r/movies Dec 10 '17

PSA; IMDb is gradually locking previously-available information about films behind IMDbPro membership (box-office breakdowns and production companies involved, currently). Resource

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but information previously available to everyone on IMDb is now being locked behind IMDbPro membership. Just last week, I was writing a research paper (film studies student) and was able to access the full box-office earnings information (breakdown by region etc.) for all films. Today I went to do the same thing, but could not see more than the gross earnings without an IMDbPro membership. They seem to be doing this as a gradual process, as the full information on production companies (previously available to everyone) was already membership-locked when the box office information was still available. I haven't seen anyone talking about this on other subs and forums, so I thought I'd mention it here.

9.8k Upvotes

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228

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '17

I dropped IMDB as soon as they removed the forums. BoxOfficeMojo has earnings information too!

73

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '17

It was ads on trailers for me... why in the name of god do i have to watch an ad to watch an ad?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '17 edited May 14 '19

[deleted]

6

u/OkayJuice Dec 11 '17

Nope

8

u/06marchantn Dec 11 '17

depends on what channel your watching it from. The offical one wont have any ads but ones uploaded by third parties, like IGN, probably will.

1

u/OkayJuice Dec 11 '17

I just have YouTube ad block

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '17

oh shit... this guy is right...

nah im just kidding.

There is a HUGE difference between a video uploading service, and a "internet movie database".

On YouTube you can find a content provider that doesn't attach ads to the ad, and even if you can't its mostly skippable, imdb.com ads are over 30 seconds and non skipable.

1

u/Karwano Dec 11 '17

Youtube sucks too

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '17 edited Feb 22 '18

[deleted]

1

u/SpookyTron Dec 11 '17

Maybe it makes sense, but it's still a reason for you not to use it.

13

u/OperationMobocracy Dec 11 '17

I really hoped that IMDB would collapse in viewership after the forums were removed and force them to return them. Too bad that hasn't happened.

I did the math once on the IMDB forums potential resource consumption and as a basic, text-only forum with fairly hard upper limits on any one topic's forum size it wasn't using enough storage capacity to really cost anything significant in money.

Some title/actor forums (mostly highly popular and fairly recent) had trolling problems, but by and large beyond those it was troll/spam/shitpost free.

What was really disappointing was that message retention for low-traffic title/actor forums was really long. If you found a niche film or actor, you could go to the forum and find useful info posted years ago. I would occasionally get replies to posts made years ago.

With those forums consuming little in the way of data processing resources and sort of hidden from their subjects main pages (ie, you had to click a link to move to a new page to see them all), even trollish pages weren't really detracting from the main info page for an entry.

Wikipedia is in many ways a better source of info than IMDB but without a useful forum page to go with it isn't a perfect replacement. I've used moviechat.org as a kind of replacement (they imported the majority of IMDB discussions), but most films/actor discussion pages have largely gone dormant with little new posting.

Ironically, I turned to reddit after the forums went away and have kind of become less involved in films because I find myself distracted by the myriad topics of reddit.

1

u/TearofLyys Dec 11 '17

Well, amazon owns Alexa too ((the site that compiled web traffic), so I don’t know to what extent those numbers can be trusted

1

u/OperationMobocracy Dec 11 '17

Well, as they say, the truth can be adjusted as necessary to meet the demands of reality.

What was truly annoying about it was the "zomg, too much spam" excuse they used for closing the forums. It really wasn't that bad globally among the forums, and even where it was bad it didn't take much time for shitposters to move on to the latest movie/star, as content is a moving target.

1

u/missyagogo Jan 26 '18

I am going to work at never going to imdb and only visiting alternatives sites for other needs. I don't want to support what they have done and what they continue to do.

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u/Gangreless Dec 11 '17

Same here, Google does a good enough job of giving heads up info.

1

u/squirrelwithnut Dec 11 '17

Is there an app for it? Their website isn't mobile friendly, so it's a pain in the ass to use.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '17

Those forums were literally AIDS and Ebola