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Editorial Guidelines

How we rank, recommend, and feature titles on CineStream — and what we promise NOT to do.

Our promise

CineStream does not accept payment to feature titles. We do not run sponsored placements. We do not adjust rankings for advertisers. There are no advertisers. The recommendations and rankings you see are entirely based on:

How rankings work

Our composite score is approximately rating × log(votes+1) × popularity^0.4. This rewards titles that are simultaneously well-rated and widely-watched, instead of letting a single 10/10 review with 3 votes top a list. The weighting is documented and consistent across all hub pages.

Editorial curation

A small number of pages — Mind-Bending Films, Feel-Good Movies, Horror Classics, Binge-Worthy TV — are hand-curated by our editors. The selection criteria for each page is in the page's intro paragraph. Editors are not paid for inclusion.

Corrections and updates

If you find a factual error (wrong runtime, miscredit, broken link), please email it via the contact page. We review all corrections within 48 hours.

Sources

Title metadata (cast, plot, ratings, runtime) comes from TMDB under their attribution license. Watch counts and engagement metrics come from our own platform.

What we don't do

Author attribution

Editorial blog posts are signed by the author and dated. Auto-generated content (per-title FAQ entries, AI-rewritten meta descriptions) is clearly marked as machine-generated.