IMDb

The Internet Movie Database

File:IMDb.Logo.png
File:Imdb07.jpg IMDb Home Page in 2007
Type of site	Online movie, TV, and video game databases
Available in	English
Owner	Amazon.com
Created by	Col Needham
URL	www.imdb.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Optional

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information about movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, and video games.

IMDb began on October 17 1990 and in 1998 it was acquired by Amazon.com.

Overview

The IMDb website consists of the largest accumulation of data about films, television programs, direct-to-video products, and video games reaching back to each medium's respective beginning, and spanning content of origin from around the world. In many cases, the information goes beyond simple title or press credits to include complete cast and crew credits, uncredited personnel, production and distribution companies, plot summaries, memorable quotes, awards, reviews, box office performance, filming locations, technical specs, promotional content, trivia, and links to official and other websites. Furthermore, the IMDb tracks titles in production, and even major, announced projects still in development. The database also houses filmographies for all persons, cast and crew, identified in listed titles. Filmographies include biographical details, awards listings, external links, and information about other professional work not covered by title entries in the database such as theatrical and commercial advertising appearances. The IMDb also offers ancillary material such as daily movie and TV news, weekly box office reports, TV listings, cinema showtimes, user polls and ratings, and special features about various movie events such as the Academy Awards. The website also has an active message board system. There are message boards for each database entry, found at the bottom of each respective page, as well as general discussion boards on various topics. Many of these are quite heated and sometimes slump into endless pages of insults very easily.

Users can go on IMDb and can post on message boards.

The IMDb is a free site, which requires only registration to access its complete range of data and activities. Any person with an e-mail account and a web browser that accepts cookies can set up an account with IMDb that allows them to submit information and engage in other site activities. Site visitors wishing only to view information without accessing interactive features can do so without registration. Database content is largely provided and updated by a cadre of volunteer contributors; only 17 members of the IMDb staff are dedicated to monitoring received data. For automated queries, most of the database can be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be extracted using the tools provided, typically using a command line interface.

In 2002, the IMDb spun off a private, subscription-funded site, IMDbPro, offering the entire content of the database plus additional information for business professionals, such as personnel contact details, movie event calendars, and a greater range of industry news.

History

In rec.arts.movies

The database originated from two lists started as independent projects in early 1989 by participants in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. In each case, a single maintainer recorded items emailed by newsgroup readers, and posted updated versions of his list from time to time. Google Groups coverage of rec.arts.movies is incomplete during the relevant time period, with a 6-month gap in late 1988 and early 1989 and a number of missing articles after that.

It began with a posting titled "Those Eyes", on the subject of actresses with beautiful eyes. Hank Driskill began to collect a list of sexy actresses and what movies they had appeared in, and as the size of the repeated posting grew far beyond a normal newsgroup article, it soon became known simply as "THE LIST".

The other project, started by Chuck Musciano, was briefly called the "Movie Ratings List" and soon became the "Movie Ratings Report". Musciano simply asked readers to rate movies on a scale of one to ten, and reported on the votes . He soon began posting "ballots" with lists of movies for people to rate, so his list also grew quickly.

In 1990 Col Needham collated the two lists and produced a "Combined LIST & Movie Ratings Report". (His first posting of the database scripts is not available.) Now the ball really started rolling. Needham soon started a (male) "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors List", and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST, which would later be renamed as the "Actress List". Both this and the Actors List had been restricted to people who were still alive and working, but retired people began to be added, and Needham also started what was then (but did not remain) a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List". The goal now was to make the lists as inclusive as the maintainers could manage. In late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 movies and television series. On October 17, 1990, Needham posted a collection of Unix shell scripts which could be used to search the four lists, and the database that would become the IMDb was born. At the time, it was known as the "rec.arts.movies movie database".

On the web

By 1993, the database had been expanded to include additional categories of filmmakers and other demographic material, as well as trivia, biographies, and plot summaries; the movie ratings had been properly integrated with the list data; and a centralized email interface for querying the database had been created. Later in the year, it moved onto to the World Wide Web (a network in its infancy back then) under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database. The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in Wales. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In 1994, the email interface was revised to accept the submission of all information, meaning that people no longer had to email the specific list maintainer with their updates. However, the structure remained that information received on a single film was divided among multiple section managers, the sections being defined and determined by categories of film personnel and the individual filmographies contained therein. Its management also continued to be in the hands of a small contingent of underpaid or volunteer "section managers" who were receiving ever-growing quantities of information on films from around the world and across time from contributors of widely varying level of expertise and informational resources. Despite the annual claims of Needham, in a year-end report newsletter to the Top fifty contributors, that "fewer holes" must now remain for the coming year, the amount of information still missing from the database was vastly underestimated. Over the next few years, the database was run on a network of mirrors across the world with donated bandwidth.

As an independent company

In 1995, it became obvious to the principal site managers that the project had become too large to maintain merely through donations and in their spare time. The decision was made to become a commercial venture and in 1996, IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd, with Col Needham the primary owner as well as identified figurehead. The remaining shareholders were the people maintaining the database. Revenue was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships.

This state of affairs continued until 1998. The database was growing every day, and it was again reaching a critical point. Most revenues were being spent on equipment, and there was not enough money left over to pay full time salaries. The system was also suffering noticeable slowdowns both in accessing the site and in having new data posted. Offers were solicited and received from major businesses to purchase the database; however, the shareholders were unwilling to sell if it could not be guaranteed that the information would be accessible to the internet community for free.

As a subsidiary company

In 1998, Jeff Bezos, founder, owner and CEO of Amazon.com struck a deal with Col Needham and other principal shareholders, to buy IMDb outright and attach it to his corporate empire as a subsidiary, private company. This gave IMDb the ability to pay the shareholders salaries for their work, while Amazon.com would be able to use the IMDb as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes. Volunteer contributors were not advised in advance of even the possibility of IMDb - and their contributions along with it - being sold to a private business, which created some initial discord and defection of regulars.

IMDb continues to expand its functionality. In 2002, it added a subscription service known as IMDbPro aimed at entertainment professionals. It provides a variety of services including production and box office details, as well as a company directory. Most information contained in the IMDb database proper continues to come from volunteer researchers, whose additional incentive, since 2003, is that if they are identified as being one of "the top one hundred contributors" in terms of amounts of hard data submitted, they receive complimentary free access to IMDbPro for the following calendar year. However, many volunteer contributors claim they just contribute data because they want to improve the database, with no thought of reward.

TV episodes

On 26 January 2006, the long-awaited "Full Episode Support" came online, allowing the database to support separate cast and crew listings for each episode of every TV series. This was described by Col Needham as "the largest change we've ever made to our data model," and increased the number of titles in the database from 485,000 to nearly 750,000.

At present, the database entries for TV series are in a state of flux, as listings are migrated from series titles to individual episodes. The maintainers anticipated "a couple of months for data to settle down and bugs to be ironed out", but inaccuracies were still present one year later.

Ancillary features

User ratings of films

IMDb top 250 films, plotted by year and the sum of the ratings for movies from that year.

As one adjunct to data, the IMDb offers a rating scale which allows users to rate films by choosing one of ten categories in the range 1–10, with each user able to submit one rating. The points of reference given to users of these categories are the descriptions "1 (awful)" and "10 (excellent)"; and these are the only descriptions of categories. Due to the minimum category being scored one, the mid-point of the range of scores is 5.5, rather than 5.0 as might intuitively be expected given a maximum score of ten. This rating system has also recently been implemented for television programming on an episode-by-episode basis.

In adopting this method, IMDb is following its widespread usage; the method is the same as rating in the range of a half star to five stars. When used in reviews by a single reviewer, the method has some basic utility given a rating is usually given in the context of a qualitative appraisal of the film. The simplicity of this method makes it popular, but in terms of psychometric, statistical, and other criteria, the method suffers shortcomings (see online rating scales).

Filters and weights

IMDb indicates that submitted ratings are filtered and weighted in various ways in order to produce a weighted mean that is displayed for each film, series, and so on. It states that filters are used to avoid "vote stuffing"; the method is not described in detail to avoid attempts to circumvent it.

Ranking

The IMDb Top 250 is intended to be a listing of the top 'rated' 250 films, based on ratings by the registered users of the website using the methods described. Only non-documentary theatrical releases running at least forty-five minutes with over 1300 ratings are considered; all other products are ineligible. Also, the 'top 250' rating is based on only the ratings of "regular voters" (IMDb does not define this term). 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; in this case from eligible users who submit ratings. IMDb uses the following formula to calculate the weighted rating:

$W=R{v \over v+m}+C{m \over v+m}\$ where:

$W\$ = Weighted Rating

$R\$ = average for the movie as a number from 0 to 10 (mean) = (Rating)

$v\$ = number of votes for the movie = (votes)

$m\$ = minimum votes required to be listed in the Top 250 (currently 1300)

$C\$ = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.7)

An extended listing of the Top 500 - following the same formula - is available to IMDbPro subscribers.

The IMDb also has a Bottom 100 feature which is assembled in the same way. Although the Top 250 films generally do not shift much (the "great" films are typically better known, and therefore have a high number of votes and a higher popularity inertia) the "winner" of the Bottom one hundred changes frequently. A disproportionate number of "Bottom 100" films were featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is said to be a result of an MST3K website encouraging all its users to register with IMDb and vote "1" on films featured on the show, during IMDb's early years.

The top 250 list comprises a wide strata of films, including major releases, cult films, independent films, critically acclaimed films, silent films and foreign films. Nevertheless, there are issues associated with compiling such lists of rankings which arise from the shortcomings of the approach to ratings.

Since the website is primarily accessed in western cultures, the Top 250 may be skewed as such, evident by the fact that there are no Bollywood pictures in it. Also, the people most likely to use the site to vote regularly would be more internet savvy, and may have common tastes in films. Films aimed at audiences not in this demographic are absent from the list, including Titanic, the highest grossing film of all time, and all the Harry Potter films, the most successful film franchise of all time (so far).

Plot keywords

Plot keywords are keywords that contributors to the IMDb submit. These are keywords regarding objects and occurrences in each film on the IMDb.

Message boards

One of the most used features of the Internet Movie Database is the Message Boards that coincide with every database entry, along with forty-seven Main Boards. These boards allow registered users to share, discuss and debate information about the movie and/or people that worked on it. They were not originally part of the IMDb, but were added only after its purchase by Amazon.com, some time in the year 2000.

Star Talk (celebrities and film professionals), General Boards (miscellaneous and non-film-related topics), Video Games (video games and its institutional context) and IMDb Help (anything pertaining directly to the site itself). As the IMDb expires older posts from all message boards variably, it is difficult to precisely measure traffic according to individual board, but the Soapbox and the Sandbox are amongst the highest traffic boards on IMDb. The Soapbox is a general purpose discussion board, where users can go for "their more heated discussions". The Sandbox is a general purpose, anything-goes board designated for test messages and off-topic posts.

Boards for various political persons (most notably President George W. Bush) have also been used for political discusssion. On May 9, 2007, a "Politics" message board was created.

My movies

Registered users also have access to "my movies," which is a database that can be created by any registered user. The user can sort the content of that database according to several criteria, such as vote history.

The home page

The home page has had some changes over the years. Mostly showing new features on the site and recent releases.

• The front page in 1996
  The front page in 1996
• The front page after a redesign in 1998
  The front page after a redesign in 1998
• Another redesign in 1998
  Another redesign in 1998
• The front page in 2000
  The front page in 2000

Criticisms

Some people regard IMDb as unreliable, even by the standards of a wiki. Common complaints leveled against the site include the following:

• The 2006 transition to "Full Episode Support", as described in the section "TV Episodes" above, has seriously impaired the use of the database for TV references.

- Until all entries are converted, the main pages for TV shows may not display the Series Cast or tenure without reference to individual episodes. (e.g. The Virginian and James Drury) - This has introduced profound TV omissions in the 'actor' listings, as many 'Series Cast' actors are only credited for their 'non-regular' episode appearances on a show.

• The database doesn't accept every vote submitted for movies to be placed on the "Top 250" or "Bottom 100" list. They only count votes from "Regular Voters," and they refuse to publish the criteria for what a "Regular Voter" is. The staff claims that it is to prevent people from taking multiple accounts and voting for their favorite or least favorite films repeatedly, but many users question this claim. Accusations abound that the voting is "rigged."

• The site's listing of titles for foreign films does not list any alternate titles except under "Also Known As." This leads to problems in searching for foreign films and titles, given that many people only know their language's translations of the titles, or have incomplete information about the original titles of the films.

• Staff members gauge the validity of contributed data based on the past reliability of the contributor, as none are themselves experts in all of the significantly varied areas of film history to know what is valid themselves. The volume of submissions and the number of volunteers who submit information are therefore likely to result in frequent errors. This is especially true for foreign cinema, which the staff appear to be much less familiar with, and where credits in a foreign language or alphabet may easily be misinterpreted by members of the predominately English-speaking user base.

• Submissions of product data are processed by categories of personnel contained in the submission, meaning the data for any one film is broken up into several components and examined independently of the other components, then reassembled without checking the continuity of the whole, which may be further disrupted if one manager's section(s) is/are backlogged, an unfortunately regular occurrence at IMDb.

• IMDb follows stringent rules on displaying cast lists only according to "the order shown on the screen in the most complete cast list shown." This was one of Col Needham's earliest rules. Such complete screen cast lists are frequently based on order of appearance or, occasionally, alphabetical listings of players. In either case, the rules for listing may result in the names of a film's stars appearing well into the cast list even though a list of main actors may have appeared at the beginning of the film or shortly after the end, as well as in advertising for the film. Consequently, visitors to the site may first encounter an abbreviated entry on a film which displays a list of cast and crew members who are not major actors in the film.

• Conversely, a fixed display by categories is used instead of screen order of credits. Only the writers category allows multiple names to be listed in the order of screen appearance within its confines.

• IMDb does not follow the eastern name order, meaning that Hong Kong Superstar Chow Yun-Fat is listed in the database as "Yun-Fat Chow", for example.

• Submission policies have become more stringent over the years, and approval of new titles to be added has become more cautious, but errors still occur while the added restrictions have made it more difficult to add information to the database or correct mistakes.

• IMDb also retains the right to publish and not to publish information in such categories as a film's trivia, goofs, celebrity information, etc., regardless of how true it is. It is not uncommon for an item to be published one day, only to be removed the next; the criteria are secretive. In other cases, it can be difficult to get a demonstrably untrue piece of information removed.

• There are increasingly recurrent complaints on general boards by certain users of a severe lack of moderation for its message boards. Thus, certain users complain that irrelevant, attacking or obscene messages, and general trolling is a problem on the boards of films and personalities, as well as the board set up by IMDb for the explicit purpose of being an outlet for screed (The Soapbox). Although offensive messages can be reported with the "Report abuse form", their removal takes some time (up to 2-3 days) and only one report per offending poster can be filed by each user under a revised system introduced in late 2005, replacing a system which allowed multiple abuse reports against an offender. However, users have an "ignore this poster" option as a sop: the function blocks the message from the view of the user who has placed someone on his/her ignore list. (Of course, the offending poster's contributions remain live and visible to anyone who does not have them in "ignore" status.)

• Regular complaints can be seen on general boards that posts and accounts are being deleted without any reason (particularly on-topic posts which have not violated any of IMDb's Terms of Service), which has raised the question of whether trolls (especially trolls with vendettas against posters they do not like) or other users have found a way to delete users' posts or even accounts. (If a post or thread is deleted by an administrator, it appears in the message board as "post or thread deleted by administrator"). In response to this complaint, the board administrators comment that "the problem they describe simply does not exist. The only people who can disable accounts are IMDb staff members on the boards administration team. For instance, the possibility has been posited that specific kinds of abuse report would result in automatic post deletion, such as posts which encourage illegal acts such as online piracy. The quantity of reports has also been questioned. Another recurrent issue raised on the IMDb general boards is whether the administrators thoroughly investigate reports of abuse or instead simply delete posts or accounts without verifying that the IMDb's terms and conditions for the message board have been violated. A recent issue coming up on the boards is that legitimate complaints filed by posters of trolling committed by ill-intentioned users are being ignored by the administrators.

• The "Mini biography" section on each actor's entry has information which is often very out-of-date and in many cases unverified (such as the information in the 'Height' and 'Trivia' sections). The information regarding the most popular and established performers is often (but not necessarily always) correct, while the quality and veracity of data for less well-known players is correspondingly less reliable.

• Complaints have been made about the advertisement being intrusive, however the IMDb says that it is working with advertising enterprises to reduce the impact that ads may have on the usability of the service

• Some actors and actresses have no information associated with them. These are usually in the process of being linked.

• Studios and people otherwise involved with a particular film will cast high ratings or post applauding comments prior to its release in order to generate buzz.

Copyright issues

All volunteers who contribute content to the database retain copyright to their contributions but grant full rights to copy, modify, and sublicense the content to IMDb. IMDb in turn does not allow others to use movie summaries or actor biographies without written permission.

See also

• Movie Tome
• All Movie Guide
• Internet Adult Film Database
• Internet Broadway Database
• Internet Book List
• Internet Movie Cars Database
• Internet Theatre Database
• Fictional film
• Films that have been considered the greatest ever
• Films considered the worst ever
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Metacritic
• Hong Kong Movie Database
• TV IV
• Wikipedia:IMDb — information on using IMDb with Wikipedia

External links

• Official Website — Internet Movie Database
• former.imdb.com - pre-2007 web design
• Do You IMDb? — L.A. Weekly (Retrieved on August 2004).