Metacritic

Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows, DVDs, and formerly, books. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green, Yellow and Red summarize the critic's recommendation, giving an idea of the general appeal of the product among reviewers and, to a lesser extent, the public. The site is somewhat similar to Rotten Tomatoes, but the scoring results sometimes differ very drastically, due to Metacritic's method of scoring that converts each review into a percentage that the site decides for itself, before taking a weighted average based on the critic's fame or stature, and listing different numbers of reviews. In addition to its television ratings, it also reviews music albums, video games, movies, and DVDs. Many review websites give a review grade out of five, out of ten, out of a hundred, or even an alphabetical score. Metacritic converts such a grade into a percentage. For reviews with no explicit scores (for example, The New York Times reviews), Metacritic manually assesses the tone of the review before assigning a relevant grade. Weighting is also applied to reviews—those from major periodicals may have a greater effect on the average than niche ones, although Metacritic refuses to reveal what weights are applied to which publications.