Is there any logic behind the numbering of people on IMDB?

Cafe Society
1

Each movie on IMDB has a unique number, which appears in the URL. For instance, the URL for Ocean’s Twelve is http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349903/

If you replace 0349903 with 0000001, you get the page for a short featuring Carmencita, the first motion picture made in America. Makes sense, right?

So what about the “people” pages? These have the format http://www.imdb.com/name/nmXXXXXXX/ - for instance, John Candy is at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001006/

So who’s at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000001/ ? Fred Astaire. And Lauren Bacall’s at 0000002. Then comes Brigitte Bardot, John Belushi and Ingmar Bergman.

Is there any logic to this? They’re in alphabetical order, sure, and they’re all big names, but what gives? Did they just choose a random selection of stars to start off with, and list them in order? Any ideas?

2

Looks like it starts out alphabetically from the first group of actors added. However, since actors can be added in all sorts of orders, they probably just number them as new actors are added. You wouldn’t want Andrew Aarons to become an actor an have to renumber everyone. :slight_smile:

3

Probably whenever they add a new movie or actor, it gets a unique ID number in their database, and that ID is used in URLs to reference an entry. I’m guessing when they first started, they imported an alphabetical list of actors (and maybe a chronological list of movies), and that initial group is numbered in alphabetical (or chronological) order. After that, it’s just based on the order that new entries were added to the database.