IMDb founder Col Needham's statement on the forums 6 months ago

As gromit82 indicates, the message boards are not a core function of IMDb. IMDb has over 250 million users per month and only the tiniest fraction of those visit the boards and even fewer post on the boards. The boards therefore make up an insignificant percentage of overall IMDb page views. It is difficult to specifically sell advertising against message board content for obvious reasons so the only ads which run there are low price run-of-site banners at the top/bottom of a subset of boards pages where we would typically only earn revenue if a customer clicks-through and signs up for whatever is being advertised. On the other hand, managing the boards and operating the technology behind them is disproportionately costly since the board systems are so old. While we do not comment in detail on specific aspects of IMDb's business, it is easy to draw the obvious conclusion behind the financial cost vs. benefit of the boards system.

From a traffic, resources and expenses perspective IMDb would be much better off without boards. There are some community benefits though and boards without a significant troll population flourish with interesting discussions and genuine community which is why we keep them around. Due to technology limitations we have to enforce an expiry policy on most boards so much of the discussion is temporary and therefore valuable content is often lost to keep the system operational. We are always looking at better ways to preserve this type of content and we have some thoughts on providing better mechanisms to transfer useful boards content into the permanent parts of the database.
Source:
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/can-someone-on-the-inside-explain-to-me



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