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| Q&A With Senh Duong |
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Back Door April 2005 • Vol.5 Issue 4 Page(s) 108 in print issue |
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Q&A With Senh Duong Rotten Tomatoes, Movies & The Crash |
 If you're an experienced Web surfer with any interest in movies, odds are you've been to Rotten Tomatoes (www.rottentomatoes .com). Founded by Senh Duong, now 30, the groundbreaking movie-review site started as just another enthusiast's hobby page. In mid-2004, gaming-titan IGN Entertainment found Rotten Tomatoes too sweet to resist and snapped up the company. However, between those two points was a desperate struggle, and Duong still thinks the best of Rotten Tomatoes is yet to come. CPU: Did you start Rotten Tomatoes because you're a movie buff? SD: Pretty much. Actually, I'm a huge Jackie Chan fan. In the old days, when I lived in Sacramento, they used to play his movies in San Francisco, and I would get my brother to drive me two hours to the Bay area just to catch one of his films. When he re-entered the Hollywood scene with "Rumble in the Bronx," I started reading reviews of his films on the Internet just because I wanted to see how U.S. critics were reacting to his films. Every time one of his films was released, I would do the same thing: go through the Internet and read every single review on it. Eventually I just thought, 'Hmm, this might be pretty useful for other people, to get a critical consensus on a movie before it opens.' At that time, some of my college buddies also started a design firm with me, so we were doing official movie sites for WB, Disney, Artisan, and some other major studios. So, on the side, I created Rotten Tomatoes just because I felt like this would be a useful tool for other Internet users. And it's something that you can only do on the Internet. If you open a newspaper, you'll see ads for all these movies, and every single quote is basically promoting the film, no matter how bad it is. There's always a quote saying, 'This is the best action movie of the year!' or whatever. When I launched the site, it also got some recognition. Yahoo! picked it for a Hot Pick. Netscape named it one of their Hot Picks, too. Yahoo! Internet Life did a feature on it and then Roger Ebert mentioned it on his show. So me and my college buddies who were working on the design firm looked at it and said, 'Maybe this could be an interesting opportunity,' being that the time, 1998, was at the peak of the Internet boom. At the time, there was also a smaller design firm we were outsourcing work to. So we sent basically our entire design business to them and converted the entire company to just working on Rotten Tomatoes. Before we did that, we also went out and got some investment money. We initially got an investment of about $1.2 million, and that's a great thing because months after we started, the crash happened. It was pretty tough because then we started slowly cutting back on people and resources just to stay alive. A year or two afterwards, it slowly recovered, and we gradually turned it into a business where we could actually make money and become profitable. CPU: How did the buyout come about? SD: Well, even during the crash, our traffic was growing steadily each year. We're currently at about 5 or 6 million unique visitors per month and about 38 to 40 million page views per month. So six months ago, IGN—you know, they're like the biggest gaming-content site on the Web—they wanted to move into entertainment because they don't feel like they can grow any bigger in video games. And they thought we were one of the groups they could acquire to help them with that. CPU: Is the purchase price public information? SD: No, actually it's not. CPU: A lot of guys in that situation have taken the money and cut loose. You could have bought a bar in Cabo, or become a CPU columnist, or something. But you stayed with the company. SD: Yeah, pretty much everyone stayed with the company except for a couple of people whose positions were redundant, and they didn't feel like driving or making compromises to stay with the company. But everyone else stayed mainly because we're excited about the direction that IGN's going, and they wanted us to help them improve their entertainment division. We felt like that's a good challenge. CPU: With all these new resources behind you, you probably have a lot more liberty in creative directions to take the site. What do you want to change? SD: There's still a lot in Rotten Tomatoes that we've planned from two years ago that we couldn't do because of man power and limits in resources. But with a company like IGN, we're able to go back to our to-do list and finally create some of those features that we always wanted to do. CPU: Such as? SD: Like custom critic's lists. Things like matching user's tastes to critics. Physically letting users rate a bunch of movies and then finding the closest matches. CPU: You have your fair share of copycats now. Yahoo! Movies comes to mind, which also conglomerates many critic reviews and issues an average letter grade rather than a score on the Rotten Reading meter. So what still makes you guys special? SD: Well, we were the first to do the quoting system and have an average grade. And we actually cover a lot more critics than they do. They cover like 20 critics. We cover thousands. Any paper, any weekly, any TV show, any critics on radio, we cover all of them. CPU: It seems there's practically a critic for every viewer out there. What's your opinion on critics? SD: If you like some actor, like I like Jackie Chan and some other actors, I'll watch their movies no matter what. But the thing is, as I found out after starting the site, there are many critically acclaimed movies that I wouldn't normally watch if it wasn't for Rotten Tomatoes. Like I'll say, 'Wow, all these critics think it's great, so it must be pretty good.' And most of the time they are. I found out that after starting the site that most of the movies that I rank on my Top 10 list end up being the ones I discovered through Rotten Tomatoes. If you compare it to nutrition, the movies you normally watch, the big blockbusters, are like junk food. But the ones that critics recommend are more nutritious food that you should eat once in awhile. CPU: As you look back over your six or seven years with the company, what was the happiest moment and what was the worst moment? SD: The worst moment was when the Internet crashed. The happiest moment was probably when Roger Ebert mentioned us on his show. Well, actually, a happier moment was six months ago when we were purchased by IGN. CPU: Tell us about the crash period. SD: When the Internet crashed, everyone was thinking, 'Wow, is this going to work? Is it time to cut our losses and go back to design or do a new thing?' We started with 24 to 30 people, and when it crashed, we ended up slowly chipping people off until we were down to six or seven. Even of those six or seven, some people had to go part-time. At the time Patrick was our CEO, and he basically had to forego his salary and only took commission on ad sales, which at the time was pretty difficult. He even once lived in one of the cubicles in the office to save money. Steven and I only took half our salary. CPU: So he took a cubicle and gave up his office? SD: He took a cubicle and gave up his apartment. Basically, the shelves were his drawers, and he had a bed under his desk. When we said, 'Let's go over and hang with Pat,' we were just walking to his cubicle. CPU: What held you guys together through all that? It must have been pretty depressing. SD: It was, but we continued to get recognition, and our traffic continued to increase. We saw light at the end and we felt like, 'Hey, maybe if we just ride through this thing, and if we weather this storm, maybe we can eventually be successful.' And that's what we ended up doing. CPU: Before the crash, what was your revenue up to, and where did it hit bottom? SD: I think before the crash we were around probably $60K to $80K per month. After the crash, sometimes we were lucky if we made $5,000 a month. CPU: That's gross revenue? SD: Yeah. Revenue went to basically nothing. CPU: Where are you at today? SD: Today, we're around $200K a month. CPU: What are your media consumption habits? Do you spend every free minute sitting in a movie theater or watching TV? SD: Lately, I find that I watch more DVDs than actually going out to the movies. It's more of a time issue. I have a NetFlix subscription, and I just bought as many movies as I could through there. CPU: Given your perspective, what trends do you see in entertainment today? SD: I think movies have definitely been more internationally influenced nowadays. There's Jackie Chan and all these Hong Kong filmmakers, and all these horror films from Japan are getting remade here. There are a lot of movies from Spain and France that are really popular here or are getting remade here. Look at "Hero," which is basically a foreign language film with subtitles. It made like $50 million in the U.S. It's pretty amazing. It's the most beautiful movie I have ever seen. CPU: You're an example of someone forsaking theaters for NetFlix. Do you see that happening on a broader scale? SD: No, I don't think so because this year's box office is better than last year's, and it continues to improve every year. I think I'm just the exception because I've just gotten more and more busy. Plus, movies are making a lot more internationally than before. There are box-office disappointments in the theater that become huge DVD hits. Something like "The Punisher," which only made like $30 million at the box office, made almost $50 million on DVD. They're making a sequel just because of that. It's something that wouldn't have been able to happen if not for the DVD revolution. CPU: Do you see foresee movies' physical media giving way to subscription services? Will we lose the disc? SD: Probably not. I wouldn't watch a movie on my computer. But I can see myself watching a new trailer on my computer. Actually, that's where I watch most of the trailers. And I can see people watching shorts on their computer or watching segments of something that's really funny, like a Conan segment. CPU: Even though you're not a reviewer, do you get invited to Hollywood screenings? SD: Actually, we do. Because we also do news and other kinds of things, it's good for our editors to see the movie so that when they write an article, they know what they're talking about. CPU: Aside from the Roger Ebert mention, have you had any notable moments where somebody huge came up to you and said, 'I love your site!' SD: Yeah, one of them recently was Alexander Payne, who directed "Sideways." That's actually one of the best-reviewed films of the year. He called us up and said, 'Thanks for the mention,' and thanked us for how well his film ran. Movies are so hard to get made, and it's just great to get that kind of recognition afterwards. There are also moments like when "Bug's Life" was released by Pixar. At the time, we saw hundreds of people from Pixar on our logs looking at our site. Interestingly, there were some from PDI, Dreamworks' animation department, too. CPU: Where did the name Rotten Tomatoes come from? SD: At first, I just wanted to do something simple like Movie Reviews. Or I was thinking Thumbs Up because I'm such a huge fan of Roger Ebert and his show. But everything I could think of was bought out. Any URL with "movies" or "movie reviews" or "films" or "thumbs up," whatever, was taken. So I ended up thinking, what's the most obscure thing that no one would take? Rotten Tomatoes. Because in the old days, when people would go see a theatrical production, if they didn't like it, they'd throw tomatoes at the actors. CPU: Are you going to keep devoting yourself to Rotten Tomatoes, or do you have another direction that you're hoping to go in? SD: At least for the next couple years, I'll be fully devoted to it. Afterwards, I'm not sure. I've always thought about film school, but it keeps getting pushed back. And I'm 30 right now, so in a couple more years, it might be kind of late for film school if I don't do it sooner.   William Van Winkle began writing for computer magazines in 1996. He was first published in 1990, the same year he took his first job in computers. He and his family live outside Portland, Ore. |
