Flixster, the movie review company with a popular Facebook application has raised $5 million out of a planned $8 million second round.  Flixster is essentially a movie review social network that started in January 2006.  Flixster receives roughly 20 million-50 million pageviews per day. 

This round of funding was provided by Pinnacle Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  In order to compete, Netflix introduced similar social networking and reviewing features within their DVD rental services.

Lightspeed Ventures previously invested around $2 million or less around January 2007.  Here are some of the statistics on the site as of January 2008 (via Wikipedia):

• User Homepages: 42,122,063
• Movie Ratings: 1,225,752,033
• Quiz Questions: 3,017,434
• Movies: 34,254
• Actors: 71,934
• Photos: 1,312,286
• Videos: 353,672

Information Source:
[1] PEHub: Flixster Raises Second Round

Fortune 500 American media company, InterActiveCorp operates 60 brands, employs 20,000 employees, and has its fair share of interesting headlines.  All of IAC’s web sites attract 680 million visitors.  IAC is also the largest buyer of online advertising.  IAC’s 60 brands keeps the company’s dazzling, spectacle headquarters glowing:

[image source: IAC press release]

Yesterday, Liberty Media Holding Corp. International bought 14 million shares of IAC/InterActiveCorp from a single holder.  And then IAC bought 6 million shares of its own stock from that same single holder.  This brings Liberty Media’s ownership of IAC to 30%.

IAC gave their Internet property, Ask.com a major marketing overhaul.  Jakob Lodwick, co-founder of Vimeo, parted ways with IAC after a disagreement with the company’s management recently.  And today I read that IAC may be close to acquiring Flixster.

Flixster is a social network centered around movies.  According to TechCrunch, either the deal is done or is “very close.”  The deal is rumored to be potentially around $150-$200 million.  One of Flixster’s primary traffic drivers is its Facebook Application.  Flixster raised around $2 million from Lightspeed Ventures and other angel investors.  The social networking company is based in San Francisco, Calif.

“They [Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari, founders of Flixster] have built an amazing user generated content site around movies, including ratings, reviews, actor pages, trivia quizes, movie compatability tests and tons of other stuff.”
-Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

San Francisco, Calif.-based movie and social network database, Flixster.com, has seen exponential growth since its January 2006 start. Flixster currently has 30 million-plus user homepages, has 870 million+ movie ratings, and 1.5 million+ quiz questions in user-generated content. The database currently also hosts over 30,000 movie profiles, 60,000 actor profiles, 1.1 million pictures, and 310,000 videos. Flixster’s Facebook Application is part of the reason why Flixster has seen enormouse growth as well.

Today TechCrunch reported that we may see a Flixster acquisition happen soon. TechCrunch sources have cited that a letter of intent was sent to Flixster from InterActivCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), parent company of Ask.com, LendingTree, Ticketmaster, HSN, and Match.com. The rumored valuation is worth $150 million.

Flixster is monitored by several administrators and the company has about 8 employees. Besides the Facebook Application, another reason for Flixster’s accelerated growth is because users are asked to provide GMail or Yahoo! Mail passwords and then the user is asked to invite friends and family from their contact lists.

Flixster is powered with $2 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Keep checking Pulse 2.0 to see whether the acquisition takes place.