IMDb

• 1. Origins And Usenet Roots

  ›

  In 1987, Col Needham began recording details of every film he watched as a hobby while working as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol. By the late 1980s, Needham joined the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies to exchange information about movies with other enthusiasts. He made a posting entitled Those Eyes about actresses with beautiful eyes which prompted other users to respond with additions and their own lists. Needham subsequently started an Actors List while Dave Knight began a Directors List and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST from Hank Driskill. Both the actors and actresses lists were initially restricted to people who were alive and working but retired performers were added later leading Needham to create a separate Dead Actors/Actresses List. Steve Hammond later started collecting and merging character names for both the actors and actresses lists when these achieved popularity they were merged back into the main lists. By late 1990 the lists included almost 10,000 films and television series correlated with actors and actresses appearing therein. On the 17th of October 1990, Needham developed and posted a collection of Unix shell scripts to the newsgroup that could be used to search the four lists thus creating the database that would become IMDb. At the time it was known as the rec.arts.movies movie database.

• 2. Corporate Acquisition And Evolution

  ›

  In April 1998 Jeff Bezos founder owner and CEO of Amazon.com struck a deal with Needham and other principal shareholders to buy IMDb outright. Amazon paid $55 million for IMDb and two other companies attaching it as a subsidiary private company. This gave IMDb access to expanding its product line using IMDb as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes. From 1996 onwards an annual newsletter email has been sent from Col Needham to contributors on the first day of each calendar year listing various information about the past year including stats top contributors tally for the year and a perspective on the site's progress and future. In 2008 IMDb launched their first official foreign-language version with IMDb.de in German. Also in 2008 IMDb acquired two other companies Withoutabox and Box Office Mojo. The website was originally Perl-based but IMDb no longer discloses what software it uses for reasons of security apart from mentioning The Apache Software Foundation. In 2010 the site was filtered in China. In 2016 The IMDb Studio at Sundance was launched a talk show that is presented on IMDb and YouTube. The site's message boards were disabled in February 2017. In April 2017 IMDb celebrated its 25th anniversary. As of that year Needham was still managing IMDb from its main office in Bristol in the Castlemead office tower.

• 3. Rating Algorithms And Top Lists

  ›

  The IMDb Top 250 is a list of the top rated 250 films based on ratings by registered users of the website using specific methods. The Shawshank Redemption directed by Frank Darabont is the highest-ranked film on the list having held that position since 2008. The Top 250 rating is based only on the ratings of regular voters whose number of votes required to be considered as such has been kept secret. IMDb has stated that to maintain the effectiveness of the Top 250 list they deliberately do not disclose the criteria used for a person to be counted as a regular voter. In addition to other weightings the Top 250 films are also based on a weighted rating formula referred to in actuarial science as a credibility formula. This label arises because a statistic is taken to be more credible the greater the number of individual pieces of information from eligible users who submit ratings. Although the current formula is not disclosed IMDb originally used a specific formula to calculate their weighted rating. The IMDb also has a Bottom 100 feature which is assembled through a similar process although only 10,000 votes must be received to qualify for the list. Since 2015 there has been a Top 250 list devoted to ranking television shows.

• 4. Platform Features And User Tools

  ›

  User profile pages show a user's registration date and optionally their personal ratings of titles. Since 2015 badges can be added showing a count of contributions ranging from total contributions made to independent categories such as photos trivia and biographies. If a registered user or visitor is in the entertainment industry and has an IMDb page they can add photos through IMDbPRO. IMDbPro allows actors crew and industry executives to post their own resume and upload photos of themselves for a yearly membership fee. IMDbPro can be accessed by anyone willing to pay the annual fee of US$149.99. Membership enables a user to access the rank order of each industry personality as well as agent contact information for any actor producer director etc that has an IMDb page. In 2006 IMDb introduced its Résumé Subscription Service where an actor or crew member can post their résumé and upload photos for a yearly fee. IMDb résumé pages are kept on a sub-page of the regular entry about that person with a regular entry automatically created for each résumé subscriber who does not already have one. By the 20th of February 2017 all the message boards and their content were permanently removed because the boards were no longer providing a positive useful experience for the vast majority of more than 250 million monthly users worldwide.

• 5. Legal Battles And Privacy Policies

  ›

  In 2011 in the case of Hoang v. Amazon.com Inc. IMDb was sued by an anonymous actress for at least $1 million because the movie website publicly disclosed her age without her consent. The actress claimed that revealing her age could cause her to lose acting opportunities. Judge Marsha J. Pechman a US district judge in Seattle dismissed the lawsuit saying the actress had no grounds to proceed with an anonymous complaint. The actress re-filed and so revealed that she was Huong Hoang of Texas who uses the stage name Junie Hoang. In 2013 Pechman dismissed all causes of action except for a breach of contract claim against IMDb; a jury then sided with IMDb on that claim. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court judgment in March 2015. Also in 2011 in the case of United Video Properties Inc. et al. v. Amazon.Com Inc. et al. IMDb and Amazon were sued by Rovi Corporation and others for patent infringement over their various program listing offerings. The patent claims were ultimately construed in a way favorable to IMDb and Rovi / United Video Properties lost the case. In April 2014 the decision was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

• 6. Data Architecture And Accessibility

  ›

  IMDb unlike other AI-automated queries does not provide an API for automated queries. However most of the data can be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be extracted using the command-line interface tools provided. There is also a Java-based graphical user interface application available that is able to process the compressed plain text files which allows a search and a display of the information. This GUI application supports different languages but the movie related data are in English as made available by IMDb. A Python package called IMDbPY since renamed cinemagoer can also be used to process the compressed plain text files into a number of different SQL databases enabling easier access to the entire dataset for searching or data mining. As of September 2025 IMDb ranks as the 40th most visited website in the world and the 35th in the United States. The database contained some 25.9 million titles and 14.8 million person records as of September 2025. On the 21st of October 2021 the site added the ability to add podcasts both as series and episodes as titles to the site via an IMDb employee announcement on their Sprinklr forums.