David Nett is an actor and writer in Los Angeles, and the creator of the web series Gold, a comedy about professional tabletop role playing gamers. David has an IMDB page, but Gold does not. Yet.
There are barriers to being listing on IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) for all TV, film and video projects, but for web series, the bar is simply too high.
I’ll start off here by saying that a listing on IMDB is important to any entertainment project for a number of reasons which boil down to one overarching theme: legitimacy.
Over the past five or six years, IMDB, for better or worse, has become the standard system of record for the entertainment industry in verifying the legitimacy of projects, especially independent projects which do not immediately gain wide distribution. An entry in the database is evidence of an entertainment product. It’s a stamp of approval, a sign of the massive amount of work that went into a movie, television show, or short film.
No listing on IMDB is nearly tantamount to not appearing on Google. It’s not that you don’t exist without it, but without it you exist far less.
IMDB has a serious challenge keeping up with the firehose of content seeking placement in its database. Because they are the source of record for legitimate entertainment productions and want to maintain that status, they can’t let any project into the club. They filter for legit content using these two general criteria.
From IMDB, the content 1) “must be of general public interest” and 2) “should be available to the public or have been available in the past.”
Seems pretty reasonable. Where it gets dicey for independent projects (those without big studio backing, national distribution or attached celebrities) is how to project that “general public interest.” For indie films (features and shorts), IMDB has decided to let the film festival circuit be the auditor. Inclusion in any festival which screens content for quality is a ticket onto the site. Sometimes the bar is even lower. According to Withoutabox (an online service which assists in promoting independent films to festivals), “most films now qualify [for IMDB inclusion] as soon as their first Withoutabox submission is received by a festival.”
But, for independent web series, it’s a different story. The film fest route isn’t open to them (yet, anyway). So, IMDB has chosen another measuring stick. In order for a web series to be listed, it must (again, from IMDB) gain “significant national mainstream press or very substantial, verifiable viewership.”
The problem with this criteria is twofold. First, popularity (”substantial, verifiable viewership”) is not a requirement for films or traditional television listed in IMDB. In fact, a large number of television pilots which never made it to air, much less past the first episode, are listed. And films which screen only at festivals (even a large number of festivals) have total audiences often smaller than even a moderately popular online series.
IMDB inclusion is not, and should not be, a popularity contest – the number of viewers should be irrelevant to the legitimacy of a project. (IMDB has not publicly released the actual viewership threshold they require for web series.)
The problem with the second requirement, “significant mainstream press” coverage, is that the main sources of editorial for the burgeoning web television movement – Tilzy.TV, NewTeeVee, and Tubefilter – are not yet considered by IMDB to be significant mainstream press, largely because those news outlets are online-only. But, attracting “mainstream press” to a web series which does not come from an established studio, or which does not have an attached celebrity, is an extraordinarily difficult pursuit. And, again, this is not a bar to which independent films must rise.
All this said, many web series have gained inclusion in the database. But many more legitimate, professional, independent, online original programs have not, despite repeated submissions, because they cannot meet these thresholds.
IMDB has a responsibility to filter those projects which seek entry. It does so, for independent films, by allowing those projects to be audited by experts in the field: film festivals. Why not do the same for web television? Instead of making inclusion a popularity contest, let the experts in this new field, magazines like Tilzy.TV, NewTeeVee, and Tubefilter make the cut. I’m certain they, and other news outlets which will no doubt emerge to cover the growing web television scene, will be happy to provide the service.
And it would level the IMDB playing field between traditional and new media, acknowledging that an entertainment project’s legitimacy is based on more than just its delivery mechanism.
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IMDB does need to figure this out and make some consistent way of making decisions. Lonelygirl15 has a page and people get on that and always ask “Since when are web shows included.” I think web shows (social shows, or whatever you want to call them) deserve to be cataloged and recognized. If IMDB doesn’t start including them, someone will have to pick up the slack until IMDB begins fairly recognizing the medium.
I’ve been in the industry a long time, and have a decent list of credits on IMDB. But included on that list are films that have not been in a single festival and have had no theatrical release. Films that have essentially been seen by less people than a single episode of my web series, “With the Angels.” There’s even a fake movie on there, created after a frustrating in-person conversation at Sundance with an IMDB rep who insisted their system was perfectly balanced and able to vet the real from the unreal. I’ve also struggled to get them to understand television credits, which are quite different from movie credits. “Story Editor,” for example, is not a “miscellaneous crew” credit as listed on IMDB, but a clear writing staff credit. IMDB is deeply flawed. They’re also highly arrogant if they don’t see the need to enter the 21st century.
Having just been rejected for the fourth and fifth time by IMDB for not having a “significant following”, this article really hits home. For those of us who are putting every last penny we have, all of our spare hours, and every ounce of our energy into our web projects, do we not deserve more than a faceless form letter? Should we not have a clear understanding of what hurdle we need to leap over before gaining entry to IMDB’s Valhalla of Credits?
It’s time that the site owners and moderators faced the facts: the media world is changing and if they want to stay on top of the cyber world, they need to adjust to the times. My show “Issues: The Series” has talent from feature films and television, was covered in numerous media outlets and the pilot episode recently crossed 3,000 views in two weeks. We have a booth at NY ComicCon. We filmed in high def. How are we any less professional than a short film that airs in a single film festival?
-Scott Nap
Great article–I hope that IMDb gets the message. We’ve been trying for almost two years to get some of our web series listed. One of our shows was getting about 50,000 viewers a week on YouTube and yet somehow that still doesn’t count as a “substantial verifiable viewership.” Meanwhile they list a student film I did in college because it was accepted into a couple of film festivals.
The hardest thing for us is that like many web producers we rely on a lot of volunteer effort–people who are working for free to get experience, some material for their reel, and another title for their resume. It’s unfortunate when these people invest heavily into a project and we can’t even reward them with a new credit on their IMDb page.
I did an episode last year about Final Cut Pro editing for “Indy Mogul”, (28k views, last I checked) and one of the YouTube commenters asked something to the effect of “If he’s an Emmy Award-Winning Editor, how come he’s not in IMDB?”
That’s a legitimate question, but if that same person had Googled “emmy award editor” without the quotes, he or she would have seen my name. Same thing for “emmy award resume” without the quotes. So, personally, I don’t need IMDB, because I’ve documented many of the television & corporate projects I’ve worked on as well as the names of the people that hired me. If anyone has any questions, they can go ask them.
Having said that, if you have zero internet presence, IMDB is the only way that people are going to consider you legitimate. I hadn’t considered this because as a Freelancer in NYC, I get all of my work via word-of-mouth and I don’t apply to random companies to edit for them. I never needed to be listed anywhere, because the people that called me already knew who I was and what I could do.
Had I known IMDB was going to become such a big deal, I could have requested that every client I worked for submit our work for entry into the database. As it happened, I was working with staffers, which means they had their jobs regardless of the internet, so there was no incentive for them to be interested in the IMDB database. It’s kind of like “We’re already in the business and have the demo reels to prove it, so why in the world would we need to put anything on the net?”
Meanwhile, in Internet-Land, shows like Rocketboom and Something To Be Desired have been producing well-done episodes for years and years and I think should be recognized for putting in as much work, if not MORE than a lot of programs that made it to IMDB while demonstrating much less skill and/or longevity.
I don’t know how the process works, but it seems to me that there should be some kind of vetting process for inclusion of internet shows into IMDB. Should EVERYTHING get in? Of course not. However, IMO, the groups demonstrating professionalism, production values & entertainment or educational value should have a chance to be included so that people without a history of actual television or film involvement are recognized as similarly capable content creators.
Really good write-up, David. I gave my 2 cents on my blog: http://tinyurl.com/bkwojq
I just found this blog post, and I wanted to offer my 2 cents. IMDB has very confusing listing policies, but it hasn’t always been that way. After years of the ‘weekend filmmaker’ rush on the scene, I settled on the assumption that IMDB just doesn’t want home movies clogging up the system. I have to add that relying on film festivals is not a good policy at all. If anyone has been to a festival lately, you know how unreliable the quality is (not to mention the ‘in-crowd’ effect you have to get passed). I have many IMDB credits, but have been unsuccessful with listing one of my earlier films with an A-list actor (made in the 90’s). The actor in this film is a celebrity actor who’s now commanding a studio salary on every movie… Thousands of teen girls are in his fan club. But IMDB still refuses to list the movie– a 15-min film made on a $35k budget in 1995 that went to festivals. In some ways, IMDB’s submission policy is no different than pitching to the Studios or Nets– If they don’t know you or your agency, they don’t want to hear about it. I did notice IMDB still lists web series as TV shows, so it doesn’t look like they’re adapting for the format. And with all fairness, we have to admit many web series out there are not much more than home movies. I think the best solution is creating an alternative database for web content that isn’t as elitist and imbalanced as IMDB. Another possible solution could be to allow professionals already listed to post their content unrestricted. But the biggest hurdle might be the fact that IMDB doesn’t recognize any of these issues as a problem.
Indeed a very interesting and relevant article. I have had several on-going communications with IMDB (Amazon) over the years about inconsistency within their criteria – particularly lack of clarity in their guidelines. Now, several years later, I am convinced that someone simply needs to start a competitive organization. One that focuses ONLY on professional, high-quality Web based shows. Call it WebMTVDB (Web Movie TV Database). Problem solved.
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