how we make money
last updated 22 August 2026
A rating site that hides its incentives has no business asking you to trust its scores. So here is every way money reaches us — there are two, and neither is a sponsorship, an ad, or anything sold to the industry — and what it is not allowed to touch.
affiliate links
Some "where to watch" links earn us a commission if you sign up or rent something. It costs you nothing extra. Those links are marked with ↗ and carry rel="sponsored".
- Which services appear, and in what order, is decided by actual availability — never by commission rate.
- Services we earn nothing from are shown exactly the same way.
- No affiliate relationship has any effect on a title's score. Scores come from ratings, full stop.
donations
The rest is donations. One-time, any amount, and they unlock nothing — there is no tier, no plan, and no subscription to sell you. A donor gets their name on the wall and the identical product everyone else already has. The Free Forever Charter lists what can never be moved behind a wall, and the answer is currently everything.
We previously ran FlickFeel Signal — commissioned attention studies on unreleased cuts and trailers, produced by a compensated panel we paid to watch them. Both the product and the panel have been removed. Nobody can commission a study, nothing is fielded, and no study data is sold to anyone. The ratings that panel produced remain excluded from every public score, exactly as they were while it ran.
We also licensed aggregate attention data — an index, per-title reports, an API — to studios and agencies. That is gone as well. Nothing derived from your ratings is sold to anyone, in aggregate or otherwise, and there is no longer any commercial party on the other side of the numbers on this site.
where the ratings come from
FlickFeel launched with a generated community: around 120 taste personas, software with handles, whose ratings and written takes were produced by a statistical model so that no title was a blank page on day one. They were labelled, excluded from real-rater counts, and never sold — and they were still invented people reviewing films nobody watched.
They have been deleted. Every persona rating, every persona review, and the handles themselves are gone from the database, and the code that generated them is gone from the repository. Nothing replaced them one-for-one, so most titles on this site now show no score at all. That is the intended result. A blank page is honest; an invented one is not.
Two things produce a curve here now, and they are never mixed:
- Ratings from people. Somebody watched it and said how it felt. This is the community score, and it is the only thing that carries the trust badge.
- The read from public discussion. For titles people are actually talking about, we collect public comments — Reddit and TMDB reviews, sources whose terms permit it — and read them into an arc: where it drags, where it lands, how it ends. It is labelled as what it is, it shows how many comments it drew on and how many of them actually discussed pacing, it links the quotes it was built from, and it never counts as a rater or feeds the community score. Where the two disagree, both are shown.
A rating written by a real person is never generated, edited, or rewritten by us. A language model does the reading in the second case — compressing what other people wrote in public into a shape — and it never invents a rater, a handle, or a quote.
what money cannot buy here
- A score, a rank, or a chart position.
- Removal of a bad result.
- Your personal data.
If any of that ever changes, it will be announced on this page before it happens, not after.