Make IMDb Ratings More Meaningful By Checking Out The Voter Demographic
Did you ever watch a movie, based solely on its high IMDb rating, and walk away wondering why it was considered so good? IMDb has long been the most popular movie rating database on the internet. It serves as a guide to how good or bad a movie is and you can always count on it to save you from watching a bad movie. You can’t however always count on it to recommend a great movie. A lot of people might find that a movie, while not terrible, isn’t as great as its IMDb rating (or the internet) make it out to be. This might have something to do with age; yours and that of the voters who rated the movie causing it to skew more or less towards a high rating. Checking out the demographic of an IMDb rating is one way to tell if a movie is good for you because it shows how people in your age group rated it. Here’s how and why.
When you click the number of people who voted to give you the collective rating for a movie, you can see how the voters differ in their rating by age. Why this helps is because, quite simply, people find different things interesting at different ages. A movie might have a very high rating but if the voting demographic that’s rated it high lies in the under 18 and you’re in your thirties, chances are slim that you will like the movie.
This may or may not hold true for the top 100 movies on IMDb but for anything that isn’t crazy popular, any movie or TV show that might have a rating under 8, this is a good way to check if you’re going to like it or not.
