In the early 1990s, Alan Jay was sitting in his London office when his phone rang with a peculiar request. On the other end was Jeff Bezos’s assistant. “She says, hi, I’m Jeff Bezos’ assistant. He’s going to be in London next week and wonders whether you’d be free for a meeting,” Jay recalled. That meeting, as it turned out, would set off a chain of events that ended with Amazon acquiring IMDB, the online movie database Jay had co-founded.
After the acquisition, Alan didn’t rest on his laurels; over the next two decades, he went on to co-found two other media companies — one in entertainment and the other sports — both of which found success and ultimately sold to larger companies. But he insists that building a sustainable media business today is far harder than when he started. “The current world we’re living in,” he said, “trying to be in the media business is unbelievably hard. None of the old rules work any longer.”
Building IMDB Before the Web Existed
Long before the World Wide Web as we know it, Jay was tinkering with early networks. In the late 1980s, he was one of the first two people in the UK with commercial internet access—a 64-kilobit leased line that connected his publishing business to the wider digital world. “It was so exciting at the time,” he said. “Most people accessing the internet were in universities or research establishments. Email and newsgroups were basically all there was.”
IMDB emerged out of one of those newsgroups—rec.arts.movies—where hobbyists shared lists of film data. One of them, Col Needham, began writing scripts to organize and retrieve the data. Jay, who had Unix expertise, ran those scripts on his own computer and built an email interface so users could query the database by sending messages like title: Casablanca or actor: Meryl Streep. “It would send you back the cast list or the actor’s filmography,” he explained. “It was all done by email. There was no web.”
As the internet expanded, IMDB evolved. A web interface appeared, an traffic grew through word of mouth. “We suddenly realized that Yahoo had just bought another company for what seemed like a lot of money,” Jay said. “We thought, well, maybe there is a business here.”
By 1995, Jay and his collaborators—23 volunteers spread around the world—incorporated IMDB as a UK company. “Of the 23 people involved, five of us were doing most of the work, and all of us were in the UK,” he said. Their first server was literally purchased on Jay’s credit card and shipped to Wisconsin. When the volunteer who received it confessed he didn’t know how to install Unix, Jay configured a hard drive in London, mailed it via FedEx, and told him to “plug it in and keep our fingers crossed.”
Soon, banner ads were paying the bills. DoubleClick was a client; Yahoo and early dot-com startups were among the advertisers. Hollywood executives were already obsessed with the site. “I’d have meetings on the Sony Pictures lot,” Jay said. “The head of marketing there told me it was his homepage—he’d type in an actor’s name when someone called so he could sound like he knew their latest project.”
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