IMDb began as one Bristol engineer's hobby list of films
IMDb started as a hobby. From 1987 Col Needham, an English engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, logged every film he watched, and in 1990 he shared search scripts with a Usenet group. That fan project now holds some 25.9 million titles and in September 2025 ranked 40th among the world's most visited websites.
In the late 1980s Needham joined the rec.arts.movies newsgroup, where a post of his about actresses with striking eyes drew replies and rival lists. He began an actors list, Dave Knight kept one for directors, and Andy Krieg ran another. By late 1990 the lists covered almost 10,000 films and TV series, and on 17 October 1990 Needham released Unix shell scripts able to search all four, creating what was then called the rec.arts.movies movie database.
Volunteers kept adding trivia, biographies and plot summaries, and Alan Jay built an email interface for queries. On 5 August 1993 the project moved onto the young World Wide Web as the Cardiff Internet Movie Database. It incorporated in Britain in 1996 with Needham as main owner, and in April 1998 Amazon bought it, paying $55 million for IMDb plus two other companies, which meant the shareholders could at last draw salaries.
The Top 250, built from votes by regular users, has been led by The Shawshank Redemption since 2008, and a television version arrived in 2015. A Bottom 100 needs only 10,000 votes for a film to qualify. The message boards, once a busy corner of the site, were gone entirely by 20 February 2017; IMDb said they had stopped serving most of its more than 250 million monthly users, and trolling was another complaint.
Industry members can pay US$149.99 a year for IMDbPro, which reveals agent contacts and rankings of industry figures. Heavy contributors could earn it free: the top 100 from 2003, widened to 150 in 2006 and 250 in 2010. Streaming efforts came and went. Freedive launched in 2019, became IMDb TV, then Amazon Freevee, and was folded into Prime Video at the end of 2024.
Source: IMDb
