6 Months After Premiere, Movieline.com Nears Growth Milestone

When Movieline.com launched last April, it "opened" well (to borrow a Hollywood phrase), logging 8,355 visits on the first day -- neither blockbuster hit nor flop. Cut to the present and Movieline.com, which revives the legacy of popular print publication Movieline Magazine (folded almost a decade ago), is approaching 1 million unique monthly visitors, fairly remarkable for a site just six months old. ComScore.com numbers for October show Movieline.com with 930,000 unique visitors, or 30,000 per day. That's up from more than 700,000 in September, and represents almost quadruple growth from the site's debut numbers. Certainly before year's end, Movieline.com will have more than 1 million unique monthly visitors. Owned by Jay Penske's Mail.com Media Corp., Movieline.com is all about movies, television and Hollywood stars. It features a lively mix of news, reviews, opinion, interviews and video clips. (See screen grab below.) General manager and editorial director Charles Runnette, a veteran of Hollywood Life and television documentaries, oversees a small editorial staff whose members come from places such as NYTimes.com, Defamer.com, TheWrap.com, VanityFair.com and Variety.com. "We keep it a lean operation," Runnette says. (Who doesn't these days?) Seventy percent of Movieline.com's audience, Runnette says, "aren't in the business. They're people who want to find out what's happening in television and film before anyone else." Runnette says Movieline.com's prime editorial directive "is to engage people. I feel like all the writers have excellent taste and they understand we're trying to appeal to a broad audience." While that mandate rules out F-bombs, Movieline.com's writers deliver a steady stream of edgy and entertaining content that continues to find a larger audience. Like nearly all publications dependent primarily on ads, Movieline.com is facing revenue challenges. "We're not profitable just yet," Runnette says, "but we're on our way."

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6 Months After Premiere, Movieline.com Nears Growth Milestone

Chris Nerney

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