Col Needham founded one of the world’s most influential entertainment websites, IMDb. Here, he reflects on cinematic obsessions, the moment Jeff Bezos changed his life, and how many movies he watches a year.
Col Needham was just a British teenager with a head full of movie credits when he started compiling a list, in what would eventually become the Internet Movie Database—better known to hundreds of millions around the world as IMDb.
Needham stepped aside as IMDb CEO in January, having led the company since the World Wide Web’s earliest days.
Now 57, Needham is in Australia as a judge for the Melbourne International Film Festival. He brings no formal film training to the role, just passion and an encyclopaedic knowledge gleaned from the 16,438 movies he’s seen since January 1, 1980.
Forbes Australia caught up with Needham shortly before the festival’s first screening [which will have lifted his count to 16,349]. In this wide-ranging Q&A, the IMDb founder opens up about his obsessive love of film, how a random email in 1993 and a naive ad pitch led to possibly the world’s first profitable website, and what it was like to sell IMDb to Jeff Bezos in a quiet deal worth part of a disclosed US$55 million.
He also shares why he still watches every end credit, how The Dry made him think differently, and how IMDb keeps evolving—even as generative AI and new formats threaten to shake up the content world all over again.
I hadn’t even heard of the internet in 1993 when your website launched. What were you thinking?
We actually predate that. So IMDb launched in October 1990. There was no real commercial use of the internet in those days. The web was still three years away. We predate the web by three years. It began as my film diary as a teenager. I used to track every movie that I saw in a database that I’d created. I saw it on VHS tape, I would rewind the tape and type in the credits. And I’ve been tracking every movie that I’ve seen ever since. So I’m currently at 16,438 movies.
“I had been to every website that existed.”
IMDb founder Col Needham
I met some like-minded people on the internet in the late 1980s. So when we launched, I wrote the very first version of the software. When we launched, it was just a way of sharing our passion for film and TV and entertainment.
There are people like trainspotters and birdwatchers who have the sort of brain that just loves listing and chronicling. Have you got that type of brain?
That is exactly me. I used to read the end credits and so I’d see things like ‘this producer often works with that writer’ or ‘this director often works with this cinematographer’. I’d be spotting those connections in my head. And that’s essentially what led to rewinding the tapes and typing the credits. So I’ve always stayed through the credits, even before post-credits things were a thing, you know, where you stay to catch some scene after the credits.
“This is like the bronze age of the internet. You could count the number of websites that were ad-supported on two hands.”
How did you turn it into a business?
I got an email from a guy who was a PhD computer science student at Cardiff University in Wales, Rob. It was like: “I’ve just installed the movie database software, I think it’s quite cool, but have you heard of this World Wide Web thing? Because it might be quite big.” So I had already heard of the web because somebody in the next office to me at work had written their own web browser and I had been to every website that existed. So we got a website in ’93, and we were one of the first 100-ish websites to launch of any kind.
There was no advertising, there was no commercial use. It wasn’t until ’95 that the web started to go mainstream and our traffic took off. We were doubling every two weeks. We were faced with this decision: Do we say that was a fun five years but we’re gonna have to close it down because we can’t do it anymore? Or can we incorporate as a business and maybe we could sell some advertising? This is like the bronze age of the internet. You could count the number of websites that were ad-supported on two hands. We agonized over that.
We incorporated in January ’96. We divided the shares up amongst all of the original people according to how long had you been involved and how much work were you volunteering to do. So we launched IMDb.com in time for the Oscars in 1996.
We bought our first web server on a credit card so we didn’t take any venture capital funding or anything and within two weeks I’m on the phone to the first potential advertiser, and they’ve never bought any online advertising before. I’ve never sold any. They’re like, ‘How much is it for a month?’ And so I named a number. And it was three times what we owed on the credit card. So we were able to pay off the credit card in the interest-free four-week period, and thus became possibly the world’s first profitable internet company.
Wow! And that that continued?
Yeah. We were all still working our day jobs. The next piece of advertising we sold was to 20th Century Fox for Independence Day, the movie with Will Smith, and I figured if we could sell advertising to movie studios, this was time to quit my day job and become our first full-time employee … We were running like that with me as the CEO for two years until I had a meeting with Jeff Bezos in January of 1998 which changed my life.
Is it public what he paid for it?
No it’s not.
Can you give us a ballpark?
What I can say is IMDb and two other companies were acquired all on the same day in April of 1998. The thing that is public is that that was a US$55 million transaction in total.
So how many how many movies do you watch a day? I suppose we could divide 16,438 by X number of days.
No, it doesn’t work like that. My 16,438, they are unique movies that I’ve seen. My all-time favourite movie is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and I’ve watched that more than 50 times.
Needham hit 10,000 movies on his 50th birthday at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016. [A Monster Calls]
It only took seven years to do another 5,000. So my target these days is I want to be at least 750, edging towards 800 or higher per year. And of course, I have all of this information available to me in IMDb. So, since you asked, I am just going to scroll through … So I saw 767 in 2024, and then 863 in 2023. But my recent peak was 2021 the partially pandemic year, with 943.
You’ve been to the Quentin Tarantino film school of learning by just watching a lot of movies. Is that your qualifications to be a judge here at the Melbourne International Film Festival?
Yeah, I have no formal training, but I’ve been on other juries before and this is such a wonderful festival. There are 217 features and that’s either narrative or documentary. Luckily, I’m on the Bright Horizons jury so we have 11 movies [by up and coming filmmakers] to judge, but I’m trying to pack in other movies around it.
What makes a good movie?
A good script.
What makes a good script?
Generally I can see something to like in any movie. I’m quite tolerant if it’s made on a low budget. Maybe the effects are a bit cheap or the locations are a bit constrained. But I like a story in a movie. It doesn’t have to be particularly believable. I have a high degree of suspension of disbelief, but if the filmmakers are telling a compelling story, and there’s just something that makes you think slightly differently about the world.
What was the last Australian film to do that for you?
I’m gonna cheat slightly, because tomorrow [Friday, August 8] at the festival I’m doing a conversation with Rob Connolly, who directed The Dry, and I absolutely love that movie … I rewatched it five days ago and that’s just a great example of a movie that makes me think.
What do you think might be the force that disrupts IMDb, in the same way that you disrupted Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide [the book that ceased publication in 2014].
The reason that we’ve been here, I believe, for 35 years is we pay very close attention to what the customer needs are. But you also equally have to be able to see what things customers might need but they don’t know yet and build those ahead of that need. If I’m allowed to say so myself, I think we’ve been doing that … We have more than 200 million people access IMDb every month. The rate at which the data is coming in continues to grow, even though we’re 35 years old. In 2024, we added more than 4 million titles. That wasn’t all things made in ’24. We’re still catching up with things from the past.
A good example of listening to customer needs is a few years ago when podcasting took off, we started to see that people, as well as doing movies and shows, are doing podcasts. They’re hosting podcasts, they’re guests on podcasts, they’re writing podcasts. If you’re an IMDb customer, you’re interested in a director, a writer, a cast member, so you’re interested in their work being discussed in podcasts. So we added support for podcasts a couple of years ago, and that’s been a surge in the growth there. So we’re just continually listening to customers to figure out what we need to build next. So IMDb can be the thing that disrupts IMDb.
I imagine that the new Google AI search thing is ripping you off blind?
Not that I’m aware of. There are so many reasons that different customers come to IMDb. So it can be to get an answer to a quick question. But then then they’re like, ‘But wait a minute, where else do I know this actor from?’ They end up on IMDb.
Do you have any nice pics of you beavering away at your computer in the old days?
There isn’t anything, really, two reasons. Number one, no digital photography. If I was a teenager doing that now, we’d have a never-ending supply of photos, but the other reason is I had no idea it would turn into what it has turned into.
Is there one of you meeting Jeff Bezos?
Definitely not, because that was a quiet meeting in London. But we did have the honour of being at Jeff and Lauren’s wedding in Venice in July. My wife is in the iconic photo that Lauren released on her Instagram. I’ll show you this just for fun … Here we go … I’m gonna zoom in. So that’s Jeff’s bow tie. Those are my wife’s sunglasses.
Cool! Front row seats. I imagine they know how to throw a good party.
They do know how to throw a good party. One of my top-ten life experience, most definitely.