Page 31 - 25_Bafta ACADEMY_Fearne Cotton_ok

the world offered, so before you knew it we had servers in the USA, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Germany and Italy.
“We even had one in Iceland, which was really crazy because I can’t imagine that there were more than 15 people online in Iceland at that time! But they had their own copy of the IMDB.”
But popularity meant that keeping the database up to date became more and more time consuming for Needham and his friends, most of whom were doing it purely as a hobby.
“The amount of traffic we were getting was doubling every two weeks or so. And that meant that the information that we were receiving would double every fortnight.
“We all still had day jobs [Needham worked in Bristol for Hewlett Packard] and were doing it in the evenings and at weekends, so we were faced with this difficult decision. Did we say that was a fun five years, let’s close it down and say goodbye? Or do we see if we can turn it into a business? Obviously we took the latter route.”
It was a brave decision, made even more so because back
then - despite the amount of time they’d spent chatting online - Needham had met hardly any of his co-founders. He hadn’t even spoken to most of them on the phone - international calls being so expensive.
“I was the managing director and we had three other direc- tors. And the first time that we ever met in person was in our lawyers’ office in London to sign the papers to incorporate the company.
“All my friends used to think I was crazy: ‘You’ve founded a company with people from six different companies, and you’ve only met three of them before’. But online, we’d been working together closely for years. One of our guys in Switzerland was the second person in after me in the early days.
“At the beginning of 1996 we bought our first web server using a credit card and launched the commercial version of the IMDB in time for the Oscars in 1996. A couple of weeks later we sold our first piece of advertising and by the summer we were selling enough advertising that we could afford to start hiring peo- ple. So one by one the 19 of us
who had been running the data- base quit our day jobs.”
The first piece of advertising paid off the credit card debt for buying the first server, so Needham went out and bought two more. Within a year, the num- ber of servers they owned had increased to nine, and it wasn’t long before they outgrew that capacity too. The site was thriv- ing. Then in 1997, Needham got an email from Amazon.com.
‘It said that [Amazon boss] Jeff Bezos was going to be in London in early 1998 and would like to meet me to discuss business. ‘Hmm, sounds interesting’
I thought...”
In a hotel in Kensington, Bezos explained to Needham that Amazon - then only selling books - wanted to expand into videos too. They wanted a partner and wanted IMDB to be that partner. “One thing led to another and we agreed to sell the company to Amazon in April 1998.”
Needham describes the part- nership as “fantastic”, and that isn’t a knee-jerk corporate PR response either. He’s genuinely pleased with the way that IMDB dovetails with Amazon. “They let us run IMDB as a separate com-
pany, a separate website. We have extensive links through to Amazon, though, so we drive a lot of sales to them.”
Five years later, and the IMDB is now a genuine phenomenon. With a new IMDB Pro section, extensive news and bulletin boards and a truly huge database of info, the site is incredibly successful.
Prior to the latest re-design, it received an average of 65 million accesses from over 3.5 million visi- tors every month. A far cry from the hundred or so accesses it received each day when Needham first put it out on to the servers at Cardiff University.
“I cannot stand here and say that in 1990 I knew it was going to be big, saw the opportunity and went for it,” he says, with a grin. “It’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. At the end of the day, we were just a bunch of people who cared passionately about film.”
29