The Numbers Turns 20
October 17, 2017
On Friday, October 17, 1997 I hit a button in an Access database, uploaded some HTML pages to Geocities, and made a brief announcement on the Hollywood Stock Exchange message boards to let people know that I was starting to analyze box office for films to help them pick MovieStocks to trade on HSX. People responded positively, and soon the site, which I had decided to call The Numbers, was getting 200 or more page views a day, according to the little counter I had embedded at the bottom of the page.
That was 20 years ago. Today, The Numbers reaches around a million readers a month, and we provide the most complete, accurate, and up-to-date reporting on movie industry finances. Beyond The Numbers web site, our services help movie producers, exhibitors, distributors, and investors around the world analyze their movies’ and the industry’s financial prospects.
What started as a hobby to keep up my coding and analytical expertise, and help people play the HSX has long since become a broad-based movie financial business. But as The Numbers has grown and changed, the fundamentals have remained the same: leveraging our team’s skill and curiosity to connect the movie business and data analysis.
When the site debuted, Jurassic Park was the top-grossing film of all time, though that was about to change: my recollection is that the site really took off with the release of Titanic a couple of months later. But looking back through the records reveals that “taking off” meant hitting 300 page views a day—respectable for 1997, but tiny by today’s standards. My news posts at the time detail the trials and tribulations of getting dial-up connections around the world as I traveled on business. The site predates the public release of the first version of PHP, and, since I didn’t have the time or patience to work with CGI scripts (the only way of creating dynamic pages on the web at the time), and Geocities only allowed static content anyway, everything would be compiled on my laptop and uploaded one page at a time. Ah, the good old days…
Over time, with the help of fellow webmasters, and books I bought at the local computer bookstore in Palo Alto, I moved the site over to a dedicated web server. I built a content management system (completed just before the first release of Wordpress in early 2003) that allowed us to start running news articles from multiple contributors. C.S. began writing for the site, and has done so ever since, publishing at least one article every day, pretty much every day. His monthly previews, 170-or-so to date, have become legendary, and are usually our most-read articles each month. In all, we've published around 20,000 news articles, and he’s written most of them.
Pim started helping out at about the same time, and he and I traded the cumbersome Access database backwards and forwards (via email!) as we built out the database. He now handles all the front-end development (fortunately, in the years since the site started, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript and CSS were invented, making things a little easier).
During this time, the database expanded rapidly, along with our film business expertise. I moved to Los Angeles in 2004, which put me in the heart of the industry. Deep archival work into historical issues of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter allowed me to extend our database of weekend numbers back to 1980 (before weekend charts even existed). Daily and weekend reports direct from the studios kept us up-to-date on an ongoing basis.
With the web becoming ubiquitous, and traffic up to the tens of thousands of pages a day, the site was well-known in the film industry, and we were getting requests from film-makers for help with their business plans. This led me to develop a system for tracking DVD sales, which we launched in early 2006 and have been extending ever since: we now track DVD and Blu-ray sales, physical disk rentals, and VOD transactions on a weekly basis.
With growing demand for analytical services in the industry, I formed Nash Information Services, LLC in January, 2006. We now provide data to over 1,000 clients, ranging from Wall Street firms and billion-dollar film investors, to independent film-makers who are just getting started in the business. Our analysis has helped launch hundreds of films at this point, from tiny niche productions to Oscar-winning juggernauts.
In 2009, Martyn, a highly-experienced system developer, began working with me to rebuild the original database and develop it into the OpusData service—a single, integrated database of all the information we collect. Ryan joined in 2010 to manage the monumental task of moving all the data we’d gathered in many nooks and crannies over into OpusData.
Today, OpusData allows us to provide box office reporting in near-real-time: data usually appears on The Numbers within 60 seconds of being reported to us by the studios. It also allows us to package giant data extracts for analytical work (someone counted over 100 academic papers that use our data a few years ago), and provide data to many other web sites and services. And we can do “Big Data” analysis of our own, including the Bankability Index.
All of this, of course, wouldn’t be possible without remarkably dedicated and talented people: C.S. is still writing his news articles at all hours of the day and night, Pim does front-end development and Martyn works on the back end. Our data team keeps the site up to date every day: Brian handles the domestic market, and Jo is in charge of international tracking, with Jennifer and Cody providing them support. Manuel handles the back office. The continued existence of the site and the business is entirely down to their efforts, and a couple of alumni: Ryan, my second-in-command, passed away suddenly last year and is dearly missed by us all, and Nettie has left us for other projects, but will hopefully be back soon.
For me, The Numbers has been a 20-year adventure that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. It’s given me the opportunity to be part of the development of the internet, and the film industry’s move to analytics. Looking back through the site over the years to write this article reminded me of myriad experiences, big and small. Our struggle to get properly listed in the Yahoo! directory when that was still how people found web sites. Being one of the first places Rotten Tomatoes advertised when it was starting out. Offering insight to news organizations around the world on such diverse topics as pre-release scandals, industry profitability, the real box office performance of Gone with the Wind, and North Korean hacking, to name just a few. Becoming the official arbiter of movie records for the Guinness Book of Records. It’s also reminded me of how far we’ve come, from a hobbyist website—I would call it a blog, but this was before blogs existed—to a financial analysis business and community of experts.
Along the way, I’ve always believed that the best course is to be independently owned and operated. I’ve turned down several offers (some of them generous) to purchase the business in the belief that becoming a small fish in those bigger ponds would end with The Numbers either being left to wither away, or repurposed into corporate blandness or a source of clickbait articles. The experiences of others that followed that path have borne that out, I believe.
For The Numbers readers, keeping the site free has also been a long-term goal, because I think it’s important that good information gets out to an industry that needs real data, along with its hopes and dreams. We’ve tried hard to keep a balance between running enough ads to keep the site afloat and not overburdening the reader with distractions. And we’ll keep on adding new features over the months and years to come.
For our clients in the industry, we are proud to have helped you realize your creative goals and look forward to the next twenty years of supporting your work. We continue to evolve our tracking to keep pace with a rapidly-changing industry. In 1997, knowing how much a film made at the box office was pretty much all you needed to know. Today, revenue comes from many directions: DVD and Blu-ray sales, subscription and ad-supported streaming services, rental kiosks, and more; and international markets grow to be a bigger and bigger part of the industry every year. We will continue to provide analysis you can trust, whichever way the industry evolves in the future.
Here’s to the next 20 years!
Bruce Nash, Founder
The early days: tech and movie geekery meet
The power of data and analytics
The business of movies
Towards the next 20 years