Metacritic has fallen on hard times

Ever since I first became aware of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, which I think was about the same time, I have been steadfastly a Metacritic supporter. That's even though Rotten Tomatoes is by far the better known and more culturally referenced method of compiling critic and user reviews to reach a single score that represents the value of a cultural item.

It wasn't a methodology thing. In the past I have looked into how Metacritic does things and how RT does things, and if anything, Metacritic utilizes the more mysterious, inscrutable means of producing its scores. I believe they have even come under fire for being less strictly data driven or less accountable to explaining their procedures.

Really, it came down to what it comes down to in a lot of these situations for me: Presentation.

I always liked how Metacritic looked -- its fonts, its layout, its whole gestalt. Meanwhile, I thought Rotten Tomatoes looked like it had been made by a child who had mastered web design -- a very competent child, but nonetheless, one who liked childish things. Like I have never gotten into the tomato splats. They just look like something you'd see on Nickelodeon's official website.

I'm not saying I feel any more favorably toward Rotten Tomatoes than I once did. I almost never visit the site.

But neither do I almost ever visit Metacritic, which has become a shadow of its former self.

The first problem I noticed a couple years ago was that the site was absolutely crippled by ads. On any page you tried to reach, there would be at least one video and usually a couple other Java-powered ads scrambling around to get your attention. Sometimes you'd have to close ads just to get to your content, but the ads themselves would contain false icons that made you think you were closing the ad when really you were clicking to learn more information about the product. Or there would be multiple ads for the same item with the content sandwiched in the middle, in a reading area that was truncated from its previous real estate.

I can be frustrated when a thing like this happens, but I also understand it. The reality is, it takes revenue to run a website. If you don't have other streams of income, you have to rely on advertising more and more. And the advertisers knew what they were doing, making their ads increasingly pernicious and increasingly debilitating to the usability of the site. (According to me, they did not know what they were doing, because any ad you perceive as pernicious should not be effectively selling the product. But it must have worked with some people because you still see these sorts of ads.)

I don't notice Metacritic being destroyed by ads these days as much as I once did. Maybe the advertisers wised up, or maybe Metacritic wised up. Now, it's an issue of functionality that has nothing to do with the effect of the ads. 

When I liked No Time to Die but was curious to see whether I liked it more or less than other critics, I went to Metacritic to get a sampling of their opinions. And this is what I found when I tried to search for it:

One of the biggest movies of 2021 cannot be found on a site dedicated to reviews of culture, through a normal search of its title.

Now, I know No Time to Die has a page on Metacritic because I googled it. That took me to the page and allowed me to see that the movie has a 68 score, which is almost exactly aligned with my own 7/10 (3.5 star) rating I gave it on ReelGood. In fact, I hesitated a little between 6 and 7, never seriously considering 6, but knowing I had enough qualms that a 7/10 was not a slam dunk. That uncertainty on my part computes to a 68 Metascore almost exactly.

Now why couldn't I have just found this by searching the site?

I suspect it has something to do with the lack of distinctiveness of the four words in the title. Those four words would appear in countless other titles, and it's possible that they just don't bring up the film when taken in combination with each other. A major malfunctioning of the site's core search architecture, to be sure, but one that at least has some sort of explanation.

But let's conduct the search from the very page itself, something that does not change the way the search performs, but just looks funny in context.

Sorry, that's a bit small, but maybe you can zoom in, or just wait for me to explain what we're seeing in the next paragraph. 

In this particular instance it does give some results, as it is searching all of Metacritic, rather than the focused movie search I did previously. The titles it does produce are not only significantly more obscure than the movie I'm searching, but they also feature common words that would appear in multiple titles. If my previous explanation for the failed search holds water, then why is the 2014 iOS game "No one dies" able to be found? Those words are certainly no more common in frequency in the database than "No time to die."

My goal today is not to roast and lambast Metacritic. It's actually far more solemn than that. It's to mourn the solid product I used to love and to visit on a weekly basis. Nowadays, I might go months between trying to use this as a resource to gauge critical consensus on a movie, and the latest James Bond movie is a reminder why.

The sad thing is that I'm not going to RT either. I'm just not looking up these critical consensuses, something I used to dearly enjoy and consider a key aspect of my engagement with the movies. 

Our relationship with any form of culture evolves over time, but when that change is forced by an external failure like this one, rather than something essential about our own changing perspectives, it's disappointing indeed.