100 Percent Fresh Exclusive!: Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes in Acquisition Talks With Yahoo and Others
Flixster-the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site, as well as BuddyTV-is in early acquisition talks with several suitors, including Yahoo, said sources close to the situation.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least the second time Flixster has been on the block: BoomTown reported it for sale back in December 2007, and the site's ownership has been an open question since at least the December 2009 episode that tied Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes into MySpace's orbit. The new wrinkle is the buyer list — sources say early talks include Yahoo alongside other unnamed suitors, though nothing is signed and both sides could walk.
For Yahoo, the timing fits a company actively reshaping its portfolio: it discontinued its own Hadoop distribution in February 2011, its top North American ad sales executive Mitch Spolan departed in early March, and founder Kevin Rose said publicly in January that Yahoo had approached Digg about taking over Delicious. A separate January report suggested new offerings would pull Yahoo into a broader internet-TV fight — which is exactly where a premium reviews asset like Rotten Tomatoes would matter.
First-order effects
- A multi-buyer auction gives Flixster's owners pricing leverage they did not have in the 2007 process, with Yahoo's interest signaling demand from portals rather than just Hollywood-adjacent buyers.
- Yahoo would be acquiring Rotten Tomatoes' review aggregation and Flixster's social-movie audience outright — content assets it currently lacks rather than licenses.
Second-order effects
- Whoever wins controls the Tomatometer badge that film marketers and rival entertainment sites quote, turning a reviews property into a distribution chokepoint over competitors' pages.
- Other suitors reportedly circling the same asset force Yahoo's rivals in entertainment content to either bid up the price or build their own review/social layer instead.
Third-order effects
- If portal-era giants keep shopping for audience-and-signal assets rather than building them, independent review aggregators become acquisition targets by default — the 2007, 2009, and 2011 sale episodes suggest Flixster's value is structural, not situational.
- Yahoo's pattern of pruning owned properties (Hadoop, possibly Delicious) while buying consumer-facing ones points toward a portfolio defined by content brands rather than infrastructure.
The trend: Large web portals are shifting from building entertainment properties in-house to acquiring established audience and review-signal assets, making sites like Flixster recurring sale candidates.