IMDb Turns 25: It Recorded Hollywood's Data — and Changed Hollywood's Taste | QDaily Business History

Come see how big data changed the movie business.

Last weekend, Amazon threw a dinner in Los Angeles for the 25th birthday of its subsidiary IMDb.

Silicon Valley and Hollywood sit close to each other, but you still rarely see a scene like this: IT engineers in formal wear, in the same room as Hollywood stars, drinking champagne and talking about movies.

Every one of those stars has an IMDb page. Photos and video from the event go up on the site and feed into the news stream and the star galleries. Clicks turn into attention, and the next day some star's place on STARmeter — IMDb's star-popularity chart — may climb another two spots.

For 25 years, this is how IMDb has recorded, one data point at a time, every Hollywood event, every project's progress, and every move by a studio or a star. Like the company's full name — the Internet Movie Database — it is monotonous and precise.

It's a classic Silicon Valley startup story: an IT engineer turned a personal list of favorite movies into the "world's largest movie database," visited by 250 million users a month, and turned his hobby into a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

IMDb is also tangled up with Hollywood in a hundred ways. It watched Hollywood sell its movies to the world, step by step, and shift from film to digital; it recorded the boom and decline of independent production, and streaming replacing DVDs and videotapes... It used numbers to record how Hollywood changed, and then became one of the forces driving that change.

It Was Born Before the World Wide Web Existed

On October 17, 1990, Col Needham, an IT engineer at Hewlett-Packard in the UK, uploaded a packet of data to the rec.arts.movies newsgroup (think of it as an early forum). Inside was information he had compiled about the movies he loved — leading actors, actresses, directors — that anyone could look through, or copy to build a list of their own.

That was IMDb's first batch of uploaded data: a private list of favorite movies. All Needham wanted was to save and share online the movie information he had been collecting since he was 13. "Forget any commercial intentions — the World Wide Web didn't even exist yet, and no one knew the internet could be used to make money," Needham wrote in a blog post for the company's 20th anniversary.

Other early internet regulars like Needham — usually engineers at big companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, people with both the access and the time — were movie fans as well, and they joined in quickly. New material kept getting added to the data.

IMDb's early homepage

The early volunteers added and edited around the clock, and the database swelled. In 1993, IMDb went online as one of the first websites, and users poured in; before long it had to rent a server of its own just to carry the traffic.

At that point Needham and the other early volunteers still treated IMDb as a hobby. No company, no revenue, not one full-time employee.

But the data, like a snowball, was already rolling.

With Ratings and Lists, It Made Moviegoing a Ritual

By Alexa's count, IMDb is the 48th-most-visited website in the world. But like Facebook and Twitter, it gets pitifully little traffic from China.

Part of that is policy, and part of it is that we have a substitute: Douban. Checking a new release's score and reviews on Douban before you go, then rating the film yourself afterward, is second nature by now. IMDb invented that way of rating movies.

Scoring and ranking films may be the smartest — and the most correct — thing IMDb ever did. You have certainly heard of its most famous list, the IMDb Top 250, a huge to-do list you can't stop wanting to work through. In an era when there was almost no reliable way to get a movie recommendation, this list was the best watchlist going.

Stitch the Top 250 posters together and you get film history as Americans see it

The list that gave moviegoing its sense of ritual started out as nothing more than scores from ordinary fans like you and me. But as the years passed, as more people voted, and as IMDb's reach grew, the list carried more and more weight.

Whether a film makes it, and where it lands, has become a mark of its standing in the industry.

The clearest case came in 2008, after Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight opened. Fans rushed to IMDb to rate it, and the early score shot to a startling 9.7, making it the first film in nearly a decade to knock The Godfather off the top spot.

IMDb's "true Bayesian estimate" keeps the list as fair as it can be, and over the following weeks The Dark Knight slipped (it currently sits at No. 4). But a crowd episode like that still shows how much the list means to movie fans.

You can still see what an IMDb score does to a film. When a new release scores badly, studio bosses get nervous — and the "North American word of mouth" the score stands for is an important reference for Chinese audiences deciding whether a Hollywood film is worth seeing.

IMDb, being smart, has since copied ratings and lists into many more areas. For the 25th anniversary alone it produced dozens of them: "25 Greatest Movies of All Time," "25 Most Memorable Movie Moments," "25 Best Films / 25 Best Actors of the Past 25 Years," "25 Stars Then and Now," and on and on.

It Recorded Hollywood's Data — and Steered Hollywood's Direction

In 25 years, IMDb has catalogued 3.496 million titles and episodes, including 336,000 feature films, 389,000 short films, and 2.224 million TV episodes.

Each one carries labels of every kind: 771,000 are tagged "comedy," reality TV runs to 166,000 titles, and 153,000 come with a soundtrack listing.

It also holds profiles for 1.737 million actors and 1.011 million actresses — how many go by a nickname, whose name has been all over the gossip pages lately, which stars' pages also collect their famous lines, their interview clips, even what they earn.

For a Hollywood that likes to let numbers do the talking, this tagged data, plus the ratings and box-office systems, is worth a great deal when a film is being developed and made.

Over the past five years, how have box office and scores moved for comedies budgeted at $20-50 million? Which actors have had several action films in a row gross more than $100 million, sit inside the top 200 on STARmeter, and are free to shoot next July through September? Answers like these, pulled from data, help you develop a film project better.

Once studios all began analyzing this way, IMDb was in effect steering Hollywood's direction. Say a director names a lead actress, and the studio finds her attention score on IMDb has stayed low while recent films in the same genre have done poorly at the box office. Casting her now draws more argument, and the studio wavers.

The effect carries on after release. You Xing, who studied film for seven years and has written and directed several short films, told us that in his undergraduate "business of film" course, the professor had students copy what a studio does: track a new release week by week along with its box office, look for correlations — what news events moved the numbers, for instance — and draw up a response.

It's Everyone's Business Card in Hollywood

Like it or not, the moment you land your first credited job in Hollywood you have an IMDb page. It follows you through every job you take here. It is your business card.

How do you find the right person among hundreds of thousands? For most film projects, IMDb is a good way. Pick a genre and a job type and you can narrow it to a few candidates — and then, if you have bought IMDb Pro, the agency's phone number is right there and you can call and ask.

"When we're prepping a film and drawing up crew lists, we put everyone's IMDb link next to their name so the key creatives can choose," said Wang Changli, who once worked in Paramount's production department. Past credits, Wang said, are the most important thing to go on when a call has to be made fast.

IMDb Pro launched in 2002. Think of it as a paid upgrade; the important part is the "key information" it opens up, such as a film's production and distribution companies in detail, and contact details for the companies and people you are looking for.

The IMDb Pro page

In his second year of graduate school, You Xing split an IMDb Pro account with a classmate. He was writing a screenplay, and his professor suggested he use IMDb Pro to search out earlier films on subjects close to his own, and find who produced and distributed them. "First, you know where you stand — what your script is being measured against. Second, you learn which producer or distributor favors which kind of film, so you know where to send it." At $19.99 a month it wasn't cheap, but he found the connected picture it gave him well worth the money.

More than 200,000 users in Hollywood use the service the way You Xing does, and over half of them are actors. "Actors ranked 1,000 to 5,000 on STARmeter use it the most. They have some credits but aren't well known yet, and directors can find them," a former IMDb employee told us. That one line of business brings IMDb tens of millions of dollars a year, making it the site's biggest source of revenue after advertising.

It Succeeded with Amazon's Help — and Became Amazon's Best Weapon in Hollywood

Go back 20 years. While Needham was busy buying more servers and arguing with the others over whether to turn this ever-growing hobby into a job, a man who would become very famous — Jeff Bezos — launched his online bookstore and changed the company's name from Cadabra to Amazon.

Amazon went public in 1998. Movie videotapes and DVDs were then Amazon's most important category after books, and Bezos saw sharply that IMDb, a site made popular by movie search data and ratings, could help him sell more of them.

By then studios like Fox had started buying IMDb ads for Independence Day, and Needham had quit Hewlett-Packard to become IMDb's first full-time employee. Still, IMDb had no good way to make money, and similar sites were appearing. Once Bezos promised that IMDb would keep running independently after the deal, Needham chose to join the Amazon family.

Looking back, it seems to have been a win for both sides.

With Amazon's technology and money behind it, IMDb expanded fast in the years after the acquisition — reaching from film into television data, launching IMDb Pro a few years later, and so on. Rivals could no longer keep up. It became Hollywood's one big yellow pages, and the data it had piled up let it push its influence upstream in the industry.

After the Amazon acquisition, DVD ads appeared on IMDb's homepage

Bezos did well out of the deal too. He is reluctant to talk about it in public, but once it closed you could see Amazon's DVD ads sitting in the most prominent spot on the IMDb homepage — the most popular movie site in the country. Never mind that after Google came along, search almost any film title and IMDb was at the top of the results.

What IMDb is worth to Amazon may keep growing, which also means the two will work more closely together. In 2013, for example, Amazon announced that the mobile version of its streaming service, Amazon Instant, could play movies already catalogued on IMDb; and now that Amazon has moved into financing and developing films and TV, the data and contacts on IMDb matter more still.