Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts in 1999, and is owned by Fandom, Inc. as of 2023. Metacritic's scoring converts each review into a percentage, either mathematically from the mark given, or what the site decides subjectively from a qualitative review. Before being averaged, the scores are weighted according to a critic's popularity, stature, and volume of reviews. The site provides an excerpt from each review and hyperlinks to its source. A color of green, yellow, or red summarizes the critics' reviews. Metacritic won two Webby Awards for excellence as an aggregation website. It is regarded as the foremost online review aggregation site for the video game industry. Criticism of the site has focused on the assessment system, the assignment of scores to reviews that do not include ratings, third-party attempts to influence the scores, and lack of staff oversight for user reviews. History Metacritic was launched in January 2001 by Marc Doyle, his sister Julie Doyle Roberts, and his University of Southern California law classmate Jason Dietz, after two years of developing the site. Rotten Tomatoes was already compiling movie reviews, but Doyle, Roberts, and Dietz saw an opportunity to cover a broader range of media. Metacritic was sold to CNET in 2005. CNET and Metacritic were later acquired by the CBS Corporation. In 2020, Metacritic and other CNET titles were bought by Red Ventures. In 2022, Red Ventures sold Metacritic and other entertainment websites to Fandom, Inc. Influence Metacritic has been used by businesses to predict future sales. In 2007, Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal wrote that Metacritic "influence[s] the sales of games and the stocks of video game publishers". He explains its influence as coming from the higher cost of buying video games than music or movie tickets. Many executives say that low scores "can hurt the long-term sales potential". Wingfield wrote that Wall Street pays attention to Metacritic and GameRankings because the sites typically post scores before sales data are publicly available, citing the respective rapid rise and fall in company values after BioShock and Spider-Man 3 were released. In an interview with The Guardian, Marc Doyle cited two major publishers that "conducted comprehensive statistical surveys through