The founder of IMDb has resigned as CEO almost 35 years after launching the online database for entertainment information. Col Needham replaces Nikki Santoro, who has been the chief operating officer of IMDb since 2021. different it’s still early reported the news.

IMDb has been criticized by film and TV buffs for years for, among other things, breaking up the community on its message boardand launching site design changes that they felt were unnecessary and made the site more difficult to navigate. Amazon bought IMDb in 1998, and the company claims to have more than 250 million monthly users. Despite the complaints, this is probably still the best place to find accurate and up-to-date casting information and in-depth filmography for individual actors.

The company has tried in recent years to follow the times and to launch new products-Amazon’s well-regarded X-Ray part of its Prime Video streaming service can show actors who appear in even what time in a film or TV show, and run. through the IMDb database. IMDb also launched a free, ad-supported streaming service of its own called IMDb TV, though that discontinued in late 2024 and free content rolled into Prime Video (it’s still accessible for free).

Besides serving as an information database, IMDb also has reviews and ratings, the latter of which has suffered over the years from review-bomb where users try to manipulate the score of a new release based on some agenda, such as targeting an actor they perceive as “woke.” Meanwhile, reviews are often more entertaining than useful—one user of a movie about horses wrote something along the lines of, “I hate movies about horses, 1/10 stars.”

A sad fact about IMDB is that it seems to be a case of a website that has reached a point of excellence and does not need much refinement. Managers and employees want to keep their jobs, however, and they have investor growth expectations to meet, which means they need to keep busy by adding new features. No one wants to tell their boss that the job is done and there is no more work to do. Eventually that leads to a bloated product with features that users don’t need to clutter up the entire product. Craigslist is a good example of a website that knows when to enter maintenance mode, and it remains extremely popular to this day.

A better way to run IMDb is probably to look at its parent company. Amazon.com’s user interface has changed very little over the years. When it creates a new feature like Prime Video, the company keeps it inside its own tab. It is not a core feature that users insist on.

The enduring nature of IMDb shows how difficult it is to kill a website that has reached critical mass solving a need and solving it well. Sites like Yahoo! and X remain great assets despite years of mismanagement and turmoil, for example.

Letterboxd has slowly gained steam as a viable competitor to IMDb, although it appears much smaller in size.

Needham says IMDb grew out of a personal film database he created as a teenager, combined with similar data he collected online beginning in the late 1980s.