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Scene from "The Rings of Power": The series has been available in Germany since Friday morning
Photo: Matt Grace / dpa
You can rate just about anything on Amazon, from a 141-function Swiss Army knife to a life-size plastic rhino.
But a prominently advertised product was still missing user reviews on Monday morning: "There are 0 customer reviews and 0 customer ratings," it says about "The Rings of Power," a $465 million Amazon series that started on Friday with a lot of Bohei - and which was accessed 25 million times worldwide on the very first day.
»Variety« provides an explanation as to why the series has garnered so many viewers but so far no publicly visible ratings.
According to the US magazine, there is a fundamental decision by Amazon that was implemented in mid-August.
Since then, the group has been publishing reviews for Prime Video with a deliberate delay of 72 hours.
His employees should have more time to check the submitted ratings for their authenticity.
Amazon confirmed that new approach to the magazine.
So, in theory, the first user reviews should be legible on Amazon this Monday (however, this wasn't the case when this article was published).
According to "Variety" and other US media, Amazon wants to use the comparatively long review period to filter out comments from bots, but also supposedly funny troll postings and comments that fall into the "Review Bombing" category.
This term describes the phenomenon that thousands of users, in actions that are sometimes more or less clearly concerted, rate a film or video game as badly as possible without looking at it because they are dissatisfied with certain decisions made by its creators.
In the case of The Rings of Power, there are netizens who are vocal about how the cast is more diverse than the Lord of the Rings movies that came out in the early 2000s and that, for example, a dwarf woman doesn't have a beard carries.
Certainly also a business decision
On Metacritic.com , where many user reviews have already appeared, one currently encounters such zero-point ratings: »This series is complete »Woke« garbage.
It was made just to indoctrinate people into the communist system that the media and entertainment industry want the country to be.” That's the full text of the review.
At Metacritic.com, »The Rings of Power« currently has a »User Score« of 2.4 out of a maximum of ten points.
An overall rating based on 37 professional reviews recorded gives the series 71 out of a maximum of 100 points - which, however, is not a very good value given the production budget.
At IMDB, the new release only gets a mediocre 6.6 out of 10 points - after all, this value is displayed on the product page.
There, a third of the users gave the highest possible rating and almost a quarter the lowest.
In any case, Amazon's new waiting period for reviews can also be interpreted as a business decision.
In the case of complex in-house productions in particular, there is a risk for the group that mediocre ratings will prevent some Prime subscribers who are actually interested from getting an idea of the new content for themselves.
Of course, this is of little help when chasing record download numbers.
According to the magazine "Deadline", the review period only affects Amazon's own productions.
See first, judge later
Incidentally, the company still has a controversial trick up its sleeve to prevent Prime Video content from being all too easily attacked by “review bombing” or simply being badly rated quickly.
If you try to rate »The Rings of Power«, for example, based on the impression of the first few minutes, you will see an overlay: »Write a review after watching: We look forward to your reviews.
Please come back here when you've finished watching the video."
SPIEGEL's first assessments of the new "Lord of the Rings" series can be found here and here.
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