Startup FilmCrave builds out social network for movie lovers

Venture Beat — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:06:27 -0400

There’s been much ado about the long tail of the marketplace, and not surprisingly a lot of the smaller start-ups I frequently write about target the micro-niche of any given market.

Startup FilmCrave is doing exactly that, stationing itself as a social networking destination for movies and movie lovers. The company, which contacted us recently to get on our radar, is small and unfunded, but it’s got an interesting niche offering: Think movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, but for the rest of us — while Rotten Tomatoes uses scores from professional movie review critics, Filmcrave focuses on user-generated reviews.

Users create top movie lists, write movie reviews and rate movies but the site’s social features let users message friends and recommend movies to eachother. Members’ top movie lists are compiled into FilmCrave’s top movie and ratings list.

Since launching in August of last year, the site has added tools to let users drag and drop their way to custom movie lists such as “worst date movies” or “most overrated films of all time,” and has included movie trailers that users can watch without going to a new page (see screenshot below).

Two of the company’s cofounders, Alex Olson and Josh Collins, developed an idea for a movie review site back in 2005 to be called take2review, in order to get posted on Rotten Tomatoes. But they changed gears a year and a half later and decided to develop a user-generated review site instead. At that time, programmer Nick Barry joined the team.

The company, based out of a Kansas City, Missouri suburb Lee’s Summitt, is jointly run by Barry, Collins and Olson, with a team of friends that volunteer various skills.

And they have their work cut out for them — they’re up against competitors like Flixster, an uber-popular Facebook app and website that boasts 56 million users. Flixster’s integration with the Facebook app platform gives it a viral effect that will be hard for Filmcrave to match.

Olson says that although it’s been difficult to gain traction with new users, the site’s core users are very devoted. They visit the site often and spend three to four times more time on FilmCrave than Flixster, he says, citing data from Compete, Alexa, and the company’s internal analytics, although he declined to mention specific traffic numbers. There are other competitors — Spout and Matchflick — which Olson argues subjectively have less of a community feel than FilmCrave.

One more potential competitor is the information standard for movies, the International Movie Database (IMDB), which Olson admits is an “incredible site,” although he says it would be very difficult for the IMDB to expand its few social elements — forum, top lists, and movie ratings — into a full-tiered social network.

While FilmCrave might well face an uphill battle to gain traction with new users among all these competitors, it does have one thing going for it: It targets such a specific niche — the long tail of movie reviews by 18-35 year-old rabid movie lovers — that it’s generating small revenues from movie advertisers as well as affiliate sales via Amazon.

None of the co-founders are involved full time and they’ve only dropped a few hundred dollars on server and hosting costs. Thanks to low costs, FilmCrave is profitable, but it is seeking a small investment.

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Startup FilmCrave builds out social network for movie lovers