The founder of IMDb has stepped down as CEO almost 35 years after launching the online database for entertainment information. Col Needham will be succeeded by Nikki Santoro, who has been IMDb’s chief operating officer since 2021. Variety earlier reported the news.
IMDb has been criticized by film and TV buffs over the years for, among other things, disbanding its message board community, and launching redesigns of the site they feel were unnecessary and made the site harder to navigate. Amazon bought IMDb back in 1998, and the company claims to have more than 250 million monthly users. Despite complaints, it is perhaps still the best place to find accurate and up-to-date information on casting and in-depth filmography for individual actors.
The company has tried in recent years to keep up with the times and launch new products—Amazon’s well-regarded X-Ray feature on its Prime Video streaming service can display the actors appearing in any moment of a film or TV show, and is powered by IMDb’s database. IMDb also launched a free, ad-supported streaming service of its own called IMDb TV, though that was discontinued in late 2024 and free content was rolled into Prime Video (it is still accessible without paying).
Besides serving as an information database, IMDb does also have reviews and ratings, the latter of which has suffered over the years from review-bombing in which users attempt to manipulate the score of a new release based on some agenda, like targeting an actor they view as “woke.” Reviews meanwhile are oftentimes more entertaining than useful—a user on a movie about horses writing something along the lines of, “I hate movies about horses, 1/10 stars.”
A sad truth about IMDB is that it seems like a case of a website that reached a point that was great and not in need of much refinement. Managers and employees like to keep their jobs, however, and they have investor growth expectations to fulfill, which means they need to keep busy by adding new features. Nobody wants to tell their boss the job is done and there is no more work to do. Eventually that leads to a bloated product with features users do not really need that clutter up the whole product. Craigslist is a good example of a website that knew when to enter maintenance mode, and it remains incredibly popular to this day.
A better way to run IMDb perhaps would have been to look toward its parent company. The user interface of Amazon.com has changed very little over the years. When it creates a new feature like Prime Video, the company silos them inside their own tab. It is not a core feature that is forced on users.
The lasting nature of IMDb goes to show how hard it is to kill a website that reaches critical mass solving a need and solving it well. Sites like Yahoo! and X remain large properties despite years of mismanagement and chaos, for instance.
Letterboxd has slowly gained steam as a viable competitor to IMDb, though it still appears to be much smaller in size.
Needham has said IMDb grew out of a personal movie database he created as a teenager, combined with similar data he collected online starting in the late 1980s.
