IMDb is 19 years old

On October 17, 2009, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) website greeted visitors with a festive logo. The largest database with film information and the world's oldest crowdsourcing web project is 19 (nineteen) years old. By the standards of the Internet is a very respectable age. The project appeared eight years earlier than Google and five years earlier than Yahoo. It is even older than the first web browser. Founder Kol Needham (Col Needham) tells how this happened.



The fact is that on October 17, 1990, Needham published the first Unix-scripts to search the huge archive of film information collected in the framework of the USENET group rec.arts.movies (similar to our FIDO). And there were no more than 23,000 entries about 10,000 films.



Although the name IMDb itself appeared only four years later, but the birth of the project happened on that very day.



In 1993, a mail interface was developed for the IMDb database, so it was not necessary to install it on your PC, you could send search requests by email and also receive a response. Surprisingly, the mail interface works and is still in demand.

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The first IMDb web server was launched in 1993 on the server of Cardiff University in Wales. Shortly thereafter, Kol Needham and the author of the web interface, Rob Hartill, exchanged surprised emails: the site’s traffic reached 100 people per day, and this popularity was unexpected for the founders. Soon they realized that this was far from the limit.



At first, the site had only an interface for accessing information from USENET, but in April 1994, the developers made a form for adding new information directly through the web. Thus, IMDb finally returned to its crowdsourcing roots, and users were able to replenish the database through the web, and not through USENET.



In 1995, every week, users contributed more information than they had in the entire base as of the end of 1990. By 1997, the base has grown a hundred times.



To pay bills for hosting, in 1995 it was decided to register a commercial firm. So in January 1996, Internet Movie Database, Ltd. appeared. (they closed the mirrors of others and bought nine servers in different data centers in the USA and the UK), and in 1998 it was bought by Amazon. Only in 1998, the project staff began to receive their first salary and were able to leave their day jobs (they used to work on IMDb at night and on weekends). Those who decided not to quit their jobs were given part time jobs.



From the very beginning, IMDb was a crowdsourcing project that was replenished by the users themselves. So he remained so far, despite all the innovations like the news service and film library with free movies.



Now the monthly audience of the site is 57 million people (2.5 billion hits), and the site itself is included in the 50 largest Internet sites (39th place in the world, according to Alexa), being the oldest among them.