I like to supplement my reviews here with the opinions of others: users of sites and services like IMDB (for my rankings of Star Trek episodes), Untappd (for my rankings of beers), and GoodReads (for my ranking of Hugo Award winning novels). And I want to incorporate more BoardGameGeek ratings as well into my reviews of boardgames.

But who are these reviewers? Sure, they’re more representative than the views of one blogger, but who are they representative of?

To understand this, I ran a survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults (details below). To no one’s surprise, reviewers are not representative of all ages equally: they skew young. Most online activities skew young. In fact, the younger you are, the more likely you are to rate and review movies, books, and other items.

And while about 60% of Millennials and Gen Z have rated and reviewed media (vs. just 34% of Boomers), most ratings are from a small minority.

The majority of those Americans who have provided ratings have logged 1-25 ratings (58%), yet these ratings comprise only 1% of all the ratings that one sees. Nearly half (47%) the published ratings are from the 2% of reviewers who have rated more than 500 items.

Approximately how many movies and TV shows have you rated on IMDb in total? - As a percentage of respondents - As a percentage of ratings

Nor are rating practices consistent. Only 14% of those who rate media always rate a show, movie or book after completing it. Though people are more diligent about certain sites and certain types of media: 38% of GoodReads raters and 32% of IMDB raters say they always or almost always rate items (higher than those using other services). But whether people like or dislike something affects if they rate it: 27% confess to mainly rating items they really like (no wonder the average 5-star rating is over 4 stars!) and 9% say they mainly rate items that they really dislike!

How often after finishing an item do you rate it? When you rate media online, which best describes your approach?

Prompts are important: the second biggest reason that people rate items is because they were asked to. The third biggest reason is to help others make a decision.

Despite the fact that reviewers skew young and that ratings skew towards the most prolific reviewers, I still think providing aggregated ratings with my reviews is valuable for wider context. But it’s important to recognize how different the audience of raters is from the wider population. (And this is just a survey from the US, while of course people from around the world contribute to such ratings.)

These results are from an online newsmaker survey of 1,067 U.S. adults aged 18 and up that was fielded by Researchscape International from August 22 to 25, 2025. The data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points. Charts and graphs prepared by the ResearchStory survey analysis software.

For a review of how the first IMDB ratings for a show or movie are often by fans and therefore higher than later ratings, see IMDB Ratings Over Time.