Letterboxd Is Up for Sale, and A24, Sony and The New York Times Are Bidding
Letterboxd, the film-centric social platform, is reportedly up for sale with a price tag exceeding $300 million. The New York Times, A24, and Sony Pictures are among the interested buyers. The site, founded in 2011 by two New Zealand designers, now boasts 30 million users, up from 1.8 million in 2020. It generates revenue through ads and paid Pro and Patron tiers. Media analyst Ken Doctor calls its engaged, paying audience 'the gold standard of the internet.'
An engaged audience that pays and that advertisers want to reach is 'the gold standard of the internet.'
- reticulates
I continue to be baffled by this sale. Letterboxd was acquired by Tiny 3 years ago, Tiny’s entire premise is that they hold for the long term. Selling after 3 years is not long term. I don’t understand why Tiny would undermine their raison d’etre unless it’s because the founders (who retain a minority stake) are pushing for it.
Tiny just recently updated their website to emphasize how long they’ve owned each property which is especially confusing given they’re now offloading things https://tiny.com/companies/letterboxd
“Tiny's model — long-term ownership, founder autonomy, no pressure to flip the company in three to five years — fit naturally.”
…?
- rdmuser
Having such a high profile film rating site be potentially owned by a film studio has serious conflict of interest issues. Same goes for amazon buying imdb and they've already used that to adjust scores for at least one film they released because of bad reviews. I'm happy to see this get some attention here after my submission didn't because the potential implications of this purchase are big.
Edit: I believe I made an error re the claim imdb changed the score of at least one amazon owned film. See replies for more info. Apologies!
- clayhacks
Is there an ATproto or activity pub version of letterboxd? I like A24, but not sure how much I trust Sony or the NYT to run it reasonably
- DarkNova6
Amazing. So Imdb 2.0 has become Imdb 2.0.
- Computer0
I use https://movielens.org/ and it is ran by the University of Minnesota.