Colin Needham was born on the 26th January 1967, in Denton, Greater Manchester, England, and is an entrepreneur who is most famous for being the founder and current CEO of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online database abundant with news from the world of movies, television and even video games, with detailed information about actors, behind-the-camera crew, trivia and many other aspects of the movie world.
Have you ever wondered how much wealth the inventor of this useful site has accumulated so far? How rich Col Needham is? According to sources, it is estimated that the total of Col Needham’s net worth, as of early 2017, exceeds the sum of $50 million, acquired through his IMDb enterprise which was actually bought out by Amazon.com in 1998 for an approximate sum of $55 million.
Col Needham Net Worth $50 million
Col attended Audenshaw School before matriculating from Hyde Clarendon Sixth Form College in Hyde. Later he enrolled at the University of Leeds from which he graduated in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. After graduation, he began his professional career as an engineer in Hewlett-Packard in Bristol. He launched IMDb in 1990, but what began as his personal movie database quickly evolved into an, as inclusive as possible, internet bulletin board containing several lists for which Col made a special Unix shell script in order to help users search data easily. By the end of 1990, IMDb already contained around 10,000 movie entries.
As the site rapidly expanded, in 1996Col abandoned his position at HP in order to work on IMDb full time. Later that year, the site featured its first advertising campaign, for the Roland Emmerich’s Sci-Fi action movie “Independence Day”. From a one-man team, it quickly grew to a real company with numerous employees, and revenues from advertising, partnerships as well as licensing. These ventures provided the basis for Col Needham’s, nowadays rather impressive, net worth.
In 1998, Needham was approached by Jeff Bezos, the founder, owner and the CEO of Amazon.com, who bought out Col’s IMDb for a sum of around $55 million, making it an Amazon subsidiary. This deal provided Col and his staff with more revenue, while Amazon gained an ability to place and sell DVDs and videotapes through IMDb’s channels and advertising campaigns. In 1999, IMDb earned Col Needham, besides a significant amount of money, two Webby Awards.
In 2002, Col presented IMDbPro, which is available for $19.99 per month, and allows producers and directors to easily find their cast and actors as well as vice versa. Today, IMDb contains over 4.2 million titles of various motion pictures, including the oldest copies dating from 1894 to the most recent ones, and features detailed information about more than 7.8 million people. With such an impressive data base, IMDb is doubtlessly the No. 1 resource when it comes to actors, movies, TV series and, in general, everything connected to the movie-making industry. It is certain that this project, which is now spanning almost 28 years, has helped Col Needham to become a millionaire.
When it comes to his personal life, Col has been married since 1989 to Karen, with whom he has two twin daughters. With his family, and his physically extensive collection of movies which he has refused to digitize, Col currently resides in Stoke Gifford, South Gloucestershire, England.
