Databasing Feels Good In A Place Like This

I love movies. I just watched my 104th movie this year. How do I know that? Because I track my movies on Letterboxd!

I’m not the only one who sees value. Private equity firm Tiny just paid $50 million for the app.

And if I could, I would pay $51M!

Letterboxd is an app that lets users rate, review, and rank movies they’ve watched — an Instagram for film. Log in when you watch it, look up who’s in it, and heart your favs. Some obsessively rate the movie on a 0.5–5 star scale. Other people use it as a movie blog, like Goodreads for film. Twitter people use it to write funny one-line reviews.

This post considers reasons a Letterboxd user (me) loves the app and how a PE firm might monetize it.

1. Unconventional Diary

Letterboxd suggests you consider your life as the things you watch. If you get in the habit, this simplifies remembering when you saw a movie. It’s the pleasure of a diary and a database. Reflection might make you a more engaged viewer and offer practice for turning feelings into words. Or it proves to your significant other that you already watched that movie.

Tiny owns a robust dataset of entertainment consumption over time, the sequence of selections, and the impact of a user’s review. They can trace the network effect of recommendations and target curated audiences.

2. Consolidated Watch List

Letterboxd offers a centralized watchlist. I have ten streaming app logins and ten separate watch lists, which I find overwhelming. I bet I’m not alone. Letterbox lets you add any movie to one list. A premium feature is accessing the “Is It Streaming?” database, which tells you what platform the movie is on without Google. You can also filter your watchlist by service.

PE likes this for a lot of reasons. First, they have a clear value proposition: watchlist app. They know what viewers watch and what they think about it.

Viewer preference data determines what shows to make. Netflix is harvesting data when they ask, “Did you like this? Rate it thumbs up or down!” Letterboxd collects that across streaming platforms in a standardized format. Rights-holders and licensees could leverage that data to see what content to buy next.

3. Recommendations and Reactions

Seeing what your friends are watch is a major part of what makes Letterboxd fun. Users see a horizontally scrolled feed of what their friends ratings and reviews.

Private Equity bought a network map of media preferences showing the impact of a recommendation.

4. Funny Reviews

Many Letterboxd reviews are funny. Like this one about Barbie.

Or this person who harassed Zach Braff.

Everybody likes jokes. Jokes help users forget they’re self-reporting their media preferences to a private equity firm.

5. Deep Movie Knowledge

Letterboxd is about movies.m so trending topics don’t drive content. Fans discuss old movies. My favorite Letterboxd user is pd187. They write about movies and military propaganda and leverage the database to show the connection between movies with strange funding.

Private Equity won’t like pd187. However, they would like a all the files, data, and detritus about American intellectual property of the 20th century. Is there an enterprise version of Letterboxd for studios and universities? Probably.

6. Curated Lists

The 2010s: the Golden Age of Internet Lists. The list lives on strong in Letterboxd. It’s easy to make lists with art and context already written.

Visually Insane is my favorite Letterboxd list. These collections are a vibe.

Consider Tiny’s company page. They hold a network for hiring visual creatives, UX design firms, template marketplaces, a Canva competitor, many Shopify integrations, and a design news publication. They monetize the intersection of data and creativity.

7. Filterable Opinions

What did the haters say? And the fans? Filtering is data granularity in action. One can look up any user, sort their reviews by rating, and see their highs and lows, what they liked and hated. Do these associations influence buying behavior?

8. Clean Data

A user can download all their data into a nifty spreadsheet. It’s great. But if I have easy access to my data, who else has easy access?

9. What’s Coming Out This Weekend?

How does Tiny get ROI on their $50M?

To me, “coming soon” is the monetization opportunity. Users want to know what’s in theaters or on streaming. Letterboxd can charge studios for targeted ads to users. They can even attribute if the ad worked because users log films. Could Letterboxd get paid per ticket sold? Getting five to six-figure payments from Hollywood marketing budgets seems like one way to 10x their investment.

10. The Community

The best part about any social media app is the other people using it. No users, no fun is obvious when looking at the empty Blue Sky.

Private Equity sees the user community as a market. Many users already pay to support the app, so one way to increase revenue is to raise prices. People will pay for it. That’s an easy way to make Q4’s numbers!

Add Me on Letterbox: Nicky_Martin

Will private Equity ruin my favorite social network? I hope they don’t because everybody loves talking about the movies.