S." As a fan of Jackie Chan's, Duong was inspired to create the website after collecting all the reviews of Chan's movies as they were being published in the United States. The first movie whose reviews were featured on Rotten Tomatoes was Your Friends & Neighbors (1998). The website was an immediate success, receiving mentions by Netscape, Yahoo!, 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. They officially launched it on April 1, 2000.