News tips and press releases may be sent to editor at hollywoodinvestigator.com. All submissions become property of the Hollywood Investigator and deemed for publication without compensation unless otherwise requested. Name and contact information only withheld upon request. Prospective reporters should research our Bookstore.

Home

About Us

Bookstore

Links

Blog


Archive

Books

Cinema

Fine Arts

Horror

Media & Copyright

Music

Public Square

Television

Theater

War & Peace


Affilates

Horror Film Aesthetics

Horror Film Festivals

Horror Film Reviews

Tabloid Witch Awards

Weekly Universe


Archives


byFreeFind

     

IMDB RIGS 'USER' RATINGS

by J. Neil Schulman, guest contributor.  [June 28, 2008]

 

 

 

 

[HollywoodInvestigator.com]  Okay, I'm a little slow, but I just figured out that the IMDb user ratings for movies listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDd) not only don't reflect ratings by anyone who has actually seen the movies -- they also don't honestly reflect the ratings of IMDb users!

Here's what I found out:

Following the two film festival screenings of Lady Magdalene's -- February 2nd and April 3rd -- Lady Magdalene's had nine "user ratings" with an average IMDb User Rating of 7.1 -- pretty decent.

Since I didn't encourage anyone to "stuff the ballot box," I had high confidence that this rating fairly reflected the opinion of people who had seen Lady Magdalene's at one of its screenings, or from the screeners I had sent out, and then went to the Lady Magdalene's.page on IMDb and registered their rating of the movie.

Suddenly, on May 27th -- 7 weeks after its most recent festival screening -- five ratings of "1" appeared within a 24-hour period, and dropped Lady Magdalene's IMDb User Rating from 7.1 to 1.8.

Plan 9 from Outer Space has an IMDb User rating of 3.5. Ishtar has an IMDb User Rating of 3.6.  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has an IMDb User Rating of 5.6.

Got the picture?

I assumed that someone had seen the recent publicity on Lady Magdalene's and decided to trash the movie as an act of vandalism, since nobody who had seen the movie at a festival was likely to wait 7 to 14 weeks before going onto IMDb and rating the movie -- and certainly not five times in 24 hours.

I was wrong. The ratings of Lady Magdalene's weren't by IMDb users at all. The new rating came from IMDb's own programmers.

Here is how IMDb explains it:

 

"About IMDb's Movie Ratings

"The User Rating score of a title in the Internet Movie Database is based on a "weighted average" of the votes cast by our large base of registered users on a 1 to 10 scale (10 being best).  Weighting takes into account additional factors and calculations besides just the number of people who voted and what their votes were.  That means it is not the arithmetic average or arithmetic mean of the scores, though those can be seen by looking at the detailed breakdown of the user ratings.

"We use this formula to help prevent organized groups of people from attempting to "stuff the ballot box" and create an artificially inflated (or deflated) rating for a title.  To prevent abuse of the system, we do not disclose what the additional factors and calculations in the formula are.

"We have carefully refined the weighting formula over the many years the database has been in operation, with all titles being affected by it equally, so as to provide the maximum levels of fairness and accuracy across the board.  Though IMDb staff votes may be displayed as a category in the detailed breakdown of the voting, the staff or non-staff status of voters is not a part of the weighting formula and does not affect the final weighted score.  And because of the universal application of the weighting formula, no title has been or can be singled out for ratings manipulation by our staff."

 

Bluntly, IMDb is telling us that their so-called "user" ratings aren't based on the ratings of their users at all -- but are instead a mathematically arbitrary rating according to some staffer's own secret programming biases and numerical manipulation.

 

 

It's a dishonest count that, just coincidentally, favors studio movies with high page hits and are biased against indie films with fewer page hits.

It's hard enough getting into major film festivals that are already abandoning indie films for high budget, star-driven movies that are often studio films. This year's Tribeca Film Festival opened with Universal's Baby Mama. Last year's Cinevegas opened with Ocean's Thirteen.

IMDb is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and they just acquired Withoutabox, which handles submissions of indie films to film festivals.

New Line Cinema, which was supposed to acquire indie films at the festivals and put them into theaters, instead just started producing high budget films of their own. And because it duplicated what its parent company, Time Warner, was already doing, the efficiency experts decided to fold New Line into the main division and eliminate duplicate staffing.

The same thing just happened with Paramount Vantage, which just got folded into CBS Paramount.

George Orwell got it wrong. The nightmare isn't that Big Brother is watching. The nightmare is that mass-media are now marginalizing the independents, so that the audience never gets a chance to watch.

IMDb's fraudulent ratings are just one more tool that the corporate media giants are using to convince audiences that only they can entertain them.

Copyright 2008 by J. Neil Schulman

 

Also read our Hollywood Investigator reports on other Big Studios Scams, including how the Big Studios are: (1) releasing intentionally warped DVDs, (2) stealing YOUR copyright, and (3) forcing you to watch their time-stealing promos!

 

"Hollywood Investigator" and "HollywoodInvestigator.com" and "Tabloid Witch" and "Tabloid Witch Award" trademarks are currently unregistered, but pending registration upon need for protection against improper use. The idea of marketing these terms as a commodity is a protected idea under the Lanham Act. 15 U.S.C. s 1114(1) (1994) (defining a trademark infringement claim when the plaintiff has a registered mark); 15 U.S.C. s 1125(a) (1994) (defining an action for unfair competition in the context of trademark infringement when the plaintiff holds an unregistered mark). All content is copyright by HollywoodInvestigator.com unless otherwise noted.