The movie analogy is interesting, because you can see the way people have evolved techniques to handle the grossly different movie products: rotten tomatoes ag

The movie analogy is interesting, because you can see the way people have evolved techniques to handle the grossly different movie products: rotten tomatoes aggregates professional reviewers to give a general score imdb lets people see the entire body of work by directors, writers and actors. So people will see a movie by a director they like the same way they'll pick up a book by a writer they like. and then you have companies like Pixar and Disney (same, I know) that exist on brand. People will see the movie because it's a Pixar movie and they know what to expect (or not expect). but what is even more interesting about the movie analogy is that with all these tools for discovering movies, box office take seems to be a function of advertising budget than anything else (to the point where they believe that movies have to hit a certain take on opening weekend to be successful at all).