Revealed: The guy behind IMDb | Hacker News Reader

Revealed: The guy behind IMDb

alexandrosmaragos.com

171 pointspielud40 comments

6 years as a hobby, and another two as a business. 8 years before he sold to Amazon. Remember that the next time you're complaining that you aren't making any money 30 days after launching a site.

Or when you're weighing quitting your job and going whole-hog versus doing the nights-and-weekends thing.

IMDb didn't magically start making money when they sold to Amazon.

No, but Colin Needham did.

You seem to be forgetting pre-Amazon ad revenue.

There was no Google Adsense before 1998.

(Other ad players were there, but nothing as efficient and accessible to any website owner/publisher)

Sources / Words / Images from the Daily Mail article[1]? Why not just submit the Mail article? Is this wholesale lifting of content even allowed?

[1]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342663/IMDb-...

Oops. Somehow missed that link at the bottom.

Even sourcier: http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?history

browsing through a handful of other posts, I'm not convinced that any of that blog's content hasn't been lifted from somewhere else...

IMDB has become so ad and video ridden over the years that I've stopped using it for the most part. Their recent redesign of the detail pages has made it even less useful. There is a open project at http://tmdb.org which is more like what imdb used to be, and it has an API allowing you to integrate it into your own projects.

The official iPhone and iPad applications are nice though. My biggest use of IMDb is while I am watching TV or movies and it's more likely I'll have my phone or iPad than my laptop.

http://thetvdb.com/ is another open project (the data is CC and the software is GPL) that's used by XBMC, Plex and others. It's aimed at software, not people, but it's good for episode listings.

Yes, and the iPhone version is better than the Android one. The search field is always there and it remembers your history. The Android app defaults to some adlike "BLOCKBUSTERS THIS WEEK" list that gives me that "I'm afraid to click on anything" feeling and you have to go to the menu in order to search, which is a button press and a screen tap minimum.

Thanks for that, a movie database with an API is a god send for anyone who's had to deal with IMDB's text files.

Agree, it's the most ugliest website out there ranking at top of the search engines. I prefer to use Wikipedia over IMDB.

Wow! Thanks for the link to tmdb.org. Nice alternative. Clean. Easier to navigate.

I have to contrast IMDB with CDDB a.k.a. Gracenote. The CDDB guy is popularly held to have screwed over the contributions of thousands of dedicated users when they made their crowd-sourced database proprietary and commercial. Some people I know obsessively catalogued their entire collections, in the spirit of community knowledge, sharing. You have to at least consider that this was Steven Scherf's plan from the beginning, from when it was one of the first, if not the first, popular crowd-sourced sites.

http://www.quora.com/How-did-CDDB-become-Gracenote

I know the CDDB guy from an unrelated mailing list to do with binary translation - a hobby of his. When I asked him for business advice, he told me get a good lawyer. Good advice!

I am that "CDDB guy" you refer to. Note that there were a number of us involved, and I can't tell you how far from our minds any of this was. Think what you like, but perhaps a little reading first:

http://link.moonsoft.com/wired.html

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/commentary/listenin...

And yes, most lawyers are sociopaths :), but they are a necessary evil sometimes.

Sorry, that last line was for @zandorg.

This is a classic case of where the guy followed his passion/dream. He wasn't in it for the money but wanted to create the best site (actually database at first) for movies and ultimately was rewarded by Amazon buying it. Shows how passionate he is that he's still there

It also shows that money is not needed for even the most amazing services or projects. (Yes, apart from running costs, though I am sure he paid for those out of his own pocket in the beginning because he felt like it.)

People sometimes get angry at others who live without wanting to pay for this and that. For example music. If people stop paying for money and that industry fails, so be it. Others make music in their free time because it is their hobby and passion.

[off-topic]

Seriously? x-small?! No matter how pretty you think your site looks if people can't read the fucking text it doesn't matter. On top of that the contrast is terrible making it even worse.

    font: x-small "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, Sans-serif;
    font-size/* */:/**/small;
    font-size: /**/small;

Sorry for the tangent I'm just tired of having to bump up the font size 2-5 times on every damn site I visit. And now I feel old. Shit.

(If you reply mentioning readability I will punch you :p Readability is not a cure-all and messes up some pages)

I don't want to stand in the way of a good rant, but if you have to hold down on the plus key for on every site, perhaps you should increase your default font size? Or perhaps something is wrong with your DPI settings? Or perhaps a larger monitor? With the Linux and OSX setups I use, I have no trouble reading this particular site, and rarely find that I have to increase font sizes.

(Excuse my ranting, could just be crankiness due to a lack of sleep caused by a 7am flight)

My default font size is 16pt and that should be enough imo, but x-small applied to 16pt is still small. My display does have a relatively high DPI at ~130, but that's why I bump up my default font size. :/ I just bumped it to 18pt for good measure.

Despite the joke about feeling old I'm only 28 and have good enough vision w/ my contacts in.

Regardless of my DPI and/or default font size, there is absolutely no good reason to use x-small on a site whose sole purpose is to display articles for people to read. That is pure lunacy if you ask me.

Overconfigured for sure.

Because I changed my default font size? If you say so...

No, for using x-small for display text.

Let me just say that as an indie filmmaker, dealing with IMDB sucks. The submission and update process is terribly confusing and the criteria for what films (and attributes) are acceptable makes Apples App Store rules seem clear and open.

I was very pleased to find several alternatives listed in this thread, thank-you!

So it's one guy? Where does he get the data? What happens to all the IMDb Pro subscription money? Does he really run it all alone?

No, it's not. I was reading about IMDB a couple of days back, back when they were starting out there were many editors (like wikipedia) and that was part of the reason they went with the Amazon buyout, so they could pay everyone for their work. In fact, in this article it says the same:

"...asked if the sale had made him and his group of volunteers rich..."

The answers to all of these questions are in the linked article.

But, just to save you the bother:

a) one guy started it, but it is not a one-man show, nor has it ever really been b) the data was sourced (Wikipedia-style, you might say) on Usenet, back in the pre-WWW days. Since then, the number of sources has multiplied. c) it goes to Amazon, who bought the IMDB back in '98. d) Of course not. He's a VP at Amazon. There is a staff (of unspecified size) working on IMDB.

Thanks, I skimmed it towards the end after it rambled a bit. Also, thank God for Readability.

You're forgetting the outcry there was for taking the USENET posts into a closed system. Similar to what happened with CDDB:

1. get users to submit a bunch of content to you in an open system for free

2. close the system and claim ownership of the database that your users helped create

3. profit!

I fondly remember those days when the entire database is distributed on Usenet. I have written a editor macro to "join" the tables to generate the full detail data of every movie. Of course when the IMDb website has launched, I have switched to their query web page.

No info about the current number of employees, but the article states that "in 1996, IMDb was managed by a group of 20 volunteers. IMDb became a company in 1996 and was sold to Amazon in 1998 He's now the Chief Executive of IMDb and his role is to oversee future strategy and make sure his creation stays true to its roots."

> his role is to oversee future strategy and make sure his creation stays true to its roots.

Which is why being bought out by Amazon is about as good as it gets. They usually find a good way to manage the post acquisition period, most other companies botch that completely.

Not generally true in that era, though. Alexa and IMDB, yes. Junglee, Planetall/Shoptheweb, Exchange, Live Bid, Bibliofind, Accept, etc - mostly dead. Good list of Amazon acqs/investments at http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/amazon.png

Depends how successful the sites were I guess, if IMDB started going backwards I'm sure it would have ended up the same as those properties.

I think having the founder still working there and not jumping ship as soon as some vesting period is over is a good advertisement for being acquired by amazon. Also it's still it's own site, could have easily been rolled into amazon in an attempt to push more DVD sales over the years.

They have an office in the Sherman Oaks Galleria, though I don't know what they do there. I suspect it's probably people who process the submitted information and work with the studios on ad sales and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com