Why You Should Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings (fivethirtyeight.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Statistical news blog fivethirtyeight.com noticed some odd discrepancies in online movie ratings, which caused them to do some investigating. They found it was generally a bad idea to rely on such ratings, particularly from sites like Fandango. "When I focused on movies that had 308 or more user reviews, none of the 209 films had below a 3-star rating. Seventy-eight percent had a rating of 4 stars or higher." Further, "In a normal rounding system, a site would round to the nearest half-star — up or down. In the case of Ted 2 [which was displaying 4.5 stars], then, we'd expect the rating to be rounded down to 4 stars. But Fandango rounded the 'ratingValue' [4.1] up. I pulled the number of stars listed on the page of each film in our sample of 437 (with at least one user review), as well as the ratingValue listed on the page's source. And I found that Fandango doesn't round a rating down when we'd mathematically expect that ... Fandango.com's rounding methodology, even if it was just an innocent bug, is a good example of why you should be skeptical of online movie ratings, especially from companies selling you tickets."

Comments

Very suspicious....

[tonyyeb]

Ted 2 [which was displaying 4.5 stars]... Was that out of 100?!

Re:Rotten Tomatoes I've suspected of Payola

[gstoddart]

A friend is in the movie biz and his reaction to any criticism of the recent Star Trek reboots is Rotten Tomatoes is an objective measure.

Well, in part you need to remember these reviews are done by the entire movie-going public, and not just nerds.

So, it is entirely possible that you disagree with the movie-going public. But I don't think that means the reviews aren't honest.

I'm pretty sure TFA even says that both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB consistently come out pretty close to one another.

I trust both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, because I've actually seen movies which are terribly reviewed, and which should have been.

But assessing your opinion of the Trek reboots vs the general opinion of them isn't really the point.