Filmcritic.com is a leading provider of movie and DVD reviews. In addition to reviews covering movies currently in theaters, Filmcritic.com provides a database of reviews covering several thousand movies, as well as a wealth of information about actors and actresses, and movies that are just released on DVD.
"The Filmcritic.com widget is a great tool for pushing content to directly to our users' desktops. The Widget Realm management system provides great tracking and easy management -- we literally don't have to lift a finger. We just provide the feed and Widget Realm makes sure our widgets get the content."
Christopher Null Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief Filmcritic.com
While the Filmcritic.com website offers a convenient search capability, Filmcritic.com wanted to create an easy and simple to use desktop platform where users wanting to go to a movie could easily see what movies are currently in theaters, and read the reviews of the movies. It was also important that the solution not put too much strain on the Filmcritic.com server, and that the solution display the information quickly.
We created a widget for Filmcritic.com which pulls the titles and reviews for movies currently in theaters. Users of the widget can easily see the names of the movies and how many stars the movie received from Filmcritic.com, and can click by the title of the movie to read the review, or click to go to the Filmcritic.com site.
Because of the significant time required to crawl the database of thousands of movie reviews and return results, the initial widget response time was approximately 19 seconds for the initial load. We created a solution off-loading the server response to our server, which cut the initial response time to less than 1 second.
In the first three months following the Widget's release, it was downloaded more than 4,000 times, and traffic to the website has more than doubled. Filmcritic.com’s traffic continues to increase dramatically as it becomes more known as one of the leading movie review sites.
