IMDb Top 300 Data Contributors for 2019

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 25th edition of our annual letter to recognise and celebrate IMDb's top data contributors. This message is being sent to everyone who contributed data in 2019. If you are a first time recipient of this year-end tradition, I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, as well as follow IMDb's future progress in our press room. IMDb will be celebrating its 30th birthday in October 2020 and we are especially excited about the year ahead.

IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we first want to thank you all for helping us to grow in another record year - whether you made a single update or whether you were the top contributor in the list below. As usual, we are continuing to work on making contributions easier and faster. We are pleased to have recently launched a beta test of IMDb Answers which we hope will eventually introduce IMDb to a whole new contribution audience; personally the convenience of IMDb Answers has enabled me to reach a higher position on the top contributors list than in recent years.

We just marked 10 years since the first IMDb mobile app launched in December 2009 on iOS and more of the data which you contribute is available in more places and upon more devices than ever before. Our vision remains to power to the creation, discovery and enjoyment of entertainment everywhere. We love working on making the "everywhere" more literally true year-by-year, and finding new ways to present entertainment information or to search IMDb while also creating a more consistent look and feel from wherever you access IMDb.

The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items which the Top 300 contributors have submitted in 2019, including corrections and deletions. New records have been set in terms of the total number of contributors (750,000+), the overall volume of data contributed and improvements to the speed of publishing.

IMDb now includes:

• Over 6.5 million titles with over 875,000 added in 2019
• Over 10.3 million names with over 750,000 added in 2019
• Over 120 million filmography credits with over 15 million added in 2019
• Over 4.5 million user reviews with over 600,000 added in 2019

More statistics are available in the press room.

We have expanded the top contributors list from the traditional 250 people to 300 in honour of our upcoming 30th anniversary and nearly 14,000 items were required to make it onto the list this year.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Matthew Pearson ...

2019 has been quite the year, both in film and TV and for IMDb. In-between arguing over the Game of Thrones finale and drying our eyes over Avengers: Endgame, we've been doing our best to help you, the people who make IMDb what it is, find it ever easier to do what you do. Today, the content you contribute is reaching more people than ever - IMDb, IMDbPro, one of our numerous mobile services, Prime Video’s X-Ray for Movies & TV and entertainment-related answers via Amazon’s Alexa around the world. There have been some big changes for content contribution in 2019, and it’s an honour to work on these improvements for you: thank you for everything you’ve done this year.

One of the frequent pieces of feedback we have from our users is they don't know what content is missing. To address this, we have launched a beta of IMDb Answers, which surfaces missing content. Simply visit the page, select the locale (country + language), content type (e.g. release date, certificates, etc.), sorting method (e.g. trending or in theatres), and title type (e.g. film, TV series, etc.), and complete the contribution. This helps you find the content that will be most valuable to IMDb customers, and with our updated contribution UI, it is quicker than ever to share your knowledge with the IMDb community (and P.S. - it works on your mobile device). In the office, we've found it especially rewarding to add content when the titles or names are trending - have fun!

In addition to new ways of contributing, we’ve expanded the content types you can contribute on IMDb. For example, for the first time, you can now contribute non-English plot outlines. Special thanks to all the contributors who are helping us test this while it’s in beta (and see here if you’d like to get involved). We’ve also done a lot of work behind the scenes to make our database fully UTF-8 compliant. While you won’t see a lot of change just yet, this paves the way for more exciting developments moving forward - stay tuned!

Likewise, we've made it easier for you to find out what happens to your contributions. We've significantly extended our "Track Contribution" feature across many more content types. You can visit your contribution history page and click the "Track Contribution" button to get started. We've also enabled you to provide explanatory comments with everything you contribute.

To further support our IMDbPro contributors, we've improved the time it takes for your Contact data to appear on the site, now typically in less than 10 minutes of us approving your contributions. We've created a new crew department for 'Script and Continuity', based on feedback from you and the industry. We've also set new records by processing more of your contributions within 24 hours than ever before, and responding to support contacts faster than ever.

With all the changes this year, GetSatisfaction remains your destination to keep up-to-date on new feature announcements, and to be involved in policy discussions. If you want to know more about new initiatives, speak up on the Ideas section with your interests - we want to work with you.

Additionally, for the first time ever, we hosted a number of local contributors at San Diego Comic-Con (special shout out to Mike Johansen for agreeing to be interviewed with Col). We also hosted a second contributor meet up in India in October, and we are looking forward to increasing these types of contributor events next year - watch this space!

And of course, a special thank you to all of the GetSatisfaction champs, beta tester contributions, and each and every one of you, from all of us on IMDb’s Content team. And congratulations if you made it to the Top 300 this year.

Happy New Year - and see you in the roaring 20's!

Matthew Pearson
Manager - IMDb Database Content

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

We began 2019 with the launch of IMDb TV in the US where you can now watch hundreds of movies and TV shows for free either directly on IMDb.com, on our mobile apps or via the IMDb TV channel on almost any device which has access to Amazon Prime Video Channels. The service is advertising supported and you can now filter by IMDb TV availability in many places on IMDb (or use an advanced title search) to find something to watch.

We continued to expand the production of our IMDb Originals videos to keep you informed of everything happening in the world of entertainment or take you to a festival or event. This also included our first ever scripted show, the delightfully funny "You’re Not a Monster" (2019) which is packed full of movie monster references and in-jokes. You can also follow us on Twitch for live interviews and premiere coverage.

Beyond IMDb TV, we have also expanded our title pages to show you where you can watch the title on other Amazon Prime Video Channels, HBO, Starz and PBS (in addition to Prime Video itself).

Our international expansion has continued with more local content including local titles, posters, trailers and ratings certificates in more countries.

Thanks once again to our poll community for the inventive polls, which now have more than 18,000,000 votes.

We are in the process of launching more consistent navigation and home pages across the IMDb mobile site, desktop site and mobile apps with some updates already live.

For more details on updates to our mobile apps including the launch of mobile advanced title search, you can read release notes in the iOS and Android stores. You can also follow us on our various social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube or sign-up for our regular emails.

For entertainment industry customers, we offer IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. IMDbPro now includes thousands of additional casting notices from partner services, along with more industry news and trending dashboards on the new IMDbPro home page. We relaunched Box Office Mojo with a new design and the site is now built upon new technology which will enable us to deliver faster in the future. The IMDbPro experience now includes much more detailed box office information, powered by Box Office Mojo. For example, see reports by country or person or distributor.

IMDb began as my movie diary as a teenager in the 1980s. My first diary entry was 40 years ago and I have been tracking every movie I have seen since 1 January 1980. I do this now by voting and checking-in on IMDb, plus I maintain an IMDb list for each year. I saw my 12,000th movie in December 2019 (unique movies, not even counting repeat viewings). On a related note, in conjunction with Curious Charts we have created an IMDb Top 100 bucket list poster, available at Amazon.com, where you can check-off how many of the Top 100 highest rated movies on IMDb you have seen.

To celebrate 2019 from an entertainment perspective, please see our Best of section. Onwards now to 2020, our 30th birthday year and to serving you better whenever and wherever you access IMDb. If you would like to join our team, please keep an eye on our jobs page.

Feedback

Thanks again for all of your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via GetSatisfaction, where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, including those pertaining to the following topics: IMDb, data, iOS, Android and IMDbPro. This letter will be posted to Get Satisfaction. If you are not in the Top 300 contributors this year and would like to know how much data you contributed along with your position outside of the Top 300, please post a reply to this post. 

We wish you a Happy New Year!

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

[The list of contributors will be available in early January at https://contribute.imdb.com/czone/hall_of_fame#top2019 as Get Satisfaction does not display long tables very well]