There is nothing like waking up in the morning and being blackmailed. This is essentially what is happening to thousands, and possibly millions, of hard working entertainment industry professionals, who woke up to find their “Starmeter” ratings on IMDB.com had lowered by thousands, sometimes millions, of points. The higher the number the worse the ranking. In other words, 1 is good, and 10 Million is bad.  What’s driving these changes is even more concerning than the numerical changes, themselves.

IMDB is short for Internet Movie Database.  For more than 15 years, IMDB has attempted to list all the credits in movies and television, to partial success.  Initially, IMDB.com was a simple site not run by conglomerates with their own advertorial or promotional agendas.  Since that time, however, IMDB.com has been bought and sold and bought again by Warner Brothers, and now Amazon, with a clear bias towards certain movies.

IMDB already collects fees from industry professionals through a portal called IMDBPRO.com, where professionals can manage their personal profiles on IMDB.  Also visible on the public IMDB.com site is something called a STARMETER ranking.  This seemingly innocuous ranking is an attempt to quantify the popularity of entertainment people into some sort of ranking system.  To many, the starmeter rankings are irrelevant, but if you put something out there in the public domain for long enough, some people, like first time film investors, new producers, or new casting directors, begin to take it seriously.

In the spring of 2013, one of our contributing editors, who is also a known and award winning entertainment professional,  received a rash of email offers from companies like Direct Image PR and Star Boost Media,  offering to lower her starmeter ranking (remember, a lower ranking is better here).  Why would these all come at the same time?  A simple “whois” search on the internet revealed that regardless of their claims, all of these companies went online beginning in the spring of 2013, just before the mass emailing of registrants on IMDB and IMDBPRO began.  All these companies claim no affiliation with IMDB.

This proliferation of companies offering to better your starmeter ranking directly coincides with a decision made internally, at IMDB’s parent company, Amazon.  Shortly before these ranking companies emerged, Amazon made the decision to end its long standing relationship with CMGI Tabulations Inc., and now tabulates the starmeter rankings internally, using an algorithm nobody will talk about.

Curious, last year our contributing editor, Anna Wilding, signed up for one of these services to see how these new companies were able to manipulate Amazon’s new, and seemingly impenetrable new algorithm, and how it affected her own starmeter ranking.  Anna has been ranked by IMDB’s starmeter rankings for 15 years.  In that time, her ranking has been relatively consistent, ebbing and flowing organically between 90 000 to 5000 with Ms. Wilding’s film projects and presence in the media, as evidenced by the graph only available to IMDBPRO’s paying customers.  Ms. Wilding’s graph had not gone below 100 000 in all those 15 years.

The one week test yielded a temporary gain in starmeter ranking.  But, when Ms. Wilding stopped her payments to this company a week later, the sample ranking company hounded Ms. Wilding, relentlessly, with request after request on PayPal.  When she refused to pay what amounted to hundreds of dollars, her ranking immediately went up (up being bad).  This morning, the starmeter scam hit a new level.  Ms. Wilding awoke to find her starmeter ranking had fallen from its average of around 35,000 to an all-time low of 5,000,000.  Accompanied with this drop was a Google search claim from a company called IMDBPROMO.com, asking for $999.00 to restore someone’s ranking.  Apparently many IMDB users woke up in the last ten days to find this anomaly.

How, we wondered, could a third party company manipulate starmeter’s rankings?  We pulled the source code from the graph page, and found that the rankings are fed not from IMDBPRO’s own servers, but instead directly from Amazon’s servers.  And why would Amazon allow a company to use the name and logo of one of its subsidiaries, IMDB, in a third-party website and logo?  True, IMDBPROMO’s website states they have no affiliation with IMDB.COM, but IMDBPROMO registered its website in 2013, and updated their database on March 10th, the same morning Ms. Wilding’s starmeter soared off the charts from 90,000 on March 9 down to over 5,000,000 this morning.

To make matters even more confounding, Ms. Wilding’s starmeter ranking remained relatively consistent even while she was out of the country for two years.  This year, with increased visibility and publicity in Hollywood, and especially with the media gernated during Oscar season, Ms. Wilding’s ranking should, organically, be lower, not higher than ever.  There is no question that these rankings were artificiality manipulated.  Thus, the starmeter ranking system makes no sense, and should now be ignored.

This is especially true, as other sites have been reporting, that actors nobody has heard of, and who have not been in the media at all, have topped the starmeter rankings for weeks on end.  This has all been very damaging for hard working entertainment industry professionals, who are falsely judged by these bogus starmeter rankings.

It is clear from IMDB message board complaints and complaints across the internet that hundreds, if not millions, of IMDB users are being conned, blackmailed, and fraudulently shamed into  paying millions of dollars to maintain their starmeter rankings. And it appears that the main company benefiting from all this, through a series of shell companies, is Amazon, the very company charging IMDBPRO members, in the first place.

To date, IMDB has not been helpful to its complaining customers, basically just letting it happen, and that is questionable given that IMDB and Amazon continue to allow some of these third-tier companies, like IMDBPROMO, to operate using their name and likeness.

A message has been left with the Screen Actor’s Guild for comment and action, and it is known that law firms have received queries about class action lawsuits against IMDB and Amazon for directly manipulating select subscribers’ data.  There is also the matter of the questionable sale of data and information to third parties.

One thing is clear – whatever credibility and integrity that IMDB and their starmeter rankings may have had, has disappeared.  Amazon’s dirty little secret is out.

NOTE:  It was brought to our attention after publishing this article that Star Boost Media and IMDBPROMO are the same company.

This article is courtesy of The Herald de Paris