Kylie

Kylie

Goddie

CROWDNEWS

Owen Gregorian

Owen Gregorian

@OwenGregorian

7 Feb 2024

Online Reviews Are Being Bought and Paid For. Get Used to It Critics have long been accused of accepting money from companies in exchange for a review of their gadget, book, or movie. Most writers would scoff at the idea, but the practice is widespread—and growing. ANYONE WHO WRITES reviews for a living has heard it before, and plenty: “How much did you get paid to write this?” I’ve been a critic of many things over the years: movies, wine and spirits, and all manner of tech gear, for WIRED and other publications. And no matter what it is that I’m writing about, there’s always that one guy who pipes up in the comments suggesting that my opinions were bought and paid for. It was invariably easy to dismiss these comments, but things got more complicated in September, when Vulture published a story that revealed the untold scale of the paid reviews industry. The story showed, among other things, how publicists were paying some independent film critics to review indie films and non-mainstream releases. These reviews, which were often published on independent film review websites, were then getting grabbed by Rotten Tomatoes. This meant, the story suggested, that a coveted Certified Fresh score on the hallowed Tomatometer could potentially be bought, and not earned. The story caused chaos in the film industry. Cast an eye beyond the world of art houses and streaming services, and you soon realize that this practice is commonplace. Reviews of everything—from gadgets to books, apparel, hotels, booze, you name it—are all potentially compromised, depending on your definition of that word. And the more you dig, the weirder things get. In the wake of Vulture’s story, Rotten Tomatoes took action and began to boot movie reviewers who it believed had taken payments off the platform. In doing so, the company upended the lives of many film reviewers and blew a hole in a common tactic employed by indie titles to get visibility. Defenders of the practice argued that those smaller films would have gone unnoticed by critics absent a financial incentive to watch them. The scenario points to a fundamental paradox in online reviews. Indie films—heck, indie anything—make the creative industry a better place, and boosting their signal above the noise is a net win for anyone with tastes outside of the mainstream. The practice of amplifying these independent voices by paying for coverage can be seen as deceitful, dishonest, and mercenary by readers who aren’t aware of the bigger picture. That bigger picture is in fact a blockbuster. No matter what you produce, there’s probably a way to buy a review for it. A network of platforms exists to connect filmmakers, authors, and product manufacturers with writers, blogs, and publications who can boost their brand for a fee. My inbox is inundated by overseas manufacturers of white-label tech products who are desperate to pay me to write a review if I can get it published in WIRED or another outlet. I politely declined, and for decades I never accepted outside payment to write a review of a product. Until, one day, I did. The Trouble With Bunker 15 Lane Brown’s piece in Vulture, “The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes,” claimed that the popular movie review site could be “easily hacked.” At the core of the article is a publicity company called Bunker 15. It’s one of many businesses that help independent filmmakers get reviews for their movies that can count toward the all-important Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer rating. For the service, it pays some reviewers $50 per review. Brown emailed me before his story was published to ask if I’d been paid by Bunker 15 for my review of the film Ophelia–also central to his piece–and, honestly, I didn’t know if I had or not. I published my review at Film Racket, an independent film website that I’ve run since 2013, more than five years ago, and I don’t have records going back that far. I told Brown it was possible, and that we did work with Bunker 15 on other films over the years. After the story was published I did more digging and discovered that, yes, I was one of the critics who was paid $50 to write a review of the movie, and that it was probably the first film the company ever submitted to Film Racket for proposed coverage. It’s not a great movie, but I gave it three stars out of five, which Rotten Tomatoes marked as “fresh.” It remains the only review I have ever personally written of a Bunker 15 film or for which I’ve been paid by a third party; other writers did the rest. Daniel Harlow, head of Bunker 15, has always been clear to me about his company’s proposition: Take a look at this screener. If you think you might like it, we'd love for you to review it. For writers who are commissioned, Bunker 15 will pay 50 bucks for the honor. If you think it looks like garbage, well, maybe don’t waste your time. It’s important to note that none of these films are movies you have ever heard of. The company has represented such recent blockbuster titles as Love in Kilnerry and The Seeds of Vandana Shiva. Vulture’s implication is that Bunker 15 would prefer to pay only for positive reviews. Of course, every publicist wants positive reviews, and they lobby heavily for that coverage. Film Racket has published dozens of reviews for Bunker 15 movies over the years, and the majority were considered “fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes. But we passed on reviewing dozens of movies too, simply saying no thanks if the trailer looked terrible. Simply put, $50 isn’t enough to merit sinking hours into watching a movie you know is going to be bad and then writing about it. Sometimes we did anyway, providing a “rotten” review—and contrary to Vulture’s conjecture, I’ve never been asked to remove a negative or mediocre review or somehow hide it. On that latter point, Harlow says that some critics have occasionally mentioned to him that they have published negative reviews on their own blogs rather than a larger media site out of respect for an indie filmmaker, which may explain the common accusation of reviews being “buried.” In the story’s wake, some critics received warning notices from Rotten Tomatoes that noted “potential violations” of its “Critics Code of Conduct,” which cites a prohibition against reviewing “based on financial incentive”—and which I, for one, had never previously seen. The communiqué also warns: “If we find evidence to support future violations, your Tomatometer status will be removed.” Many of their allegedly compromised reviews were then delisted from the site. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason as to who got these warning letters. Some longtime Bunker 15 collaborators received no warning and no punishment, while conversely at least one critic was completely deleted from the Rotten Tomatoes database, along with their entire catalog of reviews. (They declined to comment further for this story, citing the potential for reputational harm, and asked not to be named.) Film Racket was also temporarily removed from the Rotten Tomatoes platform entirely, though I didn’t realize it at the time. An executive at Comcast NBCUniversal had to alert me to that fact when I was attempting to wrangle a comment out of the company for this story. I hadn’t done any active development on Film Racket for years and have largely left it clinging to life as a place for a few other critics to publish occasional reviews on. My plan is to let the domain expire in a few months and then shutter the site completely in 2024. Rotten Tomatoes also sent a cease and desist email to Bunker 15 which reads, in part, “We are removing film pages which appear to be associated with Bunker 15, and plan not to honor any future requests to include films represented by Bunker 15 on Rotten Tomatoes.” Harlow says he was never given the chance to plead his case or refute the claims made about his business. The movie Ophelia was scrubbed for a time from Rotten Tomatoes entirely, as if it never existed, along with numerous other films promoted by Bunker 15. One of those was The Light of the Moon, a well-regarded indie which won a 2017 audience award at South by Southwest and which Bunker 15 promoted pro bono. (And a film, Harlow says, for which no critics received payment for their reviews.) Now, tainted. Pay to Play It doesn’t help matters that the entertainment industry has a long history of money changing hands in exchange for promotion. The payola scandal of the 1950s, where radio DJs in the US were paid to play records, was one of the first big shots. It seems decidedly quaint today, but the matter eventually resulted in congressional hearings and an amendment to the Communications Act, which outlawed the practice. In the late 2000s, the government got involved again in response to the rise of bloggers—among the most prominent being “mommy bloggers” at the time—who were getting free samples and writing positive reviews of products without disclosing the receipt of the freebie. New rules were enacted, and today bloggers in the US are supposed to meticulously disclose these samples, as are social media influencers. The guidelines are extensive but confusing around what must be disclosed and even who is bound by the rules. As such, critics warn that they are widely ignored. There’s even a marketplace for paid reviews: GetReviewed connects product manufacturers with a “hand-picked network” of product review bloggers. When it comes to film and TV criticism, the shenanigans run deep. I’d be remiss without a callback to good old David Manning, a 2000s-era film critic who loved Sony’s movies so much he seemed too good to be true. And he was. Sony had made him up, along with all his poster “blurbs.” Then in 2021, when the Los Angeles Times revealed that Emily in Paris received two Golden Globe nominations after its original producer, Paramount, jetted dozens of members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to the show’s set in France, the backlash started the conversation that led to the Golden Globes telecast being canceled the following year. These tales are damning, but is the Bunker 15 business model really on the same level? Is there in fact anything bad about it at all? Is it possible to get paid by a publicist to write something, but do so with honesty and integrity? No matter what your gut reaction to those questions is, understand first that reviews which involve money changing hands are already all around you. In moviedom, Film Threat is the most visible and transparent example of the pay-to-get-reviewed concept, a business model that it launched in 2011 and then revised under new management in 2018. The long-running, well-respected site offers multiple tiers of coverage for filmmakers looking for a review. While anyone can submit a movie for free, you’re not guaranteed a review of a feature film unless you pay $100, which also gets you bonus extras like promotion on social media, a link to the review on the home page, and a backlink to your film’s website. For $500 you get an ad, a feature in the newsletter, trailer promotion, and more. Alan Ng, Film Threat's editor in chief, will offer these “fast pass review” assignments to a specific writer, or drop it into the site's bullpen of writers, who can pipe up to review the film if they are interested. Other sites have similar fee-based arrangements, but none publicize their rates as openly as Film Threat. Proprietor Chris Gore says the site receives upwards of 100 requests for coverage each week from small-time filmmakers looking for reviews. The program gives Gore a way to pay his writers—many of whom otherwise work for free—while simultaneously supporting independent filmmakers looking for press. Today, about a third of Film Threat’s revenue is generated by the pay-to-get-reviewed program. Still, the operation is tiny, and Gore notes that it has been forced to cease publication on at least two separate occasions over the years. “Even with 30 writers contributing four reviews a month,” Gore says, “we’re still covering less than half the movies submitted to us.” This model lets filmmakers jump the line, guaranteeing a prompt review in a week instead of having to wait for up to three months in the hopes of getting one. The pay-to-get-reviewed system is the best way to support the industry, Gore argues. “You can read our reviews, and you can call bullshit if you’d like. But I'll just let my reputation and what I've built speak for itself.” Gore calls the model the “most fair” he can come up with, the fee akin to a single submission to a film festival and enough to help keep the website online. Still, if a filmmaker pays Film Threat for a review and the movie is deemed awful, the site provides an escape hatch. Film Threat editor in chief Ng explains that he avoids the problem of people having buyer’s remorse over paying for negative coverage. “I get ahead of it and offer the filmmaker or publicist the opportunity for a news item or filmmaker interview in lieu of a review,” Ng says. “Almost always, they take the interview.” Film Threat is far from alone in giving indies a pass. I also corresponded with Jessie Maltin, daughter of famed film critic Leonard Maltin and cohost of his podcast Maltin on Movies, on this topic. She says that back in 2016 or 2017, Leonard—no longer writing his famed Movie Guide or reviewing for a commercial outlet—decided that “if he really didn’t like a smaller movie then he wouldn’t review it,” Jessie says. A critic of the elder Maltin’s stature is usually not given specific assignments and can review what he wants, Jessie says, so he’s focused on only praising good cinema. “The number one thing people say to him is, ‘You never seem mean,’” she says. “They feel like he wants to enjoy the movies he sees and looks for the positive. It’s the truth. He loves movies and genuinely wants them to be good.” Gore takes a similar position, saying that at Film Threat, indie films earn more leeway than big-budget studio pictures. “I judge studio films more harshly because there’s no excuse for this movie not to be the best movie I've ever seen,” Gore says. “When it comes to indie films, I always look for a movie that's like a bird with a broken wing: This movie would soar if they had more money for a bigger budget.” Prior Art The film industry's stance on the use of paid reviews seems almost quaint in comparison to other industries. Consider the magazine Publishers Weekly, which offers a paid book review service called BookLife. For $399, independent and self-published authors can buy a 300-word review that includes letter grades for various production elements (nothing below a C) and “an honest, positive one-sentence takeaway that summarizes the reviewer’s opinion of the book’s best aspects and likely audience.” These appear on the BookLife website and in print, at the author’s discretion, in Publisher’s Weekly. Carl Pritzkat helped found BookLife in 2014 as a place to provide feedback on unpublished manuscripts to authors. That business model was “dead on arrival,” Pritzkat says, and so he guided its evolution into its current form in 2019. Much like Film Threat, BookLife considers its goal to “try to give self-published authors exposure to professional criticism,” says Pritzkat, while providing these reviews to the publishing industry: libraries, booksellers, agents, and publishers. The program initially had to prove itself. Early features, like the manuscript preview and BookLife prize, were dismissed at the time. “We got a lot of flak when we came into the marketplace by the community who thought somebody was trying to cash in and scam them,” says Pritzkat. Over the years that perception was erased, namely because the program has done what it promised, he says, showcasing quality where it exists and bringing up books’ shortcomings in a constructive way. “Over time we’ve developed a great reputation because people really see the benefit of it. They know they’re getting a truly professional, honest review.” Today, BookLife publishes about 1,600 reviews annually—a number that goes up every year—compared to the 9,000 published by Publishers Weekly. Coverage from Kirkus Reviews can be purchased too—and unlike at Publishers Weekly, these aren’t shunted to a separate site. According to Chaya Schechner, president of Kirkus Indie, these paid reviews “follow the same strict editorial standards as the rest of the magazine, and an indie review can be positive (it can even earn a Kirkus Star), negative, or somewhere in between.” The fee for a Kirkus Indie review starts at $450 for a traditional book, but “if you receive a negative review, you can choose not to publish your review and it will never see the light of day.” Reviews from the program, which launched way back in 2005 as Kirkus Discoveries, look just like unpaid reviews, except for a small notice—“Review Program: Kirkus Indie”—appearing in the review’s errata. The program now reviews a whopping 4,400 or so books annually. About a third of those reviews go unpublished, presumably because they are not overwhelmingly positive. “Kirkus Indie has seen a lot of growth over the years and is another way for Kirkus to accomplish its goal of connecting books and readers,” says Schechner. “Many authors have been very happy with the program and have had multiple books reviewed.” How about the world of wine? Glad you asked. The venerable Beverage Testing Institute charges a minimum of $140 for a review, and publishes a score, medal, and short writeup on its website Tastings.com. The site does not appear to publish reviews that score below 80 out of 100 points, and anything below 85 points seems to just receive a “bronze medal.” The company did not respond to a request for comment. Then there’s Sam Kim, a New Zealand-based wine critic who launched his wine review site Wine Orbit in 2007. His initial business model was to charge a subscription fee to readers, but that fizzled. “Turns out New Zealand is a small country,” he says. After 18 months he pivoted and started charging wineries NZ$34 per bottle in exchange for a review on his site—an amount that Kim estimates is about half the cost of submitting a wine to a formal wine competition, which wineries gladly pay. Kim’s site does not carry advertising, and he only publishes reviews that score 81 points (3.5 stars) or higher, which amount to about 90 percent of submissions, he says. Some wineries have balked, but most haven’t. “I expected the number of entries to drop significantly, but it didn’t,” Kim says. “In fact, it significantly grew.” Today he receives about 4,500 wines per year for review and has turned Wine Orbit from a hobby into a full-time job. Minor backlashes have erupted over the years asking whether Kim’s business model is unethical or if his reviews are automatically biased because money has changed hands. Today, Kim says, “by and large” his business model has found acceptance. “It’s Like an Assassination” Doug Bremner is a physician and medical school professor who also loves movies. In 2014, he wrote and directed a film called Inheritance, Italian Style, inspired by his wife’s Italian ancestry. After the movie wrapped, Bremner says, “We did the usual thing and went to film festivals, and finally went through two distributors.” No one ever saw the movie. The film eventually ended up streaming on Amazon Prime—you can watch it right now for $2—but Bremner didn’t have a clue how to get people to watch it. A post on X eventually led Bremner to Bunker 15, with whom he contracted to get some reviews of the film in the hope of getting some critical attention. He says that he ultimately got nearly two dozen reviews, some good and some bad, but that they were positive enough to earn a “fresh” Rotten Tomatoes rating, which helped move the needle. “We got more exposure, and it worked out pretty well,” he says, earning enough from paid streams to cover the $2,000 he had paid to Bunker 15. Today, he says some of those reviews have been deleted from the Rotten Tomatoes database as part of its purge, but he’s still sitting at a 71 percent “fresh” rating, at least for now. Rick Pamplin, a longtime independent filmmaker and a former film critic, has a similar but more volatile story. While the Vulture article suggests that his most recent film, Burt Reynolds: The Last Interview, is a “medium-sized” title, it’s really quite tiny, a documentary made by a husband-and-wife team with a sub-million-dollar budget and a rather niche subject. It’s an oddball movie, but Pamplin calls the film “the best film I’ve ever made in my life,” and gushed to me for nearly an hour about how he poured his heart and soul (and savings) into the movie’s distribution, which became a celebration of the final days of the famed screen icon. Getting critics to watch and review a movie about Burt Reynolds was a massive undertaking. The movie played at the Berlin Film Festival, and a few reviews trickled in. After trying to get additional reviews outside the festival on his own, Pamplin came up dry. He says he was told that "editors didn't have the budget to assign anyone to review the movie. We hired two publicists, and they got us zero reviews. But once we went with Bunker 15, we started seeing reviews pop up.” Pamplin says the process of getting Bunker 15 to agree to represent the film was onerous, saying that Harlow had to personally see the film and approve it and then interview Pamplin about the movie. They saw eye to eye, and after Bunker 15 had beaten the bushes, the movie finally reached 16 reviews linked on Rotten Tomatoes, enough to get the film some notice from streaming services and lucrative in-flight movie services. Eventually the film landed at a 94 percent Tomatometer score and a 97 percent audience rating. After a mention in passing in the Vulture article, Rotten Tomatoes sharpened its ax. Today, the movie has five reviews and no official “freshness” designation because that total is too small. “No one [from Rotten Tomatoes] has talked to us,” Pamplin says. “No one has said anything. It’s been devastating. It’s like an assassination.” Pamplin says that the actions taken by Rotten Tomatoes are exclusively targeting small productions, adding that a grave injustice is being committed, one which is “basically annihilating independent films,” he says. In his early days in the studio system, he says, he was witness to big studios spending “hundreds of thousands or millions” of dollars to “wine and dine” critics and fly them to exotic set locations—and then demand quid pro quo, good reviews if they wanted to stay on the guest list. “It’s always been about undue influence at the highest level.” That kind of influence is tough for Rotten Tomatoes, which makes money from big studio advertising and is owned by Comcast NBCUniversal, to call out. Independent filmmakers make for a much easier and lower-risk target. “The sad thing about Rotten Tomatoes is that I gave them a lot of credit for bringing on all these other critics in 2018. Why shouldn't other voices be heard?” says Pamplin. Now he thinks those voices are being quashed along with the small films they are writing about. “It just seems terribly unfair and undemocratic and against art. It’s disrespectful to filmmakers, to us, to everybody—and to Burt. But it’s been this way my whole life.” How Many Reviews Does a Plastic Doll Need, Anyway? And then there’s the other side of the equation: the independent film critic. A few dozen critics with national recognition dominate the discussion; in fact, Rotten Tomatoes prioritizes them as “Top Critics.” The rest—thousands of them—fight over the scraps in the hope that their words will be seen by someone willing to get through more than 400 reviews (no, really) of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. Naturally, most critics gravitate to writing about blockbusters. Film critics large and small cover Hollywood studio films because there is inherent demand for reviews. This is why Film Threat reviews the latest Spider-Man movie for free; ads and revenue from YouTube will (in theory) cover the cost of producing the writeup. Publishers Weekly doesn’t charge Simon & Schuster to review the new Stephen King book. Consumers want to read it, as the review will sell magazines and generate clicks. 1/2

858