It's Rishi

The answer: 50% of all Internet users! Hitwise released a report comparing the traffic of the four leading map products: MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft’s Live Local. What didn’t surprise me is that Google Maps is the only one of product of the four that has gained significant year-over-year traffic. The others are flat to down slightly. However, even at GMaps’s brisk growth rate, it still won’t likely catch MapQuest for atleast 18 months.

I don’t know a single person that uses MapQuest. Even after a recent redesign, MapQuest is still a poor, uncompetitive offering. The only times I use MapQuest is when it is integrated into a third-party website (most often store locators). Even in such cases, I often copy+paste the address into GMaps. MapQuest is that horrible and I am shocked to learn that half of Internet users still choose it. Above all, this news serves as a great wake-up call that even a compelling product from a market leader still can take years to cross the chasm.

Among other features, IMDB allows users to rate movies. What I’ve noticed for the past several months is that nearly every movie inevitably starts out with a massive number of 10 ratings.

How do you explain the following?

At first glance this rating breakdown exhibits a common phenomenon in user ratings: many users rate the extremes. In this case that would be 1 and 10. However, if you look at most rating breakdowns on IMDB, there is no such polarity. Only a heavy bias of 10 ratings.

Another theory might be that the people who are first to see a movie and rate it online are generally those who are most enthusiastic about the movie. Thus, it is natural that the ratings of their users would be irrationally high.

Yet another theory is, of course, that those involved with marketing the movie are gaming the ratings. IMDB is massively popular site (almost 20M uniques per month according to Compete.com) and many movie-goers use the site’s movie ratings to decide which to see. Moreover, even if a movie studio didn’t intend to game ratings, they are almost forced to simply to keep pace with other movies that do have people gaming its ratings. Anyways, this is just a theory. No proof.

More to come…