The format is 1000 movies facing off in a round-robin tournament (~500k votes per round). We needed a non-arbitrary sample of movies to vote on, so we've started with a list of the Top 1000 US box-office takings. Each round, the bottom 50 will be culled to make room for the top 50 in the Up & Coming.
We're working on... 1. an 'add movie' page, allowing you to add any movie to the up&coming 2. member pages showing your own votes & reccomendations, 3. actor pages, ranking the movies people have been in by popularity.
Monetising... 1. netflix add-to-queue buttons, 2. amazon links (the site is great at reminding you of things you want to see), and feasibly 3. targetted advertising (ie. only show this ad to people who have voted for romcoms).
Also how about doing a mobile version if you can, that would be snazzy (Iphone yeh!) :D
I'd be interested to see the rankings you get from this.
I guess I'm saying I would like it better if you had like different genres, they don't even have to be that specific like say horror action comedy family; and could compare withing those, but I guess that is limited with your selection right now.
I think the idea of getting an ordering by pairwise comparisons (instead of discrete scores for each item) is sound, but it doesn't work as well for movies as for people.
pickthehottie.com (launched at least before June 22, 2001, according to the Wayback Machine) did the same thing to AmIHotOrNot's photo-rating juggernaut (launched in October 2000, according to Wikipedia). I think the A-B model worked really well for them, and the incentive for sticking around to compare for photos was a little more intrinsic.
How about having an option "can't compare"? That the user can indicate they saw both but cannot compare. With enough data, maybe you can cluster more frequently compared movies together or even making categories automatically?
(Downside is more complex UI; it's better to keep UI simple, so I'm not sure).
A problem on my end or is the site unable to handle all the traffic?
What satisfaction does the user get from voting? Why vote or visit more than a few times? Why would they recommend to their friends?
I'm not sure on the statistics, but maybe you'd be better off showing X movies at a time and asking the user to pick 2 of them; that might generate preferrence data faster. That way, when some of those X movies repeat, you would get more reliable ranking data. you could also ask the user to order the movie as it's common in studies, but that would potentially take too long.
Some kind of "progress" to show to the user would be nice too, e..g "you rated 5123 movies", even when not logged in.
It will be less annoying than clicking on "Haven't seen it" ten times on both pictures and will provide more comparison data.
Edit:
If you don't like the "Disliked" choice, you could simply reload both pictures when clicking on "Haven't seen it".
Great idea :).
* Some description/tagline/plot of the movie along with the poster would be good
