Short answers, pulled from the story.
Col Needham founded IMDb in 1987 as a personal cataloging project while working as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol. The project evolved into a collaborative effort on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies by 1990.
IMDb moved to the World Wide Web on the 5th of August 1993 under the name Cardiff Internet Movie Database. The site was hosted on the servers of Cardiff University in Wales with an original web interface built by Rob Hartill.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com acquired IMDb for $55 million in April 1998. This acquisition transformed the site from a volunteer-run project into a commercial enterprise serving as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes.
IMDb permanently removed all message boards and their content on the 20th of February 2017. The decision was driven by business realities as the boards generated less income from advertisements and were costly to maintain due to their aged system design.
As of September 2025, IMDb contains approximately 25.9 million titles and 14.8 million person records. The database covers films, television series, podcasts, video games, and streaming content with data provided by subjects through a Résumé Subscription Service introduced in 2006.