IMDb

• 1. Introduction

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  IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, traces its origin not to a Silicon Valley startup or a media company, but to a single engineer's handwritten notes. Col Needham, working at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, had been keeping records of every film he watched since his teenage years. By the time the internet arrived, that private obsession would become one of the most visited websites on the planet.

  In the late 1980s, Needham found a community as passionate as himself on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. He posted a piece entitled "Those Eyes", a note about actresses with beautiful eyes. The response was immediate. Strangers across the network began contributing their own lists. Out of that exchange, something unexpected grew: a distributed, volunteer-built archive that no single institution had thought to build.

  By late 1990, those lists had grown to cover almost 10,000 films and television series. On the 17th of October 1990, Needham posted a collection of Unix shell scripts that could search the data, and the database was born. Today, that database holds some 25.9 million titles and 14.8 million person records. How a hobby became an institution, and what it took to keep it there, is the story ahead.

• 2. From Usenet to the Web

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  Dave Knight began a "Directors List" around the same time Needham launched his "Actors List", and Andy Krieg took over a companion list called "THE LIST" from Hank Driskill, which was later renamed the "Actress List". Steve Hammond eventually started collecting character names for both the actors and actresses lists. When those grew popular enough, they were merged back into the main database.

  The lists began strictly: only living, working performers were included. As the project expanded, retired performers were added, and Needham created a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List" to accommodate them. By 1992, the database had grown to include trivia, biographies, plot summaries, and properly integrated movie ratings. A centralized email interface for querying the database had been created by Alan Jay.

  On the 5th of August 1993, the database moved to the World Wide Web under the name "Cardiff Internet Movie Database". It lived on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in Wales. Rob Hartill wrote the original web interface. In 1994, the email system was revised so contributors could submit any type of information directly, rather than hunting for the right list maintainer. For several years after that, the database ran on a global network of mirrors kept alive by donated bandwidth.

• 3. Amazon's $55 Million Bet

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  In April 1998, Jeff Bezos struck a deal with Needham and the other principal shareholders to buy IMDb outright. Amazon paid $55 million for IMDb and two other companies in that transaction. Bezos folded IMDb into Amazon as a private subsidiary, and the strategic intent was clear: Amazon intended to use the database as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes.

  IMDb had already incorporated in the United Kingdom in 1996, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd, with Needham as primary owner. Revenue before the acquisition had come from advertising, licensing, and partnerships. The Amazon deal changed the scale of everything, though the editorial identity of the site remained recognizable.

  In 2008, IMDb acquired Withoutabox and Box Office Mojo, extending its reach further into the film industry. That same year, IMDb launched its first official foreign-language version, IMDb.de, in German. As of April 2017, when IMDb celebrated its 25th anniversary, Needham was still managing the site from its main office in Bristol, in the Castlemead office tower.

• 4. Ratings, Lists, and Secrets

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  The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont and released in 1994, has held the top position on the IMDb Top 250 list continuously since 2008. The list covers feature films across a wide range of categories: major releases, cult films, independent films, silent films, and non-English-language films. Documentaries, short films, and TV episodes are not included. Since 2015, a separate Top 250 list for television shows has also been maintained.

  The formula behind the rankings is deliberately opaque. IMDb has stated that it does not disclose the criteria used to determine who qualifies as a "regular voter" for the Top 250, citing the need to maintain the list's integrity. The underlying calculation draws on a method from actuarial science called a credibility formula, which weights a statistic more heavily as the number of individual data points grows.

  At the other end of the spectrum sits the Bottom 100, assembled through a similar process. To qualify for that list, a title needs only 10,000 votes, a lower bar than the Top 250. Both lists depend on vote counts that can be gamed, which is part of why IMDb keeps its weighting methodology private.

• 5. The Message Board Controversy

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  By the 20th of February 2017, all of IMDb's message boards, and every post they contained, had been permanently removed. The site explained the decision by saying the boards were "no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide". IMDb founder Col Needham had noted in a post months earlier that the boards generated less advertising income than other parts of the site, and that board members made up only a small fraction of overall visitors. The infrastructure itself was aging and expensive to run.

  The backlash was immediate. An online petition gathered more than 8,000 signatures from users opposed to the deletion. In the days leading up to the shutdown, both Archive.org and MovieChat.org used web scraping to preserve the entire archive of IMDb message board posts, and both sites published those archives afterward.

  The episode illustrated a tension that runs through IMDb's entire history: the site depends on volunteer contributions, but the volunteers do not control the platform. Copyright on individual contributions technically remains with the contributor, but the compiled database is IMDb's exclusive property, with the full right to copy, modify, and sublicense it.

• 6. Legal Battles Over Identity

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  In 2011, an anonymous actress sued IMDb for at least $1.075 million after the site published her age, which was 40 at the time, without her consent. She argued the disclosure could cost her acting work. US district judge Marsha J. Pechman dismissed the case on the grounds that the actress could not proceed anonymously. When she re-filed and identified herself as Huong Hoang of Texas, who performed under the name Junie Hoang, Pechman dismissed all but a breach of contract claim. A jury sided with IMDb on that remaining claim. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment in March 2015.

  California's legislature took a different angle in January 2017, passing state bill AB-1687, a SAG-AFTRA-backed anti-ageism law requiring commercial entertainment employment services to remove subscribers' ages and birthdays on request. By early 2017, IMDb had received more than 2,300 such requests, including from 10 Academy Award winners and another 71 individuals nominated for Oscars, Emmys, or Golden Globes. On the 23rd of February 2017, Judge Vince Girdhari Chhabria issued a stay on the bill, questioning whether it unconstitutionally targeted IMDb specifically. In February 2018, Chhabria struck the statute down. In June 2020, the Ninth Circuit affirmed his ruling, holding the law was an unconstitutional content-based restriction that violated the First Amendment.

  A separate policy shift came in 2019, when IMDb changed its long-standing practice of retaining all valid information. The site began removing birth names of people who no longer use them and whose birth names are not widely known publicly. The change came in response to pressure from LGBTQ groups concerned about the involuntary disclosure of transgender people's prior names, a practice known as deadnaming.

• 7. IMDbPro and the Streaming Pivot

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  Actors, crew members, and industry executives can pay an annual fee of $149.99 to access IMDbPro, which provides rank ordering of industry personalities, agent contact information, and the ability to claim and manage their own pages. Users identified as among the top contributors of hard data have received complimentary IMDbPro access; for 2006, IMDb extended that benefit to the top 150 contributors, and for 2010 to the top 250.

  In January 2019, IMDb launched an ad-supported streaming service called Freedive. It was the company's second attempt at a streaming service; a similar service had launched in 2008. By June 2019, Freedive had been rebranded as IMDb TV. In April 2022, the service was renamed Amazon Freevee. On the 30th of December 2024, it was shut down as an independent service and its content was merged into Amazon Prime Video.

  The STARmeter Awards, presented annually, reflect a different kind of data product. IMDb determines its top 10 lists using page view data from more than 200 million monthly visitors. When IMDbPro celebrated its 20th anniversary, IMDb added the Icon STARmeter Award, given to artists who appeared in the top 10 positions throughout the year. Salma Hayek received the inaugural award.