IMDB turns 20
I often joke with friends and students that I wish I could have an IMDB chip implanted in my brain, mostly because I’m constantly coming up with movie references in my conversations, lectures, and blog posts that require me to visit that website. Why can’t I just blink my eyes twice and push a tooth to enable me to figure out what the name of the actor who played Carl in Casablanca (his name was S.Z. Sakall — found that out by going to IMDB).
As it turns out, IMDB turns 20 years old on October 17th. In advance of that momentous occasion, TheWrap’s Steve Pond conducted an interview with IMDB’s CEO Col Needham. Here are some excerpts:
For your anniversary you’re now making content, instead of just listing it.
Yeah, this is our first foray into original video content that we’ve shot ourselves. Every day for the next 20 days we’re going to have a different star of the day talk about their favorite films, and sometimes about how they’ve used IMDb over the years.
Obviously we’re well aware of how widely used we are, but it’s one thing to know that, and it’s another thing to have, perhaps, a favorite director mention an anecdote about using IMDb. You go, wow.
I imagine that you’ve had plenty of moments along the way of thinking, this is bigger than I imagined.
Yes. I mean, it started as a hobby 20 years ago. Really, from day two it’s always been bigger than I imagined, even when I let that imagination go wild.
One of the key points was back in 1995, when I returned home from work one day and my wife said, “The New York Times called.” I said, “The New York Times? What did they want?” “They want to talk to you about the site.” That was kind of key.
What were the key decisions you made, the times when the site could have gone in a different direction?
I guess there are a couple of key transitions. One was toward the end of 1995. We were running a volunteer operation in our free time. And we were faced with a difficult decision, because at the beginning of that year traffic was doubling every two weeks. We had to make a key choice: Can we incorporate this as a business and provide a better service to our users as a professional organization than we can as a group of volunteers?
That was quite a hard decision, because back in ’95 you could literally count the number of websites that had an advertising-supported model on two hands.
There were other services in other areas back in that mid-’90s time frame, but they just couldn’t cope with the growth and simply closed down.
Did you struggle to get those first ads, or did the model work right away?
It was surprisingly good. We did the classic startup thing: We literally bought our first web server using a credit card, and we didn’t really know how we were going to pay that off. And within two weeks of launching IMDd.com, we had sold our first advertising deal, so we immediately paid off the credit card before the debt became due. And then we used the rest of the money to buy another two servers. It’s a bold claim, but I think we may have become the world’s first profitable Internet company.
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After you see a movie, do you go straight to IMDb and rate it?
Oh geez, absolutely. Every movie that I can remember seeing has my own rating factored in there. I’ve voted for absolutely every film.
And as part of the anniversary, we’re encouraging our listeners to make lists of anything and everything they like or dislike that has to do with entertainment. Users can very easily create lists of titles, names, characters, and add their own commentary. And you can publish those lists through social media, share them with your friends on Facebook, tweet about them. And then as part of the anniversary editorial section, we’re going to pick some of the best user lists and feature them as we go through the 20 day countdown. It’s IMDb back to its listing roots, which is very exciting to me.
Here are some of the 20th anniversary items currently on IMDB:
Conversations with actors
20th anniversary press release
How about you? How do you use IMDB? What do you love about it? How would you improve it? And can you imagine having lived the last two decades without it?
Hopefully by the time IMDB turns 25, they can figure out that whole brain chip implant thingee.
For more of the interview, go here.
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