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Databases Movies The Media Entertainment

IMDb Hits 25 59

Posted by timothy from the 5-stars-down-the-line dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The year 2015 heralded a number of notable Internet milestones — the humble .com domain name reached 30 years of age, while both eBay and Amazon reached the grand old age of 20. That the Internet Movie Database, a gargantuan film and TV show encyclopedia better known as IMDb, began 25 years ago as a pre-Web hobby project and is now one of the top 50 most visited websites on the Internet is a notable achievement. "IMDb is the only pure Internet company that can celebrate its 25th anniversary," said Col Needham, founder and CEO of IMDb, in an interview with VentureBeat.
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IMDb Hits 25 More

IMDb Hits 25

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  • and my Grandmother still argues about it.

  • Impressive but not unique (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There are a lot of things that started offline, moved online, and are still going strong after decades.
    The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences [oeis.org] comes to mind. Neil Sloane started that 50 years ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      online?

  • Pure Internet Company? (Score:5, Informative)

    by great throwdini ( 118430 ) on Friday October 30, 2015 @06:11PM (#50836131)
    Not sure what the definition of 'pure Internet company' might be in this context, but IMDb has been owned outright by Amazon since the late '90s, so at best, it's a 'pure Internet subsidiary' ...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I remember when I first encountered IMDb. Downloaded it from aminet.
      It was fun playing around with a reasonably large dataset, picking out movies the same two actors had been on and such.
      The webpage, is much less fun, but it seems like you can still download the data from http://www.imdb.com/interfaces [imdb.com]
      It claims to be a subset but doesn't specify what is missing.

      • >I remember when I first encountered IMDb. Downloaded it from aminet
        Me too. Seems they stopped updating the AmigaGuide version in 2005. Slackers.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My own take on IMDB is that it's the internet poster-child for "commercial exploitation of user generated content". It's an identical model to Slashdot, though I bet Amazon makes a shit load more money from IMDB than Dice do from here.

      I think the main problem is the sense of scale (volume of visitors) is lost on most people. That, and determining how much money a website makes is pretty difficult for experts, and impossible for a regular web user to do.

      The reason the deceit is so strong, is that it's a simi

      • Wikipedia is the first thing that came to my mind when thinking of a non-exploitative alternative to IMDB. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has "notability" guidelines that are often poorly implemented. An article about an obscure indie movie has better chances of not getting deleted in IMDB.

  • Happy birthday (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Friday October 30, 2015 @06:17PM (#50836151) Journal

    Happy birthday IMDB! You've done more than any other site on the internet to convince me of the necessity of ad-blocking! Those HUGE banners above everything else, especially when they are the last thing to load and make the page move while I'm trying to click on the search bar but instead get taken elsewhere. The nice blurring of the line between just listing what's new, and giving huge extra amounts of intrusive space to movies that are paying you for clicks... And let's not even get started on locking-up content behind a paid service that was previously freely available (and still available on other sites). Or the Yahoo/Amazon-esque cramming more crap into every page, or spreading the content across dozens more pages, so that it takes 4 extra clicks to look-up the basic info nearly everybody visiting your site is looking for...

    No other site makes me curse for needing to use it like you do, IMDB. So happy birthday...

  • Is it just the website? (Score:3)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Friday October 30, 2015 @06:34PM (#50836227)
    I seem to remember IMDb started on Usenet in the 80s.

  • I didn't realize IMDB was that old. I remember getting a CD of Microsoft Cinemania in 1994, which was the best reference that I knew of for movies at the time. I think they came out with a new one yearly, but Internet databases such as IMDB could be updated easier and more frequently so they stopped publishing Cinemania.

  • The most useful movie reviews look something like this:

    V: 9
    A: 9
    M: 8

  • I've been using IMDB forever. I still use it several times a day. I do have some nits to pick though:

    I have started to notice lately, a lot of images for actors are missing.

    I think I would like it if the image for the actor in the movie link was one from the movie, not one 40 years later. Much of the time
    there are images in the photos (if there are any) of the actor in the movie I'm looking at.

    Lastly, there seems to be some real issues with most foreign (non-Hollywood) movies.

    Frequently there is no detai

    • I can't speak for the A-list actors. Just for everyone else listed on IMDB. All of those pictures are uploaded by the person listed or an agent of that person. I have a profile as a lowly Grip. You can't add a picture unless you are an IMDB pro paid user. At least not that i have found yet.

      http://www.imdb.com/name/nm689... [imdb.com]

      • I can't speak for the A-list actors. Just for everyone else listed on IMDB. All of those pictures are uploaded by the person listed or an agent of that person. I have a profile as a lowly Grip. You can't add a picture unless you are an IMDB pro paid user. At least not that i have found yet.

        http://www.imdb.com/name/nm689... [imdb.com]

        So grips don't have agents? (Just kidding)

        I thought it would be something like that, agents need their booty. A-listers can probably afford it. and you wouldn't want to get into
        legal trouble by just pasting any old picture in there.

        I do dislike the watermarked images though.

  • I use IMDB mostly to pick out movies to watch based on user ratings. But I've noticed that in the past 10 years, there's been a divergence in IMDB ratings and my ratings. Anyone else notice this? Some movies rated 8 are total crap. 10 years ago, every movie rated 8 or above was guaranteed to be a great movie. Maybe my tastes have changed, but i feel the voters have changed. My theory is that IMDB is more popular, and now the people who vote on it are just the average person, not computer nerds like me.

  • ...have barely advanced beyond the age of three.

    Although I am willing to allow 25-year-old monkeys flinging poo as an alternative.

  • When it was at Cardiff University, I helped out for free as did many other people around the internet at the time. It was then taken commercial without any notice or recompense, with really quite sketchy and dubious claims of ownership, and it was quite a controversy at the time. I have still not forgotten it, and a lesson was learned that day.

  • must be getting old.
    i remember a post on /. (long ago) where the imdb founder said in an interview that he would love to have a site like slashdot. not so sure that he still feels this way now though.

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