IMDb looks like a relic of the early internet, a plain list of cast and crew that has barely changed its look since the 1990s. That simplicity is doing a lot of work. Amazon has owned the Internet Movie Database outright since April 1998, when it folded IMDb into a trio of acquisitions, alongside two European booksellers, for roughly 55 million dollars combined, paid mostly in Amazon stock. IMDb has never been spun out, never floated, and never had to publish a set of accounts of its own. It sits inside Amazon as a wholly owned subsidiary, and its revenue is not broken out anywhere in Amazon's quarterly filings. Amazon's segment reporting splits the company into North America, International and Amazon Web Services; IMDb's advertising, subscription and data-licensing income simply disappears into those totals, most likely blended into the North America segment where Amazon books its advertising business. Outside estimates compiled by business-data trackers put IMDb's annual revenue somewhere between 250 million and 500 million dollars, but that figure comes from third-party modelling, not from anything Amazon has confirmed. The money comes from four places. The first and oldest is advertising, sold against a site that still draws well over 250 million unique visitors a month, a scale that makes it one of the biggest pure traffic plays in entertainment media. The second is affiliate commerce: click through from a film's IMDb page to buy the DVD, stream the title, or shop a cast member's merchandise, and IMDb takes a cut, the same model that has made Rotten Tomatoes a reliable earner through its own retail links. The third, and the one growing fastest, is data licensing. IMDb sells access to its catalogue, more than 12 million movie, television and video game titles, 16 million cast and crew entries, and close to 1.9 billion user star ratings, through Amazon Web Services' Data Exchange platform. Customers include film studios, streaming services, television networks, airlines curating in-flight entertainment, electronics manufacturers, and even non-profits and academic researchers. In September 2025 IMDb used the IBC trade show in Amsterdam to launch a new tier of weekly-updated datasets, including historical popularity rankings for titles and for industry names stretching back to 1998, pitching itself less as a fan site and more as an intelligence vendor for a streaming industry that is desperate for better signal on what people actually want to watch. The fourth stream is IMDbPro, the paywalled professional tier that turns the free site's casual browsers into a recurring subscription business. An individual membership costs 19.99 dollars a month or 149.99 dollars billed annually, which works out to 12.50 dollars a month, and a group plan covering up to five seats runs 79.99 dollars a month. There is also a free Basic tier for anyone with a verified IMDb credit, though it strips out the contact database and the rankings tools that make Pro worth paying for. What subscribers get for the money is contact information for more than 300,000 industry professionals, in-development project tracking, box office figures, and the STARmeter, MOVIEmeter and COMPANYmeter rankings that measure relative popularity by tracking page views across IMDb's enormous audience, a real-time buzz gauge that studios and casting offices treat as a rough proxy for who is hot before the box office numbers exist to prove it. Measured against its closest rivals, IMDbPro is priced to win on volume rather than depth. The Numbers, the box office analytics service beloved of distribution executives, charges 49 dollars for an opening month and then 69 dollars a month for its full Business Report, which includes theatrical forecasting the company says has landed within five percent of the actual market every year since 2022, plus its bankability rankings for the 250 most valuable cast and crew. Cinando, the database built and run by the Marché du Film at the Cannes Film Festival, charges a flat 149 euros a year, or 59 euros for three months, and is effectively free to anyone who registers for Cannes, the Berlinale's European Film Market, the American Film Market or Ventana Sur, because market accreditation comes bundled with a year of access. Where IMDbPro sells breadth, a little bit of everything for every working actor, agent, journalist and producer, The Numbers sells forecasting precision for people who move money around a release slate, and Cinando sells a closed network of verified sales agents, distributors and festival programmers who are actually buying and selling finished films. Industry writers who cover the space consistently describe IMDbPro's typical user as an actor managing a public profile, a casting-adjacent professional checking representation, or a journalist and producer doing basic background research, people who need broad coverage more than forecasting precision. The comparison gets sharper once rival databases outside the IMDb-Amazon orbit are lined up. Rotten Tomatoes, now under Fandango, which is itself jointly controlled by NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, leans overwhelmingly on advertising sold against its aggregate scores, supplemented by affiliate commissions that the company says have multiplied several times over through retail-integration partnerships. Metacritic, which aggregated reviews independently for two decades, was folded into Fandom Inc. in 2022 as part of a roughly 55 million dollar bundle that also picked up GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and TV Guide from Red Ventures, and now runs on the same advertising-and-traffic logic as its sister wiki properties. Letterboxd sits furthest from the ad-driven model: the social cataloguing app for film obsessives runs a freemium structure, free for most of its member base, with a Pro tier at 19 dollars a year and a Patron tier at 49 dollars a year unlocking extra personalisation, on top of advertising and affiliate links to streaming services. That community-first approach has made Letterboxd valuable enough that its majority owner, the Canadian holding company Tiny, is reportedly exploring a sale of its controlling stake, with interest from backers including A24, Sony Pictures Entertainment and The New York Times Company, in a deal that could value the platform above 300 million dollars, a startling number for a service that still feels like a hobbyist project compared with IMDb's industrial scale. What ties all of these services together is that the content fuelling the commercial machinery is written for free by the public. Every star rating, every user review, every forum post on IMDb becomes raw material the platform can license, aggregate into rankings, or sell as a dataset, without paying the people who created it a cent beyond the entertainment of having their opinion counted. IMDb's own terms of use draw a hard line here: personal, non-commercial use of ratings and reviews is tolerated, even encouraged, but any business that wants to build a product on top of that data has to go through IMDb's commercial licensing desk. That asymmetry, millions of unpaid contributors generating the inventory that a handful of corporate buyers pay real money for, is the quiet engine underneath the entire category, and it is not unique to IMDb. Rotten Tomatoes' audience scores, Letterboxd's diary entries and Metacritic's user reviews all work the same way: free labour in, licensed or advertised product out.