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IMDb Top 250 Data Contributors for 2018
Included below is our end-of-year message to IMDb's top 250 data contributors for 2018.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed to IMDb -- every data contribution helps. If anyone outside of the top 250 would like to know their 2018 (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.
Happy New Year 2019 from IMDb!
[sorry for any errors in the format due to cut-and-paste into Get Satisfaction; a clean copy is also available via the IMDb home page today at https://www.imdb.com/best-of/col-needham-letter-2019/]
Introduction and Thanks
Welcome to the 24th edition of our letter to recognise andcelebrate IMDb’s top data contributors of the year, which is again being sentto everyone who contributed data in 2018. If this is your first time reading, Iam IMDb’s Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, aswell as follow IMDb’s future progress in our press room. Wepassed a number of milestones in 2018 – 20 years as a subsidiary of Amazon.comin April, the 25th anniversary of the launch of our first web sitein the summer, and our 28th birthday online in October. It has beenquite a year and we are grateful for all of your support. Thank you.
IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we want to thank eachand every one of you for helping us to grow in another record year, whether youadded just one item or whether you were #1 in the top contributor list below. Throughoutthe year we have worked on making it easier for you to contribute, to process yourupdates quickly, to be more consistent with our policies, and we started to providea real-time status on all pending updates (see the new contributionhistory beta test).
Earlier this year Amazon’s Jeff Bezos wrote about people’s everincreasing expectations in his annualletter to shareholders - this has particularly resonatedwith us as we strive to improve IMDb for both our contributor community and ourhundreds of millions of monthly visitors worldwide. We are building more newfeatures as well as making existing features more consistently available acrossall of IMDb’s websites and mobile applications to try to exceed yourexpectations. We are always thrilled when we are able to bring IMDb to newdevices and services; you never know where something you have contributed mayappear next.
The Numbers
The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved,non-duplicate data items which the Top 250 have contributed in 2018, includingcorrections and deletions. New recordshave been set in terms of the total number of contributors (600,000+) andoverall volume. Yet we still managed to achieve further reductions in the timebetween submission and publication.
IMDb now includes:
· Over 5.6 million titles with over 700,000 added in2018
· Over 9.5 million names with over 750,000 added in2018
· Over 105 million filmography credits with over 14million added in 2018
· Nearly 4 million user reviews with over 400,000added in 2018
More statistics are available in the press room.
Over 14,000 items were required for you to make it onto the Top 250 listthis year.
Progress
... From a contributor perspective byThomas Porter ...
Looking back at the changes over the past year is always apleasure. Sharing the improvements with you, a real privilege. Whether you’re adedicated archivist, industry professional or armchair critic, your contenthelps power careers and settle viewing decisions (and bets) the world over.Significantly, it’s not just visitors to IMDb’s websites and apps who benefit.Today IMDb’s content is helping to reinvent the video-watching experience viaPrime Video’s X-Ray for Movies & TV and power entertainment-related answersvia Amazon’s Alexa. Your contributions can have an enormously wide reach, onethat is expanding fast.
With that in mind, for IMDb’s Content team, 2018 will beremembered as the year we started to get serious about structured,international data. Having the right answers at the right time in multiplelanguages, and presenting them in a way that makes sense in text, voice andother media formats has been a big focus and we’re hugely grateful for everyonewho has been involved so far. Many of you have been adding international titletext for years (thank you) and we were pleased to roll-out a well-receivedpolicy change to enable us to collect even more locale-specifictitle information. We also launched languageand country-specific tagging for posters. Check out these versionsof the Avengers:Infinity War (2018) poster, tagged with Portugueseand Hebrew.
Elsewhere we’re still laser-focused on making it easier for you tocontribute. In 2018 we launched brand new contribution interfaces for UserReviews on apps and our mobile site, and for TitleFAQs on our regular desktop site. For the latter we’re now open tosubmissions of questions without answers to encourage those that do know tohelp those that don’t. We also launched a new DataGaps feature to surface missing key title content includingruntimes, release dates and plots. We’d love to hear your feedback on newcontribution initiatives like this, so please do give it a whirl.
We also just announced a new interface that provides easy, bulk-accessto subsets of IMDb title and name data. Check it out if you likeyour data straight-up.
Speed of service continuesto be a major focus. In 2018, a record-breaking number of your contributionswere processed within minutes, most within hours, and 95% of everything within24hrs. For the remaining 5%, we work around the clock to ensure no contributionsits around for more than 5 days. Our customer service speed has alsoaccelerated. Over the year 95% of your contacts were handled within 24 hours onGet Satisfaction and via the new-for-2018 IMDbHelp Center (helping scores of you find answers without having tocontact us – the speediest type of service there is).
Last but certainly not least, in 2018 we’ve had more directcontact with a wider array of contributors than ever. Our help community on GetSatisfaction is still the place to keep abreast of the latest featureannouncements and have your say on content policy changes (see these recentdiscussions on Companynames and writercredits, for example). Our new ventures into internationalization,however, have led us to many new contributors from across the globe and we’vebeen blown away with the willingness and enthusiasm to get involved (specialshout out to janusminoa and ljdoncel,you rock!). We even ended the year with a face-to-face contributor event inMumbai. Col Needham and several of the team attended and had a blast – thankyou for hosting us, India!
If you’re keen to get involved in new initiatives, please do makeyourself known on Get Satisfaction. We’d loveto work with you.
On behalf of IMDb’s Content team, thank you, thank you, thank youto our Get SatisfactionChamps, our localization participants, our Beta testers and to eachand every one of our contributors. Huge congratulations if you made the top 250this year.
Happy New Year everyone, see you in 2019!
Thomas Porter
Manager - IMDb Database Content
... From a customer perspective byCol Needham ...
This is an exciting time to be a fan of movies and TV (and relatedvisual media) because we are living in a golden era of choice and convenience:it has never been easier for people to tell stories on-screen and it has also neverbeen easier for audience members to watch this content. We love connecting storytellers to theiraudience and we love it when you, our customers, find something great to watchvia a search, recommendation or other IMDb feature. As technology advances we always look toprovide new ways to access IMDb on more devices. When we launched back in 1990, the ability tosearch IMDb by voice would have seemed like something from a sciencefiction movie, yet this is now a common experience with IMDbhelping to power entertainment queries on Alexa (and recently not only in English). Wewill continue to help you to get answers for all your entertainment questions,to watch wisely andto share your passion forentertainment with other IMDb customers worldwide.
On a related worldwide note, India isnow our #2 country by size of our active user base, behind the US at #1 andreplacing the UK (now at #3). I am justback from my first-ever visit to India with some of the team in December and itwas an honour to meet our top contributors and industry professionals there. Insupport of our international expansion, we also recently added Hindi andTurkish translations to fixed labels within the IMDb Android app. Look for more locallyrelevant content across IMDb wherever you are located in 2019.
We have continued to produce a variety of own video content and whatbetter way to find a list of it than using an IMDbadvanced search. Inparticular, we have spun-off features from The IMDb Showincluding IMDbrief. The IMDb Studio filmed interviews at TheSundance Film Festival, The Oscars, South by Southwest, The Cannes FilmFestival, San Diego Comic-Con, The Toronto International Film Festival, TheEmmys and New York Comic-Con.
Our end-of-year section, Best of, isbigger than ever and celebrates the year in entertainment. We presented anumber of IMDb STARmeter awards across the year: Bill Skarsgård, Pom Klementieff, John David Washington, Olivia Munn, Olivia Cooke, andJacob Elordi. Theaward is based upon actual traffic to IMDb so every page you visit effectivelyforms part of the vote.
We followed our 2017 technology migration with a regular cycle of site updates bothbehind-the-scenes and visible to you. Updates included user reviews, lists,advanced title search, https support and a new video player.
Thanks again to our poll community for the inventive polls,now with over 15,000,000votes.
Beyond the main web site, we regularly release updates to our mobileapps and you can read release notes or reviews in the iOS and Androidstores. You can also follow us on our various social channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, andYouTube orread our growing number of regular emails.
For entertainment industry customers we offer IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. OnIMDbPro we launched a newdesign of the main pages based upon extensive customerresearch; we added many features to the iOS app; we launched an Androidapp; we are especially pleased with the launch ofIMDbPro Track allowingyou to be notified when people or titles in which you are interested appear inthe news. IMDbPro is also proud to be able to support the ReFrameinitiative.
We have an exciting 2019 planned and we look forward to serving youbetter whenever and wherever you access IMDb. If you would like to join our team or have friends or contacts with thevery particular set of skills weare seeking, please keep an eye on our jobs page where we are regularlyrecruiting in the UK (Bristol, London) and US (Seattle, LA, NYC).
Thanks and Feedback
In recognition of your contributions, as usual, we are offering the Top250 contributors free access to IMDbPro for 2019 which will activate / renew automaticallywhen they next visit IMDbPro andlogin.
Thanks again for all your support during the year. As always, ideas andconstructive feedback are welcome via Get Satisfaction,where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, specifically including: IMDb, data, iOS, Android or IMDbPro.
We wish you a Happy New Year!
Col Needham
IMDb Founder & CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team
Thanks again to everyone who contributed to IMDb -- every data contribution helps. If anyone outside of the top 250 would like to know their 2018 (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.
Happy New Year 2019 from IMDb!
[sorry for any errors in the format due to cut-and-paste into Get Satisfaction; a clean copy is also available via the IMDb home page today at https://www.imdb.com/best-of/col-needham-letter-2019/]
Introduction and Thanks
Welcome to the 24th edition of our letter to recognise andcelebrate IMDb’s top data contributors of the year, which is again being sentto everyone who contributed data in 2018. If this is your first time reading, Iam IMDb’s Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, aswell as follow IMDb’s future progress in our press room. Wepassed a number of milestones in 2018 – 20 years as a subsidiary of Amazon.comin April, the 25th anniversary of the launch of our first web sitein the summer, and our 28th birthday online in October. It has beenquite a year and we are grateful for all of your support. Thank you.
IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we want to thank eachand every one of you for helping us to grow in another record year, whether youadded just one item or whether you were #1 in the top contributor list below. Throughoutthe year we have worked on making it easier for you to contribute, to process yourupdates quickly, to be more consistent with our policies, and we started to providea real-time status on all pending updates (see the new contributionhistory beta test).
Earlier this year Amazon’s Jeff Bezos wrote about people’s everincreasing expectations in his annualletter to shareholders - this has particularly resonatedwith us as we strive to improve IMDb for both our contributor community and ourhundreds of millions of monthly visitors worldwide. We are building more newfeatures as well as making existing features more consistently available acrossall of IMDb’s websites and mobile applications to try to exceed yourexpectations. We are always thrilled when we are able to bring IMDb to newdevices and services; you never know where something you have contributed mayappear next.
The Numbers
The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved,non-duplicate data items which the Top 250 have contributed in 2018, includingcorrections and deletions. New recordshave been set in terms of the total number of contributors (600,000+) andoverall volume. Yet we still managed to achieve further reductions in the timebetween submission and publication.
IMDb now includes:
· Over 5.6 million titles with over 700,000 added in2018
· Over 9.5 million names with over 750,000 added in2018
· Over 105 million filmography credits with over 14million added in 2018
· Nearly 4 million user reviews with over 400,000added in 2018
More statistics are available in the press room.
Over 14,000 items were required for you to make it onto the Top 250 listthis year.
Progress
... From a contributor perspective byThomas Porter ...
Looking back at the changes over the past year is always apleasure. Sharing the improvements with you, a real privilege. Whether you’re adedicated archivist, industry professional or armchair critic, your contenthelps power careers and settle viewing decisions (and bets) the world over.Significantly, it’s not just visitors to IMDb’s websites and apps who benefit.Today IMDb’s content is helping to reinvent the video-watching experience viaPrime Video’s X-Ray for Movies & TV and power entertainment-related answersvia Amazon’s Alexa. Your contributions can have an enormously wide reach, onethat is expanding fast.
With that in mind, for IMDb’s Content team, 2018 will beremembered as the year we started to get serious about structured,international data. Having the right answers at the right time in multiplelanguages, and presenting them in a way that makes sense in text, voice andother media formats has been a big focus and we’re hugely grateful for everyonewho has been involved so far. Many of you have been adding international titletext for years (thank you) and we were pleased to roll-out a well-receivedpolicy change to enable us to collect even more locale-specifictitle information. We also launched languageand country-specific tagging for posters. Check out these versionsof the Avengers:Infinity War (2018) poster, tagged with Portugueseand Hebrew.
Elsewhere we’re still laser-focused on making it easier for you tocontribute. In 2018 we launched brand new contribution interfaces for UserReviews on apps and our mobile site, and for TitleFAQs on our regular desktop site. For the latter we’re now open tosubmissions of questions without answers to encourage those that do know tohelp those that don’t. We also launched a new DataGaps feature to surface missing key title content includingruntimes, release dates and plots. We’d love to hear your feedback on newcontribution initiatives like this, so please do give it a whirl.
We also just announced a new interface that provides easy, bulk-accessto subsets of IMDb title and name data. Check it out if you likeyour data straight-up.
Speed of service continuesto be a major focus. In 2018, a record-breaking number of your contributionswere processed within minutes, most within hours, and 95% of everything within24hrs. For the remaining 5%, we work around the clock to ensure no contributionsits around for more than 5 days. Our customer service speed has alsoaccelerated. Over the year 95% of your contacts were handled within 24 hours onGet Satisfaction and via the new-for-2018 IMDbHelp Center (helping scores of you find answers without having tocontact us – the speediest type of service there is).
Last but certainly not least, in 2018 we’ve had more directcontact with a wider array of contributors than ever. Our help community on GetSatisfaction is still the place to keep abreast of the latest featureannouncements and have your say on content policy changes (see these recentdiscussions on Companynames and writercredits, for example). Our new ventures into internationalization,however, have led us to many new contributors from across the globe and we’vebeen blown away with the willingness and enthusiasm to get involved (specialshout out to janusminoa and ljdoncel,you rock!). We even ended the year with a face-to-face contributor event inMumbai. Col Needham and several of the team attended and had a blast – thankyou for hosting us, India!
If you’re keen to get involved in new initiatives, please do makeyourself known on Get Satisfaction. We’d loveto work with you.
On behalf of IMDb’s Content team, thank you, thank you, thank youto our Get SatisfactionChamps, our localization participants, our Beta testers and to eachand every one of our contributors. Huge congratulations if you made the top 250this year.
Happy New Year everyone, see you in 2019!
Thomas Porter
Manager - IMDb Database Content
... From a customer perspective byCol Needham ...
This is an exciting time to be a fan of movies and TV (and relatedvisual media) because we are living in a golden era of choice and convenience:it has never been easier for people to tell stories on-screen and it has also neverbeen easier for audience members to watch this content. We love connecting storytellers to theiraudience and we love it when you, our customers, find something great to watchvia a search, recommendation or other IMDb feature. As technology advances we always look toprovide new ways to access IMDb on more devices. When we launched back in 1990, the ability tosearch IMDb by voice would have seemed like something from a sciencefiction movie, yet this is now a common experience with IMDbhelping to power entertainment queries on Alexa (and recently not only in English). Wewill continue to help you to get answers for all your entertainment questions,to watch wisely andto share your passion forentertainment with other IMDb customers worldwide.
On a related worldwide note, India isnow our #2 country by size of our active user base, behind the US at #1 andreplacing the UK (now at #3). I am justback from my first-ever visit to India with some of the team in December and itwas an honour to meet our top contributors and industry professionals there. Insupport of our international expansion, we also recently added Hindi andTurkish translations to fixed labels within the IMDb Android app. Look for more locallyrelevant content across IMDb wherever you are located in 2019.
We have continued to produce a variety of own video content and whatbetter way to find a list of it than using an IMDbadvanced search. Inparticular, we have spun-off features from The IMDb Showincluding IMDbrief. The IMDb Studio filmed interviews at TheSundance Film Festival, The Oscars, South by Southwest, The Cannes FilmFestival, San Diego Comic-Con, The Toronto International Film Festival, TheEmmys and New York Comic-Con.
Our end-of-year section, Best of, isbigger than ever and celebrates the year in entertainment. We presented anumber of IMDb STARmeter awards across the year: Bill Skarsgård, Pom Klementieff, John David Washington, Olivia Munn, Olivia Cooke, andJacob Elordi. Theaward is based upon actual traffic to IMDb so every page you visit effectivelyforms part of the vote.
We followed our 2017 technology migration with a regular cycle of site updates bothbehind-the-scenes and visible to you. Updates included user reviews, lists,advanced title search, https support and a new video player.
Thanks again to our poll community for the inventive polls,now with over 15,000,000votes.
Beyond the main web site, we regularly release updates to our mobileapps and you can read release notes or reviews in the iOS and Androidstores. You can also follow us on our various social channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, andYouTube orread our growing number of regular emails.
For entertainment industry customers we offer IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. OnIMDbPro we launched a newdesign of the main pages based upon extensive customerresearch; we added many features to the iOS app; we launched an Androidapp; we are especially pleased with the launch ofIMDbPro Track allowingyou to be notified when people or titles in which you are interested appear inthe news. IMDbPro is also proud to be able to support the ReFrameinitiative.
We have an exciting 2019 planned and we look forward to serving youbetter whenever and wherever you access IMDb. If you would like to join our team or have friends or contacts with thevery particular set of skills weare seeking, please keep an eye on our jobs page where we are regularlyrecruiting in the UK (Bristol, London) and US (Seattle, LA, NYC).
Thanks and Feedback
In recognition of your contributions, as usual, we are offering the Top250 contributors free access to IMDbPro for 2019 which will activate / renew automaticallywhen they next visit IMDbPro andlogin.
Thanks again for all your support during the year. As always, ideas andconstructive feedback are welcome via Get Satisfaction,where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, specifically including: IMDb, data, iOS, Android or IMDbPro.
We wish you a Happy New Year!
Col Needham
IMDb Founder & CEO
on behalf of the whole IMDb Team
No Responses!