
// Development
IMDb Website Clone - How to Create a Movie Review Website Like IMDb
// Development
IMDb (Internet Movie Database) is the most popular and vast database of information related to films, series, TV shows, home videos, videogames and streaming video content. This website includes data about the content (release date, cast, production crew, gross, etc.) and, what’s most important, users’ ratings and reviews, which attract almost all the traffic. We’re going to tell you how to create your own movie review website like IMDb and make it a successful and profitable business project.
When you launch your movie review website, its listing most likely won’t be as big and full as IMDb’s. That is why there will be no point in creating direct IMDb’s competitors. It would be much more appropriate to choose a niche, which is very popular with the viewers and to work only in this direction.
The niche can be both a certain genre and another approach to content reviewing. For example, Rotten Tomatoes website provides the certified critics’ reviews, Metacritic shows two averaged scores by users and professional editions, BCDB and CommonSenseMedia review the content for children and IAFD is focused on adult video content (erotic and porn).
How to choose a niche for a new movie review website:
However, if we simplify IMDb’s business model, then we’ll see that this site is structured around data about the video content and users’ reviews. Such a project isn’t expensive and difficult to create. The most important thing is to initiate a network effect: the more reviews there are on the site, the more links to the site will be. And in that case, people will leave comments more often.
This effect can be achieved if you correctly choose a niche, feature set, and marketing strategy and if you don’t go too far with push-notifications, advertising and other ways of project monetization. We’re going to talk about website features and marketing later. Now let’s see how the IMDb platform makes money. There are five such ways.
Ordinary advertising. This is the simplest and available to all people way of monetization for any site, which can be provided with the help of Google Ads, for example. IMDb never had a lot of such advertising and there almost isn’t any after the purchase of Amazon platform. Nevertheless, if you create your movie review website, then ordinary PPC advertising will become your main source of profit.
A couple of years ago, IMDbPro also added the Pro Casting service. This is a listings service featuring casting calls, auditions, and upcoming roles. It is another way for the aspiring star to find necessary events and people.
Freedive is available only in the USA yet and a larger part of its collection is old movies.
Big data sales. Neither IMDb, nor Amazon go public about it, but there’s no doubt that they sell anonymized personal data and make a lot of money out of it. All websites with high amounts of traffic do that and in fact, there’s nothing wrong with it as long as the data is really anonymized.
Think about the implementation of the following elements on your site:
You can use several ways to create a movie review website like IMDb: