Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterIMDB and You, the Filmmaker
Mar 17, 2009 7:49 AM, Craig Erpelding
What IMDB, and sister sites Amazon and Without A Box have planned for filmmakers
The internet movie database, imdb.com, may be one of the most vital sites for filmmakers promoting themselves and their work in today’s web-friendly world. After the company sold itself to Amazon.com, and ad revenues rose exponentially, the website’s operators continually are looking for ways to provide as much information to film fans as possible, while giving film makers more opportunities to promote their work.
In 1990 Col Needham was compiling a list of films, cast and crew for his own personal knowledge in his Bristol, U.K. home before most anyone even knew about the world wide web. Since then, he found a group of collaborators on usenet and hosting on a university web server in which the database, in its infancy—starting with 60 page views—saw a doubling of page views every two weeks.
After purchasing a 4GB server on a credit card and shipping it to a collaborator in Wisconsin, the site quickly took off and now sees 57 million unique visitors a month and 3 billion page views during the same period. Therefore, having your film’s title on this site is now a must-have.
And now that imdb.com has purchased the film festival submission site withoutabox.com, Needham looks to incorporate the data provided on each site to provide seamless ways for filmmakers to upload information to Without A Box and also assist in the future goals of the ever-expanding database, collaborating on both data input and video uploads into the Without A Box interface for use on IMDB.
And video is top priority for the site, which eloquently stated by Needham is to “put a play button on every movie title page.” A lofty goal for a site that has 1.3 million movie title pages—a number which grew by 170,000 films last year alone. That play button could feature behind-the-scenes interviews, trailers, and Needham even hopes that filmmakers will start streaming their full-length movies on their IMDB page.
Besides posting your movie directly to IMDB, expanded distribution of your film has also become imminent for the site through their parent company Amazon.com which not only sells DVDs, but also provides a video on demand service. Additionally, Amazon now also owns createspace.com where filmmakers can upload their film’s DVD file, create a movie page, and interested parties can purchase a DVD which is printed and mailed on demand to the purchaser while the filmmaker makes a commission.
Whether or not the IMDB/Amazon group’s distribution model is the one that takes hold in today’s “new internet distribution company a minute” environment is the unknown.
“There are going to be lots of winners coming out of this whole [distribution model] thing,” Needham says, “but the big winners are going to be film fans.”
So, when you submit your film to IMDB, what exactly happens before it goes online? It’s widely noted the lag time for data to be posted in today’s wiki-environment, and the answer is that IMDB is not “user generated” in the same sense as many other sites.
In fact, the submissions IMDB receives (approximately 600,000 items of data per week) goes through a staff of live editors before ever going online. All editors are full-time staff, and although Needham will never provide numbers on just how many staffers there are, they are quite astute on film facts and include some of the site’s original usenet group members, and as an example, the Sound Design editor for the database has been working on staff since 1995. He may know more about sound crew on films than anyone else on the planet.
Less than 10% of submissions are rejected.
International filmmakers may be happy to note that another big initiative of the company is “international expansion” where IMDB will have sister sites in every country so that listings will show up under “local” or foreign titles that can be accessed by fans in their own language, instead of the American title versions.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.