IMDb Top 250 Data Contributors for 2016

Included below is our end-of-year message to IMDb's top 250 data contributors for 2016. 

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to IMDb -- every data contribution helps. If anyone outside of the top 250 would like to know their 2016 (only) live item total and position in the complete list, please post a reply here and, for a limited time, we will try to let you know as long as you have submitted more than 200 live items. 

Happy New Year 2017 from IMDb! 

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 22nd edition of our end-of-year message to IMDb's top data contributors. I am IMDb’s Founder & CEO and it is a real privilege to co-write this letter each year. In the process of writing it, I enjoy the opportunity to remind myself of what IMDb has been able to achieve across the year, all thanks to your help.  The most important thing is to thank everyone who has contributed data to IMDb in 2016, and therefore has built upon the contributions of previous years from 1990 onwards. We could not do it without you and every data contribution is important. 

We recently updated our promotional video which also serves as a great reminder of how IMDb is used by over 250 million customers worldwide each month and also how IMDb is used within the entertainment industry.  Please take a few minutes to watch the video at http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1376433177/ and, if you are interested in more background, please visit our press room at http://www.imdb.com/pressroom/ 

This message is first being sent to the 250 most prolific contributors in 2016. It will also be shared widely such that everyone can appreciate your efforts, including being placed alongside previous letters in the Contributor Zone at http://www.imdb.com/czone/top_msg 

Across 2016 we have continued to build new services on the IMDb website and on the IMDb mobile apps, as well to place more IMDb content on other devices and services. In particular within the viewing experience on Amazon Video, where we help people discover great movies and shows to watch and to learn more about them before, after and during their viewing (on the latter, see http://www.imdb.com/x-ray/).  You will also see IMDb ratings on more services, including on several airline in-flight entertainment systems. 

If you have contributed any data in 2016, our gratitude applies equally to you. Thank you.


The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items (including deletions / corrections) which you have contributed in 2016 and your position within the top 250 contributors.  This has been a strong year for contributions and one in which we saw a record number of people contribute to IMDb, with contributions from over 450,000 different people in 2016 alone.  We are especially proud of the new image upload system, which has increased the image coverage on IMDb beyond all our expectations. Even though contribution volumes have increased, we have made significant reductions in the time between submission and publication. 

The headlines from the 2016 numbers are:

* IMDb covers over 4 million titles with over 475,000 added in 2016

* IMDb covers over 7.5 million names with over 700,000 added in 2016

* IMDb includes over 81 million filmography credits with nearly 10 million added in 2016

More statistics are available at http://www.imdb.com/stats

The database gets more complete each year, so in theory there ought to be fewer holes in the coverage to fill, which makes these growth numbers even more remarkable. For the first time, the minimum number of items required to be in the top 250 contributors exceeded 10,000. This is an exciting time for fans of film and TV as the opportunities to create and watch more content expand. 

On a personal numbers note, IMDb began for me well before our public launch on the pre-web Internet in 1990 when, as a teenager in the early 1980s, I started to record details of the movies which I saw in a database which I had built myself. As a result, I have been able to count every full-length movie which I have seen since January 1980 in my IMDb ratings history. 2016 became a landmark year for my film viewing as I saw my 10,000th unique film, which was A Monster Calls (2016) featuring IMDb STARmeter award winner Felicity Jones as announced via http://www.imdb.com/pressroom/press_releases_ind/2016/10_17 


Progress

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

When we're not arguing about where Rogue One fits into the correct Star Wars viewing order, the IMDb content team spent much of 2016 building on the foundations laid in previous years to improve the contribution experience. Following last year's image tagging launch we've built a pipeline for contributors to upload images to titles; continued to expand the mobile submission interface (and made an important change to the old desktop one); and driven significant improvements to service levels.

First up one of our proudest moments of the year has been the launch and adoption of title image upload. We've been overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of your image submissions of posters, stills and artwork. Thanks to you IMDb is an even more content-rich and good-looking destination. A big shout out to those contributors involved in the Beta and those that continue to delight us with awesome images every day.

In last year's letter we raised a glass to halving the longest wait for a vetting decision from 14 to 7 days. This year we've expanded our team of Data Editors to handle 90% of data contributions and 95% of content-related customer service contacts within 24 hours of the point of submission, including on weekends. We've always worked around the clock but handling helpdesk messages within 24hrs 7-days-per-week should be noticeable to those of you who use our report forms, for example, to request primary image changes, event creation or company edits.

Staffing changes are not the only recipient of 2016's toast. A large portion of our data processing improvement is thanks to technological investment, including the decoupling of data attached to new titles, names and companies. Now, once a new title is approved all the filmography and title-related data submitted with that title is released for processing straight away. You should see it go live on the site much quicker. This kind of behind-the-scenes development is like stealing the design plans for the Death Star. Work like this makes it much easier to fix and build new contributor-facing features moving forward. Some of this work enabled us to launch a new filmography section for location managers. 

As for improving existing contributor tools we recently rolled out Name Suggestion Search. Now, as you begin entering a name in the filmography form we provide suggestions based on what you've typed and the context of the submission. We're trying to reduce the number of steps needed to contribute data and increase the accuracy of submissions. To read more about this feature and to help make it even better, visit our Get Satisfaction community forum: https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/contribution-name-suggestion-search 

In fact Get Satisfaction is the best place to keep abreast of all our launches and updates: https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/categories/imdb_imdb_contentdata_issues?topic-list[settings][type]=...  

Your feedback here directly helps to improve our contributor tools and shape our development roadmap so please keep it coming. Over the past year if you've helped out a fellow contributor, participated in a Beta, submitted an idea or debated a data policy, thank you (especially our champs, you guys rock: https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/details/champions). Even if you haven't because you're too busy contributing cool data to get involved, thank you too. IMDb wouldn't exist without you.

From everyone in the Content team, thanks again and Happy New Year! Here's to 2017.

Thomas Porter
Manager - IMDb Database Content

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

Outside of improving the contribution experience, our big themes in 2016 have been to continue to build and improve upon the features and services which sit on top of the unique database content, and to expand internationally.  Our aim is to be the first thought for all your entertainment information needs, whether you are a deep fan, a casual consumer, or an entertainment industry professional. 

Rather than the traditional month-by-month look, we are going to group the progress by theme. First, there is now a set of regular events which form the backbone of our editorial calendar. This year we have grown our editorial team and added new events and new types of content.  Our awards season coverage is located under http://www.imdb.com/awards-central/ and, new for 2016, is a dedicated film festival section under http://www.imdb.com/festival-central/ to conveniently group our year round festival coverage in collaboration with our Withoutabox festival submissions team. 

Thank you also to our active poll community who help to engage IMDb users with fun questions on our home pages and on http://www.imdb.com/poll/ throughout the year.  By genre we added a horror section at http://www.imdb.com/scary-good/ and, in terms of viewing opportunities, an Amazon Originals section at http://www.imdb.com/amazon-originals/ and Holiday Streaming at http://www.imdb.com/streaming/ along with sections for coverage of specific titles or franchises, including http://www.imdb.com/star-wars/. The editorial year always ends with our annual “Best Of” section at http://www.imdb.com/best-of/ which reviews the year using IMDb data. You can always keep track of other timely editorial content via the IMDb Picks section at http://www.imdb.com/imdbpicks/ 

The IMDb STARmeter award is now presented twice per year and the 2016 recipients were Bryce Dallas Howard and Felicity Jones. The award is based upon actual traffic to IMDb so every page you visit effectively forms part of the vote. Bryce received her award at Sundance in recognition of her #1 position in the 2015 breakout star listing in our annual STARmeter list, see http://www.imdb.com/list/ls073917212/videoplayer/vi2784212249. Felicity received her award at Toronto in anticipation of the stellar fourth quarter which saw her appear in three movies and hit #1 in STARmeter on several weeks, including the final chart of 2016 this week, see http://www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi1554429465. The 2015 recipient at Toronto, Brie Larson, went on to win the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Room (2015). 

Building upon the success of video last year, we first expanded our Sundance Studio at http://www.imdb.com/sundance/video.  We updated the design of title pages on the website to more prominently feature trailers and other videos. At the Oscars we were able to broadcast video interviews live from the arrivals red carpet for the first time. At Comic-Con we partnered with filmmaker Kevin Smith on a set of fun and informative video interviews and broadcasts from the event, see http://www.imdb.com/comic-con/. At The Emmy Awards we broadcast a live show from backstage and we were the first media outlet to be granted filming access to the after-party, see http://www.imdb.com/emmys/; an Emmy video highlight for us was the Game of Thrones team discussing IMDb ratings at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6039504/#lb-vi4105156121. We are also pleased to host web-series on IMDb such as No Small Parts at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4150832/videoplayer/vi319468825  

You can see the regular improvements in our mobile apps via the release notes. We have also taken a number of steps to make features consistent between the desktop site, the mobile site and the mobile apps: we will continue working upon this in 2017.  The sign-in process is now the same. The watchlist feature has been rebuilt for mobile and desktop web. The suggestion search, which anticipates the search results as you type, has been greatly expanded to include almost all names and titles rather than just a popular subset and is available everywhere.  We rebuilt advanced title search so that it is faster and the results are more timely as it updates continuously, rather than on a once per day build cycle. 

Internationally we were pleased to launch the IMDb India Spotlight earlier this month at http://www.imdb.com/india which serves as our home for all things related to entertainment in India, including a set of top rated charts at http://www.imdb.com/india/toprated and live trending data at http://www.imdb.com/india/trending along with quizzes at http://www.imdb.com/india/quiz.  We also added a Top Rated English Language Movies chart at http://www.imdb.com/chart/top-english-movies 

Our professional services team, which includes IMDbPro and Withoutabox, continued to make progress on behalf of our customers in the entertainment industry.  On IMDbPro we now enable professionals to control their Known For titles and their primary profession in search results, see http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?knownforcontrols. For filmmakers submitting to festivals via Withoutabox, we launched a new submissions interface as announced at https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/submit-to-sundance-today-with-the-newly-redesigned-withoutab... and, for festivals receiving those films, we launched an Amazon FireTV app which allows festival programmers to better view them. 

We are pleased with the overall progress in 2016 and we already have an exciting 2017 planned also with improvements to the depth and range of editorial content on IMDb, along with making more content and features available across more of the different IMDb platforms and social network feeds as appropriate. If you would like to join our team or have friends or contacts with the very particular set of special skills that we are seeking, please keep an eye on our jobs page where we are regularly recruiting in Bristol or London in the UK and Seattle, Santa Monica or New York City in the US: http://www.imdb.com/jobs


Thanks and Feedback

In recognition of your contributions, as usual, we are offering everyone in the top 250 free access to IMDbPro for all of 2017. We will send a separate message with details and an access code within the next few days.

Thanks again for all your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome. Please join us in the Contributors' Help message board for policy discussions:

http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000042/threads/

or contact us via Get Satisfaction:

https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb

Thanks and we wish you a Happy New Year!

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


The actual list is posted on the IMDb message boards at http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000042/thread/264680445?d=264680470#264680470