Amid criticism, IMDb founder Col Needham is stepping down as CEO after 35 years

The creator of IMDb has stepped down as CEO nearly 35 years after launching the online database for entertainment information. Colonel Needham will be replaced by Nikki Santoro, IMDb’s chief operating officer starting in 2021. Diversity earlier informed news.

IMDb, among other things, has been criticized over the years by film and television fans. deletes the message board communityand launched a site redesign that they felt was unnecessary and made the site more difficult to navigate. Amazon bought IMDb back in 1998, and the company claims to have more than 250 million monthly users. Despite the complaints, it’s perhaps the best place to find accurate and up-to-date information on casting and in-depth filmography for individual actors.

The company has tried to keep up with the times and release new products in recent years—the popular X-Ray feature on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service, which can show actors appearing at any moment in a movie or TV show, is getting stronger. By IMDb database. IMDb also launched a free, ad-supported streaming service called IMDb TV. Discontinued at the end of 2024 and free content converted to Prime Video (still available without paying).

In addition to serving as a database, IMDb also has reviews and ratings, the latter over the years sight-bombing users try to manipulate the account of the new release based on some agenda, such as targeting an actor they see as “woke”. Reviews, meanwhile, are often more entertaining than helpful – a user writing something like “I hate horse movies, 1/10 stars” on a movie about horses.

The sad truth about IMDB is that it seems to be a website phenomenon that has reached a great point and doesn’t need much improvement. However, managers and employees like to keep their jobs, and they have investor growth expectations to meet, which means they have to keep adding new features. No one wants to tell their boss that they’re done and there’s nothing left to do. Ultimately, this leads to a bloated product with features that users don’t need to mess with all over the product. Craigslist is a good example of a website that knows when to go into maintenance mode, and it remains incredibly popular to this day.

Perhaps a better way to manage IMDb would be to look at its parent company. Amazon.com’s user interface has changed little over the years. When they create a new feature like Prime Video, the company silos them in its own tab. This is not a core feature forced on users.

The enduring nature of IMDb shows how difficult it is to kill a website that reaches critical mass by solving a need and solving it well. Sites like Yahoo! and X, for example, remain great properties despite mismanagement and chaos.

There is Letterboxd slowly gained steam As an IMDb-friendly competitor, it still seems smaller for its size.

Needham said IMDb grew out of a personal movie database he created as a teenager, along with similar data he collected online starting in the late 1980s.