Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 30th edition of our annual letter of thanks and celebration for IMDb's data contributor community and for all our customers worldwide.

I am IMDb's Founder & CEO. IMDb launched in October 1990, and therefore we will be celebrating our 35th anniversary in 2025; this letter only became possible in 1995 as it was the first full year where we could count data contributions centrally. As you can no doubt imagine, it has been quite a journey over 35 years and 30 letters. Today we have record numbers of customers accessing IMDb from all over the world and across so many different devices and languages.

I often have the privilege of speaking about IMDb in public and I usually begin by showing our video sizzle reel to provide a glimpse of IMDb's impact. We could not have this impact without you, our contributors & customers, and so we offer you our deepest appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has contributed any factual data, rated a title, written a review, created a list, voted in a community poll, added a video reaction, marked an item as helpful, installed our apps, engaged with us on social media, recommended IMDb to anyone else, or improved IMDb in any other way.

To learn more about contributing data, please visit our Contributor Zone and where you can also view a history of past letters there. Our team members Ramsey and Jay co-wrote this letter with me again; we are a small part of a larger worldwide team whose work this letter also represents. Thank you also to the IMDb team for your hard work, dedication, and customer obsession.

The Numbers

Growth in 2024 has been remarkable, thanks to your contributions. IMDb now includes:

• Over 22 million titles (4 million+ added in 2024 or 10,000+ new titles per day)
• Over 14 million names (925,000+ added in 2024)
• Over 212 million filmography credits (17 million+ added in 2024)
• Almost 8.5 million user reviews (500,000+ added in 2024)
• Close to 645 million data items in the core database

These numbers represent countless hours of dedication from contributors like you, ensuring IMDb remains the world's most comprehensive and reliable entertainment database. Thank you.

Additional statistics are available in the press room and they are updated quarterly. Note that recent previous editions of this letter did not exclude merged names from the name count; this error has now been corrected and the numbers here match those in the press room.

The dynamic Contributor Leaderboard enables us to count submissions right up until the end of the year and anyone with more than 100 approved items in 2024 can discover their own position in the rankings. Across December we have been updating a running total with the final version published early on 1 January 2025. I always look forward to seeing my own ranking and I am on-track to be inside the Top 100 again, possibly even in the Top 75.

2024 Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Ramsey and Jay on The Contributor Team ...

2024 has been another extraordinary year for the IMDb contributor community. Thanks to your incredible efforts, IMDb remains the go-to source for movie, TV, and entertainment information. Whether you're submitting credits, crafting plot outlines, or sharing reviews, your contributions help keep IMDb accurate, engaging, and constantly evolving. Here's a look back at what we've accomplished together and some exciting updates from this year.

First and foremost, 2024 saw significant behind-the-scenes upgrades to our contribution systems. We prioritized improving performance, stability, and reliability while bolstering security and privacy protections. By adopting modern technology standards, we've not only reduced system risks but also ensured even better protection of your data'making your experience smoother and more secure than ever.

This year also marked the official launch of a more streamlined contribution experience within IMDbPro, now available to all customers. The success of this interface led to its expansion into other areas, starting with FAQs on IMDb.com. We're excited to share that more data types will adopt this upgraded interface in 2025, bringing enhanced functionality and ease of use to even more contributors.

Throughout 2024, we tackled and resolved numerous bugs that impacted the contributor experience. For example, we fixed an issue with the 'career-gap' warning flagging even when credits were being added to people who had recently worked on a TV episode, and addressed a bug that caused certain words or phrases to be incorrectly removed from episode title submissions. Your feedback played a key role in identifying and resolving these issues.

Last but not least, we refined the Heights contribution form to provide clearer guidance on our preferred formatting. These updates are designed to save you time and increase the likelihood that your submissions are approved on the first try.

As we look ahead to 2025, we're excited to continue working alongside our incredible contributor community. From all of us on IMDb's Contribution Team, thank you for your passion, dedication, and invaluable contributions this year. We wish you a restful holiday season and a fantastic New Year!

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

I constantly marvel at the progress of technology in terms of how we can serve our contributors and customers compared to the time of our launch in 1990. Similarly, storytellers can now engage their audiences in ways which would have looked like something from a science fiction movie just 35 years ago. Today we are grateful for the opportunity to connect audiences with storytellers. IMDb not only fosters a global appreciation for entertainment but also supports the production process through IMDbPro, enhancing the entire entertainment world.

Throughout 2024, we have made significant progress in adapting IMDb for the future. We are on track to complete our migration to the new technology platform in 2025. This upgrade will enable us to introduce new features and support further growth, benefiting our customers worldwide. You can read about the background to this in the same section of the 2023 letter.

We make incremental changes almost daily on the site, and we are continuously experimenting to enhance the customer experience or to improve the speed and accessibility of our pages. As is the Amazon tradition, we start with the customer and work backwards to determine what we need to build next via our customer research team. Some of the larger highlights from 2024 include: updated video pages in February; emoji reactions across web and apps in April; a redesigned lists experience, which has resulted in a huge growth in the number of customers creating / sharing lists, as well as improved quality in those lists surfaced across IMDb; the return of character name search; updated photos and galleries in May; a modernized filmography search, which is now the most powerful and versatile in IMDb's history; a replacement name full credits experience in June, which is integrated into advanced title search for increased customization; the launch of Interests on the web in August, following a successful earlier launch on the apps; modernized parents guides and user reviews in September; a rebuild of events pages in November, just in time for the start of the new awards season; and finally in December, the initial launch of our updated profile (activity) pages with more to come early in 2025.

For improvements specifically in our mobile apps, please see the release notes for the apps in the iOS and Android stores. Some of the larger apps highlights from 2024 include: new Streaming Picks iOS widget in January; addition of list creation and editing on Android in February; Favorite People widget on Interest Pages in March; improved experience of browsing across Interests in April; Interests added to search results in May; Title page widget improvements in June; search bar added to home screen in August; improved movie showtimes and ticketing experience in November; initial launch of an updated profile page experience in December, with more improvements coming in 2025.

We made further improvements to IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo for our entertainment industry professional customers, including a simplified sign-up process and a new partnership with SAG-AFTRA to add verified union membership badges to name pages.

We were pleased to be able to support industry events and organizations throughout 2024 as detailed across Awards Central, Festival Central, IMDb Originals, and Press Room.

For more on 2024, please see our annual Best Of section (as a follow-up to my 15,000th movie as reported last year, see my Top 10 of 2024 where #1 is my 16,000th movie). We were pleased to grant more STARmeter awards to a further set of talented people, based on their popularity amongst IMDb customers. You can follow us on our various social media channels: TikTok; Facebook; Instagram; X; and YouTube. Thanks as always to our poll community for creating such engaging content for IMDb customers.

The Future

IMDb now reaches over 250 million monthly customers, spread across almost every country in the world. We are already seeing the benefits of our new technology, which allows people to access IMDb more consistently across devices and languages, with features and content that are relevant, accessible, and increasingly more personalized. We will be building on these foundations across the coming year. We are already welcoming more contributions covering more countries and our local language support is expanding. We are excited to be growing in our 35th anniversary year.

Feedback

Thank you again for all your support across 2024. Ideas and constructive feedback are always welcome via Sprinklr, where you can also propose and vote upon new ideas. This letter itself will be posted to Sprinklr if you have any feedback or questions.

If you have 100+ approved contributions, you can check your own position in the contributor rankings via the annual leaderboard. If you are inside the Top 300 contributors, we are offering free access to IMDbPro Premium throughout 2025 as a reflection of our appreciation. We will contact those contributors who qualify with access details soon. Badges for the Top 300 contributors will also be awarded early in January.

We wish you a Happy New Year for 2025!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO
on behalf of the whole worldwide IMDb Team

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 29th edition of our annual letter to thank IMDb's data contributor community and IMDb’s customers all over the world.

I am IMDb's Founder and CEO. I always look forward to this opportunity to reflect upon the year and to share those reflections with our contributors and customers alike. This letter celebrates all of our data contributors, especially those who made the Top 1,000 list by volume in 2023. Our thanks go to everyone who has helped us along this exciting journey, regardless of contribution volume.

IMDb’s vision is to power the creation, discovery and enjoyment of entertainment everywhere. This has been true ever since our launch in 1990 and one of the beauties is that the way we go about it is ever-changing: as entertainment grows; as storytellers can reach their audiences in new ways; and as technology enables us to do more for our customers.

In 2023 IMDb celebrated the 25th anniversary of becoming a subsidiary of Amazon.com back in 1998. We were jointly Amazon’s first acquisition so myself and several IMDb team members are among Amazon’s longest serving employees. The tradition of sending this letter began in 1995, and for an interesting view of our history, you can catch-up on any of the 28 previous editions. Our team members Ramsey and Jay co-wrote this letter with me again - we are a small part of a larger worldwide team whose work this letter also represents. Thank you IMDb team.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed any factual data, participated in a ratings poll, written a review, shared a list, voted in a user contributed poll or improved IMDb in any other way. The “everywhere” portion of our vision continues to happen beyond just the IMDb websites and apps to now include social media, a presence at many real-world events, collaborations with other organizations, and licensing IMDb to third parties who build even more experiences for their customers. A single data contribution has the power to ripple through these pathways and reach people across the world in a growing number of languages. To learn more about contributing data, please visit our Contributor Zone.

The Numbers

The dynamic Contributor Leaderboard enables us to count submissions right up until the year end and anyone with more than 100 approved items in 2023 can discover their own position in the rankings. We have been updating a running total for 2023 weekly across December with the final version published early on 1 January 2024 at https://contribute.imdb.com/leaderboard/2023/

IMDb now includes:

• Over 17.5 million titles with more than 4.5 million added in 2023
• Almost 14 million names with over 950,000 added in 2023
• Almost 195 million filmography credits with more than 20 million added in 2023
• Almost 8 million user reviews with more than 500,000 added in 2023
• Almost 575 million data items in the core database, having crossed 500 million earlier in 2023

Additional statistics are available in the Press Room and are updated quarterly.

This has been another record year across many dimensions of contribution, notably new titles. We averaged almost 1.25 million approved updates per week. Speedy processing, rapid publication, and consistent policies continue to be our focus areas as we appreciate their importance to you. We have made extensive scaling and processing improvements behind the scenes to deliver upon these aims.

Every contribution is important and, as we often highlight, you never know when just one piece of extra data will help another customer answer their question or make a viewing/listening discovery which changes their life for the better. We are reminded of this via the movie quote: “all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies” [or also answered in TV, web-series, games, podcasts, and music videos].

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Ramsey and Jay on The Contributor Team ...

Is it just us, or has 2023 flown by? It’s been an incredible year for film, with the record-breaking Barbenheimer release weekend, a new Scorsese epic, and countless animated visual masterpieces (shout out to 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem'), not to mention a feast of top TV shows like "The Last of Us" and the final season of "Succession" to name a few of our favorites.

It’s also been another busy year for our epic contributor community, so we must start by saying thank you. From the plot outlines, to the reviews and the millions of factual data points you take the time to upload and share, thank you to each and every one of you who took the time to contribute to IMDb. Your contributions are vital in keeping our titles up-to-date, informative, and entertaining for the entire IMDb community.

Our Contributor Team has spent a lot of time in 2023 focusing on technology improvements that should make contribution easier, more fun and ensure our contribution systems are robust and can scale in the future, as the entertainment landscape and the IMDb fan experience continues to evolve and change.

With that said, there have still been a number of significant improvements, which we hope have made your contribution experience better. Given the positive feedback around 2022’s end of year leaderboard, we added “your position is” messaging to the top of the monthly leaderboards, making it easier than ever to determine where you rank each month. We also identified a couple of issues with how the contribution calculations were handled and made some tweaks to make them more accurate - including counting a few previously omitted data types like contact data.

Further, the team have made various improvements to our quality control systems for certain data types, now making it more likely that contributors will be warned upfront if their contribution is invalid. Some of these changes include; warnings to prevent the mistaken submission of duplicate release dates, and restricting contribution of new items on types where only one is valid, such as heights or birth dates. We also added more guidance and messaging to help you format submissions correctly the first time round, to improve your chance of getting your hard work approved and live on IMDb as soon as possible.

We recently kick-started an initiative to engage with our contributors on changes we are making to the contribution process. Over the last month we have invited our Sprinklr Champs to participate in closed beta testing, trialing some exciting upcoming changes and giving us insightful feedback. This has proven invaluable and is something we’re looking forward to exploring even further in 2024.

We also owe a huge thanks to every contributor who has provided feedback about their experience via our contribution satisfaction survey. We appreciate your insights about what we can be doing better. Based on your suggestions, we have already rolled out a few improvements, which we hope will make your lives a little easier. This included adding a character count to the plot outline submission forms and introducing auto-suggestions to Award Nominations/Movie Connections. So, if you'd like to have your say, keep an eye out for the survey at the bottom of your next Contribution Confirmation page or leave us your thoughts any time over on our Community pages.

2024 is going to be a big year for IMDb and our contributors will, as always, be an integral part of our growth and success. So, here’s one final enormous thank you to our contributors from the entire IMDb team - we hope you have a restful holiday period and a Happy New Year!

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

This is a wonderful time to be an entertainment fan and we are always appreciative of the work which storytellers devote to their creative process and to reaching their audiences. We find it inspiring how IMDb often plays a part in the making of these stories in the planning and production stages via IMDbPro, and how we also can connect storytellers to their audiences once the title is ready to be shared with the world. When you use IMDb, you are helping here, too.

I track all of my movie viewing through IMDb and, if you know our history, this is how the early non-public version of IMDb began for me in the 1980s. I have now watched over 15,000 unique full-length movies – a milestone achieved with the IMDb Seattle team this past summer at a team screening of the excellent and funny Joy Ride (2023). This also means 15,000 ratings from me on IMDb - this total does not include re-watches either. It took me 36 years to reach 10,000 movies and just under seven years for the next 5,000. As we have always done, IMDb needs to adapt and grow to remain relevant to entertainment audiences in 2024 and well beyond. We want today’s new entertainment fans to benefit from IMDb as they start to discover titles, people, and stories - hopefully we will be their constant entertainment companion throughout their lives, just as IMDb has always been for me.

We have a responsibility to ensure the fruits of previous hard work and data contributions are accessible to a worldwide audience for the next 33 (and more) years. This does require the acceptance of change and an appreciation that the presentation of information online is always evolving. What once worked fine when technology was simpler, when expectations were lower, and when the content types IMDb covered were smaller, will not always work as well today. We are heading into the final stages of a multi-year rebuild of IMDb which will see us long into a future where: we grow data types to match the changing entertainment landscape; we cover more languages as entertainment becomes more globally accessible; we support more ways to discover then watch/listen/consume entertainment; and we are more consistent/accessible across a growing range of devices. It is an exciting challenge for us.

We now serve over 90% of web page views on our new modern, scalable technology service with our new responsive, localizable, and more accessible design (see last year’s letter for more on this). Across the year for the redesign we launched: the first batch of title subpages in January; news pages in March; ratings pages also in March, with additional country breakdowns and episode ratings-at-a-glance for TV shows; name subpages in April; additional title subpages in May; charts pages in June (along with more powerful filtering options on the same pages in October); the events page and many of the special sections pages in June; FAQ and episodes pages in July; Watchbar logos in October; and finally, advanced title search in November. Outside of the redesign we launched: name and title FAQ pages powered by Alexa; video playback improvements, including closed-caption support; Six Degrees game (in beta testing); and a data visualization challenge.

For improvements in the IMDb apps, please see the release notes for our mobile apps in the iOS and Android stores. We are especially pleased with the recent additions of "Interests" pages and vertical video in both apps. We also made extensive improvements to the IMDb What to Watch app which is available for Fire TV in the US.

We made further improvements to IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo for our entertainment industry professional customers, including producing a new series of How To videos for IMDbPro Premium members.

We were pleased to be able to support industry events and organizations throughout 2023 as detailed across Awards Central, Festival Central, IMDb Originals, and Press Room.

For more on 2023, please see our annual Best Of section and our IMDb STARmeter Awards section. We updated our sizzle reel for some fun reminders of how our customers and the industry engage with IMDb. You can follow us on our various social media channels: TikTok; Facebook; Instagram; Twitch; X; and YouTube. Thanks as always to our poll community for creating such engaging content for IMDb customers.

The Future

We have an exciting year ahead as we look to complete the technology migration with customer lists up next. This migration unlocks further international growth along with getting IMDb on more devices, and with improved accessibility everywhere. We want to continue our work with the global entertainment industry via IMDbPro to encourage more equitable hiring. The generative AI space presents many interesting opportunities for IMDb.

IMDb will be 34 years old in October, briefly catching up with Taylor Swift before her December birthday – no 2023 publication would be complete without mentioning the TIME Person of the Year! I will be celebrating by attending two of Taylor’s London concerts in 2024. I am going to remember it All Too Well.

Feedback

Thank you for all of your support across 2023. Ideas and constructive feedback are always welcome via Sprinklr, where you can also propose and vote upon new ideas, including those pertaining to the following topics: IMDb, data, iOS, Android, and IMDbPro. This letter itself will be posted to Sprinklr if you have any feedback or questions.

If you have 100+ approved contributions, you can check your own position in the contributor rankings via the annual leaderboard. If you are inside the Top 300 contributors, we are offering free access to IMDbPro Premium throughout 2024 as a reflection of our appreciation. We will contact those contributors who qualify soon with access details.

We wish you a Happy New Year for 2024!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team

Introduction and Thanks

Hello. Bonjour. Guten Tag. Hola. Salve. Olá. नमस्ते.

Welcome to the 28th edition of our annual letter to thank IMDb's worldwide data contributor community. The theme for the letter this year is international expansion as you may have guessed from the greetings above. In 2022 we added support for eight additional country/language pairs on the IMDb website, so in addition to US/English, we now offer a growing number of pages and content in these combinations: Canada/French; France/French; Germany/German; India/Hindi; Italy/Italian; Brazil/Portuguese; Spain/Spanish; and Mexico/Spanish.

I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and one of the highlights of my year is always sharing the news in this letter and celebrating all of our data contributors, especially those who made the Top 300 list by volume. Thanks to the support from all of our customers, we have had another exciting year at IMDb as we continue to help IMDb power the creation, discovery and enjoyment of entertainment everywhere. We launched IMDb in 1990 and the tradition of sending this letter began in 1995 if you would like to catch-up on any of the 27 previous editions. This year our team members Ramsey and Jay co-wrote this letter with me by providing the special section below on contribution improvements. We are all part of a team who are delighted to serve you and whose work this letter also represents.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed any factual data, voted in our ratings poll, written a review, shared a list, voted in a user contributed poll or added to IMDb in any other way. Every contribution is important and you never know when just one piece of extra data will help another customer answer their question or make a viewing (or listening) discovery. Once again, we are pleased with audience growth directly on IMDb and via other IMDb powered devices or experiences. The content you provide is reaching an ever-wider audience and now in even more local languages. To learn more about contributing, please visit our Contributor Zone.

The Numbers

We have a new approach to sharing the Top Contributors table this year via the Contributor Leaderboard which means we can count submissions right up until the year end and anyone with more than 100 approved items in 2022 can discover their own position in the rankings. Based upon the monthly leaderboard, we have been updating a running total for 2022 weekly across December with the final version published early on 1 January 2023 at https://contribute.imdb.com/leaderboard/2022/

IMDb now includes:

·       Over 12 million titles with more than 3 million added in 2022

·       Almost 13 million names with over 850,000 added in 2022

·       Over 170 million filmography credits with more than 18 million added in 2022

·       Almost 7.5 million user reviews with more than 750,000 added in 2022

·       Almost 3 million podcast episodes

·       Over 100,000 music videos

 

Additional statistics are available in the press room and are updated quarterly.

This year over 17,000 items were required to make it onto the Top 300 Contributors list. Across the year we averaged over one million approved updates per week with submissions of around two million items on some weeks. We know that speedy processing and publication times are most important to our contributors, and despite the volume increases, we have been able to reduce these times and reduce the sizes of (occasional) backlogs. Thank you everyone for your support.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Ramsey and Jay on The Contributor Team ...

What a year it has been. We must start by saying a huge thank you to our contributor community. You are the lifeblood of IMDb and we are forever grateful for your passion, knowledge and commitment to enriching the fan experience by providing vital and fascinating data, credits, ratings, reviews and everything in between. 

The IMDb Contributor Team has been hard at work to continuously improve and advance the contributor experience, to make contribution easier, smoother and more fun. We listen closely to your suggestions and try to implement as many ideas and recommendations as we can, so please keep your suggestions coming over at our Community pages. 

Twelve months is a long time, but it flies by, so let's take a look back at the key features, updates and improvements we have made for our contributors in 2022. 

To make contributing easier, we introduced the ability to contribute "Release Type" data, so that new Release Date submissions are always accompanied with a method of release (e.g. theatrical, online etc.). This makes data more consistent and simplifies this process for new contributors. We also introduced a new mechanism for categorizing keywords into sub-genres, plot details and plot time-frames. This aids the standardization of data and improves the discoverability of title pages, helping to bring some much needed order for those of us that like to have our ducks in a row. 

For the first time, contributors are now able to submit delete requests for incorrect or cancelled titles. Previously contributors would have to contact our customer service representatives via the help site to make such a request, which was a time consuming process. Now you can save time and help remove those pesky pieces of data that are no longer relevant.

Next, we introduced a feature which allows you to upload supporting evidence for credits and bio data submissions. In the past, contributors would have to upload evidence to 3rd party sites, but now you can upload to IMDb instead - straight to the source, making it easier than ever. This evidence helps our team to verify that submissions are factual and improves a contributor's chance of having their submissions approved. Now that's what we call a win-win! 

We also made some big improvements to our Contributor Leaderboard page. We understand that the leaderboard is a great place to see your name up in lights and get the recognition you deserve for your hard work all year round. So, we rolled out a new page for our leaderboards, celebrating the most prolific submitters. The new page allows users to click on profiles and see past rankings, as well as highlighting changes in standings from the previous month. We have more exciting updates planned for the leaderboard, so keep your eyes peeled for what comes next in 2023. 

In 2022, demand for authoritative data continued to accelerate across the Media & Entertainment industry. From creating compelling content, discovering new talent, or building new content recommendation features to attract and engage audiences, the need for accurate data to power decision making and content discovery has never been greater. We're proud (as you should be, too) that IMDb's data is leveraged by an ever-growing number of major studios, TV networks, global streaming operators, research & analytics services and many more via IMDb's commercial content licensing business. This year, we're particularly pleased to welcome Samsung TV Plus, and to help their customers discover new content to watch. On the market research side, we're also delighted to welcome Kantar to the fold, and to help their analyst teams manage movie/TV data for entertainment-related research, analysis and reporting.

Finally, don't forget to check out the IMDb Rewind. We put this together to celebrate the incredible efforts of you, our contributor community, and wanted to bring to life some of our favourite data types to surprise and impress. The Rewind really highlights how much effort our contributor community makes and in the year that IMDb turned 32 years old, it reiterates that we wouldn't be here without you. Thank you!

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

Continuing our international theme this year, if you would like to switch languages on the IMDb site, please use the menu in the upper right corner of any page (selection defaults to "EN" for English).  This localisation works on any of the modern pages built on our new technology — more pages will be converted over time. These nine country/language pairs (and more) are already supported in our mobile apps. Some IMDb content also powers the voice experience for entertainment questions on Amazon's Alexa devices in many more languages.  As someone trying to learn French myself, it has been fun to interact with Alexa in French and hear the device recite information in French that I originally contributed in English. We continued to improve search results in local languages as part of this work, with more to come. In October we also launched our first social media handles in India on Instagram and Twitter. We replaced our US-centric Now Playing section with an expansion of the worldwide release calendar covering every country for which we have release dates; similarly, the home page Coming Soon feature is now localised. If release dates are missing for your country, do feel free to contribute them.

Our category expansion team worked on growing the podcast and music video title types, with some of the results shown in the numbers section above.  We are weaving these new types further into the IMDb experience, including the addition of "Listen" links onto podcast title pages. We increased the supported professions on IMDb to include Music Artist and Podcaster as you can see, for example, with Taylor Swift and Julia Galef. I have enjoyed updating episodes and connections on one of my favourite podcasts, You Must Remember This (2014) as I caught-up with 17 seasons across the year after its host, Karina Longworth, appeared on our podcast, IMDb Is Obsessed (2021) in April. We expanded our coverage of podcast and music awards too with The Ambies and The Grammy Awards being good examples.

We remain committed to helping improve diversity, equity and inclusion across the entertainment industry. We took two further significant steps in 2022 in support of this important work. In August we launched a new free subscription tier for IMDbPro allowing anyone with an IMDb name page to claim their page and to optionally supply personal details / demographic data, and to update their IMDbPro performer profile outside of their credits.  This helps all professionals better showcase themselves and their careers to industry decision-makers without requiring a paid subscription. In December we launched the next phase whereby anyone with a claimed name page can control the display of this information on IMDbPro and on all other IMDb interfaces, along with control over the display of their birth year, birth name and alternate names.  For on-camera talent, age-playing ranges are now supported more widely.  We believe that this is a positive step forward for representation and it should lead to IMDb having a larger range of content, thanks to the new fields available and thanks to the direct relationships with the larger number of professionals who have claimed their pages. Our press release contains more information on these steps to support more equitable hiring in the entertainment industry and it lists the organisations with whom we worked. 

All of the above inspired us onwards in terms of the rollout of our new technology and design which had previously launched on the home, title, what to watch, photo and video pages. We want to be able to better support more languages, more device sizes, more title types, more data fields, and improved accessibility / consistency across the whole of IMDb. In November we launched our new name pages to support these aims immediately and to allow faster changes along with download speed improvements in the future. We are already seeing additional benefits in terms of customer engagement and traffic to the site as well as a reduction in mental switching costs between accessing IMDb on the web vs. mobile since the majority of customers access IMDb across more than one device. More details are available in the launch FAQ.  The main search results were also migrated to the new technology platform for similar advantages.

In May we brought IMDb to a wider range of customers via the launch of our What to Watch app for Fire TV devices in the US.  The app has a series of simple, fun games which you can play alone or as a group to help you find something great to watch. We later added speedy access to your IMDb watchlist via the app which is a great way to locate these titles on your Fire TV for convenient viewing. You can also save your preferred services for a personalised streaming guide.

Video plays an important role in the IMDb experience and we released an updated video player on the site and apps.  This in turn has enabled more support of closed captions for IMDb original videos on the site, which improves accessibility and, continuing a theme, provides better access for customers whose first language is not English (app support and wider video coverage are coming soon).  The "sticky" video feature means that if you click to play the audio of a video at the top of a title page and scroll, the video will stay within view as you read the rest of the page — perfect for multi-tasking (and coming soon to name pages).  We also improved our playlist selection so there is something relevant to watch once the current video finishes.

We have continued to produce our own video content in the form of interviews, short shows and coverage of popular awards and events.  We returned to San Diego Comic-Con, expanded our video coverage at Disney's D23 event, and continued our coverage of The Academy Awards, Emmys, and New York Comic Con. Our new weekly round-up, 5 Things to Watch is proving popular.

In addition to short videos such as trailers and interviews, IMDb also links to other locations where full movies and shows can be watched (as well as where podcasts can be heard) in a growing number of countries and supporting a growing number of providers.  We transitioned the IMDb TV brand to Amazon Freevee back in April and then added Freevee support in the US, UK and Germany to the Watch option on our title pages. In the US, new watch providers included AMC+ and Peacock.

We continue to invest in original photography, leading to a number of exclusive portrait studios at The Film Independent Spirit Awards, D23, Outfest LA Film Festival, and The Critics Choice Association 5th Annual Celebration of Black Cinema & Television.

For improvements in our mobile apps, as usual please see the release notes for our mobile apps in the iOS and Android stores. My personal favourite this year is the addition of plot keywords to both apps.

Beyond the changes already highlighted, we made further improvements to IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo for our entertainment industry professional customers. On IMDbPro launches included updated company pages, an updated summary for name pages, and the Discover people and title searches. We were pleased to be able to support industry events and organisations throughout 2022, including: The American Black Film Festival; The Critics Choice Association Celebrations (Asian Pacific Cinema & Television, Latino Cinema & Television and Black Cinema & Television); Easterseals (Disability Film Challenge and Media Access Awards); Film Independent (Independent Spirit Awards); Outfest (Outfest Fusion, Outfronts, Outfest LA and Outfest Legacy Awards); The Sundance Film Festival; SXSW; The Toronto International Film Festival; Women in Film; and The Women in Film & TV UK Awards. We again provided data to ReFrame as the basis for their ReFrame Stamp initiative to highlight gender-balanced TV and film productions.

We expanded our Best Of section with even more lists of popular people and titles worldwide and some additional India lists inline with our international theme. Our Top Breakout Star was Emma D'Arcy who is pictured here receiving their Breakout STARmeter award.  Other STARmeter awards across 2022 were: Lauren Ridloff in celebration of Black History Month; Salma Hayek Pinault (Icon Award) in celebration of Women's History Month and IMDbPro's 20th anniversary; Simu Liu in celebration of Asian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month; Simone Ashley (Breakout Award); and Melissa Barrera in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month.

You can also follow us on our various social media channels: TikTok; Facebook; Instagram; Twitch; Twitter; and YouTube. Thanks as always to our poll community for creating such engaging content for IMDb customers.

The Future

In addition to IMDb's 32nd birthday, 2022 marked IMDbPro's 20th birthday given we originally launched IMDbPro at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. I have fond memories of the launch itself — I am grateful for how far we have come and yet I remain excited about how much further we have to go at both IMDb and IMDbPro. The steps we have taken this year are a good start in the next phase of our journey and our mission to encourage more equitable hiring across the entertainment industry.

Finally talking of fond memories, if you would like to hear more of the IMDb story, I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show, The Bottom Line with Evan Davis in November.

Feedback

Thank you for all of your support across 2022. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via Sprinklr, where you can also propose and vote upon new ideas, including those pertaining to the following topics:  IMDb, data,  iOS, Android and IMDbPro. This letter itself will be posted to Sprinklr if you have any feedback or questions.

New this year, if you have 100+ approved contributions, you can check your own position in the contributor rankings via the annual leaderboard hosted directly on IMDb. If you are inside the Top 300 contributors, as usual, we are offering you free access to IMDbPro for all of 2023 as a reflection of our appreciation. We will contact those people who qualify next week with access details.

We wish you a Happy New Year for 2023!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 27th edition of our annual letter to thank IMDb's growing worldwide community of data contributors. As in years past, we are giving a special thank you to our Top 300 contributors, whose passion for entertainment makes IMDb better with each passing year. I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and it is an honour each year, with fellow team member Jennifer, to reflect upon the improvements we have made to IMDb with your help. We marked IMDb's 31st birthday in October 2021 and the tradition of sending this letter began in 1995 if you would like to catch-up on previous editions.

First, it is important to acknowledge that we are still in the midst of an ongoing and ever-evolving global pandemic and the situation remains difficult for so many. In July we lost a beloved IMDb team member to COVID-19; and although we feel the pain of their absence daily, we also celebrate and cherish their memory. We hope you have all been able to stay safe and well during 2021, and our thoughts and best wishes go out to everyone who is struggling during this unprecedented time.

IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so thank you again.  Every single data update is important and helps IMDb get closer to achieving its vision of powering the creation, discovery and enjoyment of entertainment everywhere. Entertainment itself continues to evolve with more movies, shows, shorts & games being produced each year. Also, IMDb's coverage formally expanded to include both podcasts & music videos in 2021 as the boundaries between different media continue to blur. Similarly, IMDb's reach across more devices, services, locations and languages is expanding, so the content you provide is being appreciated by more people than ever before. If you have not yet contributed any data to IMDb, you can learn more via our Contributor Zone.  

The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items which the Top 300 contributors have submitted in 2021, including corrections and deletions. The total number of contributors exceeded 900,000 people, and since March we have been posting monthly contributor rankings to Sprinklr. We have also made further improvements in terms of both processing times and publishing speed, even with record contribution volumes.

IMDb now includes:

• Over 8.7 million titles with more than 1.25 million added in 2021
• Almost 11.4 million names with over 800,000 added in 2021 (note a change to the counting methodology vs. 2020 due to name merges)
• Almost 155 million filmography credits with more than 16 million added in 2021
• Nearly 6.5 million user reviews with almost 1 million added in 2021

This makes two consecutive years with more than one million new titles added across the twelve months, which now equates to an average of over 3,400 new titles per day! Additional statistics are available in the press room and are updated quarterly.

This year over 16,000 items were required to make it onto the Top Contributors list.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Jennifer Reiley ...

While 2021 was definitely filled with highs and lows for many, personally I was immensely excited to finally return to the cinema in time to watch No Time To Die, a "must see" on the big screen. I also considered writing this section in the style of Lady Whistledown from Bridgerton but alas, dear reader, I have not. I am thrilled to be able to share the progress we have made over the year with you and want to start by saying thanks. In 2018 we said, "Your contributions can have an enormously wide reach, one that is expanding fast" and this year that statement is truer than ever.

Something that we are particularly excited about this year was the expansion of title types supported by IMDb to include Podcasts and Music Videos! In October, we launched the first new title type in 16 years -- Podcast Series and Episodes -- followed quickly by the launch of Music Videos in November. It's a very exciting time for us to provide these new entertainment categories, and appreciate all of your contributions and support along the way. If you haven't had a chance, check out the new contribution form for adding a podcast or music video, and if you are interested in learning more about contributing a podcast or music video, you can visit our Submission Guide.

We have also been doing a lot of work to support our global contributor base, improving functionality and offerings. For example, we enabled contribution of Devanagari (Hindi script) Alternate Titles and launched non-English plot outlines on IMDb title pages. We remain committed to improving the experience for our global contributor base, so stay tuned for ongoing improvements in this area!

We continue to invest in IMDb Answers, a tool designed to help you contribute in a fast and easy way by answering the most up-to-date feed of questions. In July, we launched the IMDb Answers Top Gap feature across all IMDb title pages and added release dates and certificates question types to the new IMDb Answers experience.

As a reminder, we continuously update the Contributor Help section by adding and revising submission guides, such as the addition of the guide for Showrunners and Head writers and updates to the Name guide to support Eastern Name formatting. This remains the place to keep up-to-date on how to contribute to IMDb. You may have also noticed that we have added a survey to the bottom of each guide, so you can let us know if the guide was useful or let us know when we need to make clarifications.

We've also been making some exciting updates for industry professionals using IMDbPro. In March, we added the ability to contribute a department head attribute and in July, we launched primary profession selection in IMDbPro which allows IMDbPro members the ability to control how and what profession is displayed on their name pages across IMDb and IMDbPro. This change improves name discoverability, so members can promote themselves, get hired, grow their network, and advance their career. We also launched the ability to set a primary contact to help industry professionals quickly reach the right person.

As always, I want to thank you for making IMDb the world's most trusted source for movie, TV, and entertainment content. Entertainment fans like you are essential to our success, and we'll continue to listen to your feedback to improve IMDb. As a reminder, we welcome your thoughts, questions and feedback on our Community forum which we actively monitor and engage on – head on over to share your thoughts!

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

One of the exciting things about working at IMDb is that new content is added by the minute; we are also always updating the software which drives the features and services built on top of this content.  In July we completed the launch of our new title pages which use a responsive design on new scalable technology.  We have recently completed the beta testing of a new multi-language experience across all of the pages built on this new technology (including title, home, photos and video) which provides access to the labels and some content across several languages according to customer location and preferences. A formal launch will be ready in 2022, and more translated pages will be supported as we move further onto the new technology.  We have also started to localise search results across the site and apps to make titles easier to find.

Speaking of ever-expanding features, see the release notes for our mobile apps in the iOS and Android stores for details of new features added throughout 2021.

You may have seen video playing an increasing role across IMDb.  We cover filmed (and more) entertainment and so it is only natural to weave more video into the IMDb experience itself. See our (virtual) awards and festival coverage. In addition to many new original videos, we produced a second series of our podcast Movies That Changed My Life, and launched a new podcast IMDb Is Obsessed.  You can learn more in our Podcasts section.

For US, and now UK customers too, we added movies and shows to our free advertising supported streaming service, IMDb TV, which is available on many of the devices having access to Amazon Prime Video.  We have also expanded the number of streaming providers supported by our "watch" buttons directly on IMDb title pages and our What to Watch section, plus other where-to-watch features across the site and apps.

Our annual Best Of section is the biggest ever, looking at top names, titles, trends, and more across 2021, including a highly entertaining video of IMDb "Breakout" STARmeter award winner, Ben Barnes accepting his award and talking about his varied roles and career thus far.

You can also follow us on our various social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube. Thanks also to our poll community for creating such engaging content for fans. You are always welcome to vote or even submit your own polls.

For our entertainment industry professional customers, we made further improvements to IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo.  We highlighted additional  industry lists on the IMDbPro homepage and have continued enhancing our beta product, IMDbPro Discover.  We also supported several industry events throughout the year, including The Sundance Film Festival and The Toronto International Film Festival, as well as inclusion initiatives such as The Easterseals Film Disability Challenge and the Media Access Awards, The OUTFEST LA Film Festival and the Legacy Awards, and The Women in Film & TV UK Awards. We once again provided data to ReFrame as the basis for their ReFrame Stamp initiative to highlight gender-balanced TV and film productions.

We are hiring to support our continued growth, and now offer virtual opportunities, so if you would like to join our team of passionate entertainment and tech professionals, or would like to recommend a qualified friend, please see our jobs page.

The Future

25 December 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Grand Canyon which contains my all-time favourite movie quote, "All of life's riddles are answered in the movies."  I love this quote because it highlights the power of movies and TV to inform and entertain their audiences; by watching, people can be transported to other times, other places, other cultures, and to imaginary worlds, both past, present and future. The possibilities are endless.  As humans we love to hear stories, to watch stories, and to tell stories. We feel very honoured at IMDb to help connect storytellers to their audiences and to help people discover great new things to watch, or learn more about what they have watched already and the people who made it possible. We want to share our love of entertainment with the world. Technology is rapidly changing how entertainment is made and how it is delivered to audiences.  Whatever takes shape, we want to be alongside you -- our contributors and customers -- on new journeys of entertainment discovery.

Feedback

Thank you again for all of your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via Sprinklr, where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, including those pertaining to the following topics:  IMDb, data,  iOS, Android and IMDbPro. This letter will be posted to Sprinklr. If you are not in the Top 300 contributors this year and would like to know how much data you contributed along with your position outside of the Top 300, please post a reply to the announcement on Sprinklr.

We wish you a Happy New Year!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 26th edition of our annual letter to recognise and celebrate IMDb's top data contributors. This message is initially being sent to everyone who contributed data in 2020 and will then be shared more widely. If you are a first time recipient of this year-end tradition, I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the annual letter here, and follow IMDb's future progress in our press room. If you have not yet contributed any data to IMDb, you can learn more via our Contributor Zone.

When we wrote the last edition of this letter, we were about to enter IMDb's 30th anniversary year with rather different plans than what ultimately turned out in reality. No words can adequately convey the impact the events of 2020 have had on all of our lives. However, we hope you have all been able to stay safe and well during what has been a tough year across the world. While the rest of this letter will take a positive tone, we felt it important to acknowledge the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic and also to highlight just how much work remains to be done in building a more diverse, equitable and inclusive society; IMDb is committed to using our influence, data and tools to help improve the entertainment industry.

IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we first want to thank you all for helping us to grow by record amounts during our 30th anniversary year - whether you made a single update or whether you were the top contributor in the list below.

We have a simple statement to capture the vision we are trying to achieve: "IMDb powers the creation, discovery and enjoyment of entertainment everywhere" and we think about our customers across several categories: entertainment fans who visit our free site and mobile apps; entertainment professionals who we help to navigate their industry; advertisers whose support helps us invest in & grow IMDb; and it all starts with our contributors who help make IMDb the most complete, accurate & timely source of global information. These factors motivate us to take IMDb to more countries, to offer IMDb in more languages, and to make everything available on more devices. Even after 30 years there is still so much more we can deliver with your help and therefore so many more places we can make the data you contribute available.

The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items which the Top 300 contributors have submitted in 2020, including corrections and deletions. New records have once again been set in terms of the total number of contributors (800,000+), the overall volume of data contributed, and improvements in the speed of publishing.

IMDb now includes:

• Over 7.5 million titles with more than 1 million added in 2020
• Over 11 million names with more than 800,000 added in 2020
• Over 135 million filmography credits with more than 14 million added in 2020
• Nearly 5.5 million user reviews with over 800,000 added in 2020

The total size of the database recently crossed 400 million data items.

To put some of the above growth into context, it took IMDb 17 years to reach our first one million titles and you have contributed over one million titles in 2020 alone! Additional statistics are available in the press room.

This year nearly 17,000 items were required to make it onto the Top Contributors list.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Jennifer Reiley ...

Although 2020 has been an incredibly difficult time, now more than ever, the value of entertainment is apparent. From the global phenomenon of the Tiger King, enjoying Hamilton from our living rooms, and finally seeing Tenet -- the first Hollywood blockbuster to open in theatres after the pandemic shutdown -- we have been adapting along with the industry in order to provide you with the best possible contributor experience.

This year, we saw a record number of contributions, including more unique contributors, which we were able to process quicker than ever! We have been working hard behind the scenes to make sure your contributions and contacts remain our top priority.

In 2020, we were particularly excited to launch a mobile friendly version of our primary contribution interface from our apps, which has full parity in contributable data types from title, name and company pages. As fans across the world shift to consume entertainment on various devices, we understand the need to provide the ability to contribute beyond desktop.

Additionally, based on your feedback, we added the ability to add Series End Years via the contribution interface. This has been a long-standing request for contributors to be able to self-serve. In the past, this was only possible by reaching out to the IMDb support team with the info - this is now a lot easier and quicker! Since launching, updates to Series End Years have markedly increased so we thank you for taking advantage of this change.

We also continue to invest in IMDb Answers in order to surface high-value content that has not yet been added to IMDb and will provide additional benefits to IMDb customers. We strive to make IMDb Answers a fun way to share your knowledge and increase content coverage across fourteen countries. The question feed can be customized to your area of interest and knowledge as well. For example, if you are interested in adding movie posters for Germany, simply choose the country you want to contribute to and the type of data and click "Go"! IMDb Answers uses real-time pageviews by IMDb customers from specific countries and populates movie showtimes data for movies currently in theatres. These contributions also count toward your end of year contribution numbers, and you can track the status of your contributions as usual.

You may have also noticed that our community page underwent a refresh this year. The IMDb Community Forums migrated from GetSatisfaction to Sprinklr. The new Sprinklr community offers additional features and functionality, so stay tuned for updates and continue to share your feedback! As with GetSatisfaction, Sprinklr is the destination to keep up-to-date on new feature announcements, and to share your own ideas and requests via the Ideas section.

As you know, this year IMDb celebrated its 30th birthday. Along with recognizing the Top 300 contributors this year, to mark the occasion, we have also added the Top 300 contributors over the last 30 years which required over 100,000 items! Thank you for your dedication!

We are grateful to all of you that share our passion for providing entertainment information across the globe.

Here's to a happy and healthy New Year!

Jennifer Reiley
IMDb Operations Program Manager

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

We are continuing to update the website with the launch of our new home page, placing more emphasis on what to watch, along with a dedicated Watch page to assist you in your viewing decisions. We now have over 50 streaming providers to help you find where to watch your chosen shows and movies. We also updated our photo gallery and video pages. The new design is also available for opt-in beta testing on title pages and you can take a look here. All of these pages use a responsive design which works across large screens through to smaller mobile browsers, making it easier for us to more quickly launch new features consistently across IMDb.

Although we were able to produce our Sundance Studio and Oscars coverage as usual in the early months of the year, the pandemic soon impacted events for the rest of 2020, and we switched to a virtual event coverage model. This provided opportunities to diversify our coverage including working with: the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge; the American Black Film Festival; the Curbside Shorts 2-Minute Film Challenge; and the UNHCR Films for Hope. We continue to work with ReFrame on their ReFrame Stamp initiative to highlight gender balanced TV and film productions.

We expanded IMDb Originals to include two new podcasts: Movies That Changed My Life which is available wherever you normally obtain your podcasts; and That Scene with Dan Patrick which is an exclusive with Amazon Music. Find out more in our Podcasts section.

For US customers, we continued to add movies and shows to our free advertising supported streaming service, IMDb TV which is available directly on IMDb and on most of the devices which have access to Amazon Prime Video.

This was a great year for our mobile apps which also added many what-to-watch and where-to-watch features as described in the release notes in the iOS and Android stores. Our iOS app includes more local language content beyond English, helping to bring IMDb more easily to a global audience.

While there were fewer theatrical releases in 2020, many people had more time to watch movies and shows at home, and IMDb's traffic and engagement likewise increased. We expanded our email program to include a new Streaming Guide and a newsletter-style Watch Guide - control your free email subscriptions via our email preferences page. You can also follow us on our various social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube. Across social we experimented with Instagram AR filters, interactive voting brackets, animated character posters, and data-driven infographics.

Our customer poll community continues to grow, now with more than 19 million votes. Thanks to everyone who contributes or manages polls (and to the voters, too).

For our entertainment industry professional customers, we made many improvements to IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. We launched a new home page on IMDbPro, including: an updated news experience with categorizations; personalised Track updates; and a Latest Attachments module. We redesigned the Jobs feature. We enhanced the IMDbPro lists service and launched a beta Add-On product, Discover, to aid decision-makers in staffing their projects.

Our year always ends with our Best Of section where you can catch-up on all of the entertainment trends from the year and add top shows and movies you may have missed to your IMDb watchlist. The section includes Anya Chalotra accepting her IMDb "Breakout" STARmeter award - joining past recipients in our new section for the award.

If you would like to join our team and help IMDb deliver on our 2021 plans, please see our jobs page.

Feedback

Thanks again for all of your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via Sprinklr, where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, including those pertaining to the following topics: IMDb, data,  iOS, Android and IMDbPro. This letter will be posted to Sprinklr. If you are not in the Top 300 contributors this year and would like to know how much data you contributed along with your position outside of the Top 300, please post a reply to the announcement on Sprinklr.

We wish you a Happy New Year!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 25th edition of our annual letter to recognise and celebrate IMDb's top data contributors. This message is being sent to everyone who contributed data in 2019. If you are a first time recipient of this year-end tradition, I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, as well as follow IMDb's future progress in our press room. IMDb will be celebrating its 30th birthday in October 2020 and we are especially excited about the year ahead.

IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we first want to thank you all for helping us to grow in another record year - whether you made a single update or whether you were the top contributor in the list below. As usual, we are continuing to work on making contributions easier and faster. We are pleased to have recently launched a beta test of IMDb Answers which we hope will eventually introduce IMDb to a whole new contribution audience; personally the convenience of IMDb Answers has enabled me to reach a higher position on the top contributors list than in recent years.

We just marked 10 years since the first IMDb mobile app launched in December 2009 on iOS and more of the data which you contribute is available in more places and upon more devices than ever before. Our vision remains to power to the creation, discovery and enjoyment of entertainment everywhere. We love working on making the "everywhere" more literally true year-by-year, and finding new ways to present entertainment information or to search IMDb while also creating a more consistent look and feel from wherever you access IMDb.

The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items which the Top 300 contributors have submitted in 2019, including corrections and deletions. New records have been set in terms of the total number of contributors (750,000+), the overall volume of data contributed and improvements to the speed of publishing.

IMDb now includes:

• Over 6.5 million titles with over 875,000 added in 2019
• Over 10.3 million names with over 750,000 added in 2019
• Over 120 million filmography credits with over 15 million added in 2019
• Over 4.5 million user reviews with over 600,000 added in 2019

 

More statistics are available in the press room.

We have expanded the top contributors list from the traditional 250 people to 300 in honour of our upcoming 30th anniversary and nearly 14,000 items were required to make it onto the list this year.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Matthew Pearson ...

2019 has been quite the year, both in film and TV and for IMDb. In-between arguing over the Game of Thrones finale and drying our eyes over Avengers: Endgame, we've been doing our best to help you, the people who make IMDb what it is, find it ever easier to do what you do. Today, the content you contribute is reaching more people than ever - IMDb, IMDbPro, one of our numerous mobile services, Prime Video's X-Ray for Movies & TV and entertainment-related answers via Amazon's Alexa around the world. There have been some big changes for content contribution in 2019, and it's an honour to work on these improvements for you: thank you for everything you've done this year.

One of the frequent pieces of feedback we have from our users is they don't know what content is missing. To address this, we have launched a beta of IMDb Answers, which surfaces missing content. Simply visit the page, select the locale (country + language), content type (e.g. release date, certificates, etc.), sorting method (e.g. trending or in theatres), and title type (e.g. film, TV series, etc.), and complete the contribution. This helps you find the content that will be most valuable to IMDb customers, and with our updated contribution UI, it is quicker than ever to share your knowledge with the IMDb community (and P.S. - it works on your mobile device). In the office, we've found it especially rewarding to add content when the titles or names are trending - have fun!

In addition to new ways of contributing, we've expanded the content types you can contribute on IMDb. For example, for the first time, you can now contribute non-English plot outlines. Special thanks to all the contributors who are helping us test this while it's in beta (and see here if you'd like to get involved). We've also done a lot of work behind the scenes to make our database fully UTF-8 compliant. While you won't see a lot of change just yet, this paves the way for more exciting developments moving forward - stay tuned!

Likewise, we've made it easier for you to find out what happens to your contributions. We've significantly extended our "Track Contribution" feature across many more content types. You can visit your contribution history page and click the "Track Contribution" button to get started. We've also enabled you to provide explanatory comments with everything you contribute.

To further support our IMDbPro contributors, we've improved the time it takes for your Contact data to appear on the site, now typically in less than 10 minutes of us approving your contributions. We've created a new crew department for 'Script and Continuity', based on feedback from you and the industry. We've also set new records by processing more of your contributions within 24 hours than ever before, and responding to support contacts faster than ever.

With all the changes this year, GetSatisfaction remains your destination to keep up-to-date on new feature announcements, and to be involved in policy discussions. If you want to know more about new initiatives, speak up on the Ideas section with your interests - we want to work with you.

Additionally, for the first time ever, we hosted a number of local contributors at San Diego Comic-Con (special shout out to Mike Johansen for agreeing to be interviewed with Col). We also hosted a second contributor meet up in India in October, and we are looking forward to increasing these types of contributor events next year - watch this space!

And of course, a special thank you to all of the GetSatisfaction champs, beta tester contributions, and each and every one of you, from all of us on IMDb's Content team. And congratulations if you made it to the Top 300 this year.

Happy New Year - and see you in the roaring 20's!

Matthew Pearson
Manager - IMDb Database Content

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

We began 2019 with the launch of IMDb TV in the US where you can now watch hundreds of movies and TV shows for free either directly on IMDb.com, on our mobile apps or via the IMDb TV channel on almost any device which has access to Amazon Prime Video Channels. The service is advertising supported and you can now filter by IMDb TV availability in many places on IMDb (or use an advanced title search) to find something to watch.

We continued to expand the production of our IMDb Originals videos to keep you informed of everything happening in the world of entertainment or take you to a festival or event. This also included our first ever scripted show, the delightfully funny "You're Not a Monster" (2019) which is packed full of movie monster references and in-jokes. You can also follow us on Twitch for live interviews and premiere coverage.

Beyond IMDb TV, we have also expanded our title pages to show you where you can watch the title on other Amazon Prime Video Channels, HBO, Starz and PBS (in addition to Prime Video itself).

Our international expansion has continued with more local content including local titles, posters, trailers and ratings certificates in more countries.

Thanks once again to our poll community for the inventive polls, which now have more than 18,000,000 votes.

We are in the process of launching more consistent navigation and home pages across the IMDb mobile site, desktop site and mobile apps with some updates already live.

For more details on updates to our mobile apps including the launch of mobile advanced title search, you can read release notes in the iOS and Android stores. You can also follow us on our various social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube or sign-up for our regular emails.

For entertainment industry customers, we offer IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. IMDbPro now includes thousands of additional casting notices from partner services, along with more industry news and trending dashboards on the new IMDbPro home page. We relaunched Box Office Mojo with a new design and the site is now built upon new technology which will enable us to deliver faster in the future. The IMDbPro experience now includes much more detailed box office information, powered by Box Office Mojo. For example, see reports by country or person or distributor.

IMDb began as my movie diary as a teenager in the 1980s. My first diary entry was 40 years ago and I have been tracking every movie I have seen since 1 January 1980. I do this now by voting and checking-in on IMDb, plus I maintain an IMDb list for each year. I saw my 12,000th movie in December 2019 (unique movies, not even counting repeat viewings). On a related note, in conjunction with Curious Charts we have created an IMDb Top 100 bucket list poster, available at Amazon.com, where you can check-off how many of the Top 100 highest rated movies on IMDb you have seen.

To celebrate 2019 from an entertainment perspective, please see our Best of section. Onwards now to 2020, our 30th birthday year and to serving you better whenever and wherever you access IMDb. If you would like to join our team, please keep an eye on our jobs page.

Feedback

Thanks again for all of your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via GetSatisfaction, where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, including those pertaining to the following topics: IMDb, data, iOS, Android and IMDbPro. 

We wish you a Happy New Year!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 24th edition of our letter to recognise and celebrate IMDb's top data contributors of the year, which is again being sent to everyone who contributed data in 2018. If this is your first time reading, I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, as well as follow IMDb's future progress in our press room. We passed a number of milestones in 2018 – 20 years as a subsidiary of Amazon.com in April, the 25th anniversary of the launch of our first web site in the summer, and our 28th birthday online in October. It has been quite a year and we are grateful for all of your support. Thank you.

IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we want to thank each and every one of you for helping us to grow in another record year, whether you added just one item or whether you were #1 in the top contributor list below. Throughout the year we have worked on making it easier for you to contribute, to process your updates quickly, to be more consistent with our policies, and we started to provide a real-time status on all pending updates (see the new contribution history beta test).

Earlier this year Amazon's Jeff Bezos wrote about people's ever increasing expectations in his annual letter to shareholders - this has particularly resonated with us as we strive to improve IMDb for both our contributor community and our hundreds of millions of monthly visitors worldwide. We are building more new features as well as making existing features more consistently available across all of IMDb's websites and mobile applications to try to exceed your expectations. We are always thrilled when we are able to bring IMDb to new devices and services; you never know where something you have contributed may appear next.

The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items which the Top 250 have contributed in 2018, including corrections and deletions. New records have been set in terms of the total number of contributors (600,000+) and overall volume. Yet we still managed to achieve further reductions in the time between submission and publication.

IMDb now includes:

• Over 5.6 million titles with over 700,000 added in 2018
• Over 9.5 million names with over 750,000 added in 2018
• Over 105 million filmography credits with over 14 million added in 2018
• Nearly 4 million user reviews with over 400,000 added in 2018

 

More statistics are available in the press room.

Over 14,000 items were required for you to make it onto the Top 250 list this year.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Thomas Porter ...

Looking back at the changes over the past year is always a pleasure. Sharing the improvements with you, a real privilege. Whether you're a dedicated archivist, industry professional or armchair critic, your content helps power careers and settle viewing decisions (and bets) the world over. Significantly, it's not just visitors to IMDb's websites and apps who benefit. Today IMDb's content is helping to reinvent the video-watching experience via Prime Video's X-Ray for Movies & TV and power entertainment-related answers via Amazon's Alexa. Your contributions can have an enormously wide reach, one that is expanding fast.

With that in mind, for IMDb's Content team, 2018 will be remembered as the year we started to get serious about structured, international data. Having the right answers at the right time in multiple languages, and presenting them in a way that makes sense in text, voice and other media formats has been a big focus and we're hugely grateful for everyone who has been involved so far. Many of you have been adding international title text for years (thank you) and we were pleased to roll-out a well-received policy change to enable us to collect even more locale-specific title information. We also launched language and country-specific tagging for posters. Check out these versions of the Avengers: Infinity War (2018) poster, tagged with Portuguese and Hebrew.

Elsewhere we're still laser-focused on making it easier for you to contribute. In 2018 we launched brand new contribution interfaces for User Reviews on apps and our mobile site, and for Title FAQs on our regular desktop site. For the latter we're now open to submissions of questions without answers to encourage those that do know to help those that don't. We also launched a new Data Gaps feature to surface missing key title content including runtimes, release dates and plots. We'd love to hear your feedback on new contribution initiatives like this, so please do give it a whirl.

We also just announced a new interface that provides easy, bulk-access to subsets of IMDb title and name data. Check it out if you like your data straight-up.

Speed of service continues to be a major focus. In 2018, a record-breaking number of your contributions were processed within minutes, most within hours, and 95% of everything within 24hrs. For the remaining 5%, we work around the clock to ensure no contribution sits around for more than 5 days. Our customer service speed has also accelerated. Over the year 95% of your contacts were handled within 24hrs on Get Satisfaction and via the new-for-2018 IMDb Help Center (helping scores of you find answers without having to contact us – the speediest type of service there is).

Last but certainly not least, in 2018 we've had more direct contact with a wider array of contributors than ever. Our help community on Get Satisfaction is still the place to keep abreast of the latest feature announcements and have your say on content policy changes (see these recent discussions on Company names and writer credits, for example). Our new ventures into internationalization, however, have led us to many new contributors from across the globe and we've been blown away with the willingness and enthusiasm to get involved (special shout out to janusminoa and ljdoncel, you rock!). We even ended the year with a face-to-face contributor event in Mumbai. Col Needham and several of the team had a blast – thank you for hosting us, India!

If you're keen to get involved in new initiatives, please do make yourself known on Get Satisfaction. We'd love to work with you.

On behalf of IMDb's Content team, thank you, thank you, thank you to our Get Satisfaction Champs, our localization participants, our Beta testers and to each and every one of our contributors. Huge congratulations if you made the top 250 this year.

Happy New Year everyone, see you in 2019!

Thomas Porter
Manager - IMDb Database Content

... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

This is an exciting time to be a fan of movies and TV (and related visual media) because we are living in a golden era of choice and convenience: it has never been easier for people to tell stories on-screen and it has also never been easier for audience members to watch this content. We love connecting storytellers to their audience and we love it when you, our customers, find something great to watch via a search, recommendation or other IMDb feature. As technology advances we always look to provide new ways to access IMDb on more devices. When we launched back in 1990, the ability to search IMDb by voice would have seemed like something from a science fiction movie, yet this is now a common experience with IMDb helping to power entertainment queries on Alexa (and recently not only in English). We will continue to help you to get answers for all your entertainment questions, to watch wisely and to share your passion for entertainment with other IMDb customers worldwide.

On a related worldwide note, India is now our #2 country by size of our active user base, behind the US at #1 and replacing the UK (now at #3). I am just back from my first-ever visit to India with some of the team in December and it was an honour to meet our top contributors and industry professionals there. In support of our international expansion, we also recently added Hindi and Turkish translations to fixed labels within the IMDb Android app. Look for more locally relevant content across IMDb wherever you are located in 2019.

We have continued to produce a variety of own video content and what better way to find a list of it than using an IMDb advanced search. In particular, we have spun-off features from The IMDb Show including IMDbrief. The IMDb Studio filmed interviews at The Sundance Film Festival, The Oscars, South by Southwest, The Cannes Film Festival, San Diego Comic-Con, The Toronto International Film Festival, The Emmys and New York Comic-Con.

Our end-of-year section, Best of, is bigger than ever and celebrates the year in entertainment. We presented a number of IMDb STARmeter awards across the year: Bill Skarsgård, Pom Klementieff, John David Washington, Olivia Munn, Olivia Cooke, and Jacob Elordi. The award is based upon actual traffic to IMDb so every page you visit effectively forms part of the vote.

We followed our 2017 technology migration with a regular cycle of site updates both behind-the-scenes and visible to you. Updates included user reviews, lists, advanced title search, https support and a new video player.

Thanks again to our poll community for the inventive polls, now with over 15,000,000 votes.

Beyond the main web site, we regularly release updates to our mobile apps and you can read release notes or reviews in the iOS and Android stores. You can also follow us on our various social channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube or read our growing number of regular emails.

For entertainment industry customers we offer IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. On IMDbPro we launched a new design of the main pages based upon extensive customer research; we added many features to the iOS app; we launched an Android app; we are especially pleased with the launch of IMDbPro Track allowing you to be notified when people or titles in which you are interested appear in the news. IMDbPro is also proud to be able to support the ReFrame initiative.

We have an exciting 2019 planned and we look forward to serving you better whenever and wherever you access IMDb. If you would like to join our team or have friends or contacts with the very particular set of skills we are seeking, please keep an eye on our jobs page where we are regularly recruiting in the UK (Bristol, London) and US (Seattle, LA, NYC).

Thanks and Feedback

Thanks again for all your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via Get Satisfaction, where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, specifically including: IMDb, data, iOS, Android or