We continue to learn from partners about how they are taking advantage of Pinned Sites. Many are pushing the limits of these features and getting more impact from the website they already have in less than a day of development. Over 1,000 sites globally have done the same, reaching over one billion active users on the web.

Flixster recently built a trio of media entertainment experiences including Flixster, Rotten Tomatoes and Buddy TV that take advantage of Pinned Sites in IE9. Together they reach 20M unique visitors monthly. They also found that users that pinned the site read 34% more pages and stayed 57% longer than their average user. We caught-up with the team to learn how they developed it and what it means for their web business.

Meet and Steve Nguyen, Lead Developer and Andrea Sharfin, Product Manager at Flixster:

Microsoft: Thanks for meeting with us today! Tell me about the Flixster experience and why it’s so popular.

Andrea: Well, we want our sites to have everything you need to plan for the big movie weekend. Date nights, family time, teen-hang outs. We help consumers make the right choice.

Steve: It’s about the trailers and actor bios. Our users start by checking-out the latest movie but they get curious about the gossip. They share it with their friends socially on Facebook and Twitter and bring them in too.

Microsoft: So, what got you interested in Pinned Sites?

Steve: Well, frankly I was skeptical at first. Most of my development time is about new content and website standards. I was running IE8 at the time but we had one of the program managers talk about the creative potential. He liked the idea of putting Flixster on the taskbar right next to native apps like a media player.

Microsoft: So it wasn’t love at first site. What made you decide to develop?

Andrea: We wanted to see if they really made a difference. Our web business is about ads. Users get our content for free. We’re not selling movie tickets. So, when they view more pages and stay longer, they see more ads. That makes them more valuable to us.

Microsoft: What was your creative process? How did you decide what to do?

Andrea: We looked at our site analytics and picked what users want to see most often. Since new movies and the box office catch the most attention, we put them in the dynamic jump list for our Rotten Tomatoes site. They remain even when the user closes the browser.

Steve: I mentioned how important social interaction is in growing our user base. We put the “like” and “tweet” buttons on Rotten Tomatoes right in the thumbnail preview. We also focused on the basics: favicons that people want to put on their taskbar and a message that tells users how to pin it.

Microsoft: What was the development experience like? Anything we can improve upon?

Steve: That was the easy part. Once we had the idea, it took us about 3 to 4 hours including testing. The site metadata took a few minutes. I spent the most time working with the JavaScript and jQuery plug-in that told users how to pin. But you could make it even easier for developers with better detection code and automating the process into a library.

Microsoft: That’s a great idea. Overall, worth your development time?

Andrea: Yes, as Steve said, it was pretty minimal. Seeing users stay on-site 57% longer is a good sign that there’s something there. I’d like to see where this goes as more people adopt IE9.

Thanks again to Andrea and Steve for sharing their thoughts. We’ll continue to share how partners are taking advantage of Pinned Sites and getting measureable results. Find the how-to and code samples here.