2015 — The year in review at TMDb

2015 was a pretty fantastic year for TMDb. Not only was it a record year in every single metric I keep track of but it was also a very satisfying year professionally for me. I got a chance to start the work on a completely new infrastructure for the API and also started on the new “v3” website. Growth is always nice but getting the chance to work on new things after 6 years is pretty special too. Lets run through some of the things that made 2015 so great.

Edits

At the heart of everything I do for TMDb is the simple goal of getting our passionate movie and TV fans in to contribute data and images to our database. This is important because it’s what makes our world go around. Without our users we wouldn’t be here. Everything I do is possible because of this harmony. 2015 was our biggest year ever for edits. Here’s what some of the stats look like:

• 4,672,665 total edits (a 32% increase from 2014)
• 15,935 editors (a 14% increase from 2014)
• An average of 12,801 edits per day

API

The API didn’t see any ground breaking features this year but the harmony I mentioned above is only possible because of it. We did however, see a record number of new developers get on board. 2015 sure didn’t slow down from the growth we saw in 2014:

• Average daily uniques grew by 296%
• Average daily traffic grew by 205%
• Average daily apps grew by 54%
• CDN traffic grew by 315%

Website

2015 marked the first time in a long, long time that I got the chance to spend a decent amount of time on the website. I launched the new index, movie and TV discover and featured list pages as well as an all new account section. Search also finally got a makeover which was lots of fun (I still love looking at trending searches). Collections also got the new treatment which is the first media page to get “v3”.

The big question of course is when will movies, TV and people get v3? Well, I don’t have a firm answer to that yet but it is coming soon. I promise.

Two big features of v3 are proper internationalization (I18n) and a real mobile view. Everything that gets updated to v3 gets both of these features. Some other misc info:

• Only 60% of our users browse in English
• The top 3 browsers are Chrome, Firefox and Safari
• 475 internal builds were created over the year
• I deployed the website to production over 300 times

Other fun facts about 2015

• Jurassic World is the most rated movie released in 2015
• Victoria is the highest rated movie realeased in 2015 with at least 50 votes
• Mr. Robot is the most rated TV show of 2015
• Better Call Saul is the highest rated TV show to premiere in 2015
• I helped Udacity with their iOS Networking course
• My 3 most listened to artists while doing all of this work were Lupe Fiasco, J. Cole and Tech N9ne.
• I estimate I consumed approximately 580 cups of coffee

2016

The focus for the first half of the year is going to be all about finishing the v3 website work and then finally (I mean it, finally!) getting a chance to start the translation and multiple release improvements to the data. I also have some features around 3rd party logins planned as well as well. This coming year is all about data and improving it.

I wish all of you a happy holidays and I’ll leave you with this, a list of the most popular christmas movies on TMDb.

Until we chat again next year!