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.

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…