A Discussion With Senh Duong, Founder of Rotten Tomatoes [INTERVIEW]

Movies With Butter

Today, we bring you Senh Duong, co-founder of the famous movie review site, RottenTomatoes. Not too long ago he started another site called MoviesWithButter.com.

We got in touch with him to learn more about it, and to ask his thoughts on Asia as well.

1. With RottenTomatoes in your past, you’ve now moved on to MoviesWithButter. Tell us about it.

Rotten Tomatoes was first acquired by IGN Entertainment in 2004. Shortly afterward, News Corp (owners of Fox) acquired IGN. I stayed for about three years and finally decided to leave in 2007. I’ve been involved in two startups in 1997 and decided that after ten years, it’s time for a break.

During my break, I thought I should still try to keep up my web development skills, so I quickly created another aggregation site called Wopular.com. It aggregates news from the top newspapers in the U.S, like an online newspaper rack. It’s a site to keep up with current events. The search box on the site searches CNN, NY Times, Digg, Google News, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, Bing, Wikipedia, and many more, all on one site.

Last year, Flixster, a social network for movie fans, acquired Rotten Tomatoes. In May of this year, Warner Bros. bought Flixster.

Since leaving Rotten Tomatoes, I’ve still kept up with the movie industry. I still read many of the movie fansites, like Joblo.com and AintItCool.com. I’ve noticed there are lots of fansites and thought that it might be time for an aggregator.

That’s when I’ve decided to start MoviesWithButter.com. Sure, there’s a movies section for Reddit, but it tends to be populated with top 10 lists and link-bait articles. I would focus MWB on tracking upcoming movies that excite fanboys.

I’m managing the site with Binh Ngo, who also worked with me on Rotten Tomatoes when it was run out of our apartment before it turned into a real company.

2. RottenTomatoes has been applauded because of its neutrality and sometimes even rough ratings. Now that it’s sold, what can you tell us about that?

Well, before the recent acquisition by Warner Bros., Rotten Tomatoes was owned by News Corp, which owns Fox.