Revealed: The guy behind IMDb

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

Sources / Words / Images from the Daily Mail article[1]? Why not just submit the Mail article? Is this wholesale lifting of content even allowed?<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342663/IMDb-run-self-confessed-geek-Colin-Needham-house-Bristol.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342663/IMDb-...</a>

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

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

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

[off-topic]<p>Seriously? <i>x-small</i>?! No matter how pretty you think your site looks if people can't read the fucking text it doesn't matter. On top of that the contrast is terrible making it even worse.<p><pre><code> font: x-small "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, Sans-serif; font-size/* */:/**/small; font-size: /**/small; </code></pre> Sorry for the tangent I'm just tired of having to bump up the font size 2-5 times on every damn site I visit. And now I feel old. Shit.<p>(If you reply mentioning readability I will punch you :p Readability is not a cure-all and messes up some pages)

Let me just say that as an indie filmmaker, dealing with IMDB sucks. The submission and update process is terribly confusing and the criteria for what films (and attributes) are acceptable makes Apples App Store rules seem clear and open.<p>I was very pleased to find several alternatives listed in this thread, thank-you!

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