Renowned data analyst and columnist Stephen Follows published an interview with Bruce Nash, the founder and CEO of the box office website The Numbers. Together with Screendollars, The Numbers has established a reputation among the box office cognoscenti as one of the best websites for publishing industry data. This past March, The Numbers shut down suddenly, providing few details on why it had gone offline.
In his first interview since that event, Nash explained to Follows that his website’s issues were the result of artificial intelligence gone awry. Over the past 12 months, traffic to his website had increased exponentially with data bots ramping up to scrape data for their own use. By early this year, only 10% of The Numbers’ website traffic could be attributed to human users. The increased activity presented a challenge for Nash and his team. The Numbers’ website had evolved gradually over the course of almost three decades since it was started in 1997. This new traffic went beyond scraping the externally visible web pages, and veered into attempts to gather box office data before it was publicly available. There were even attempts to manipulate the data presented on the website.
Follows’ article is a fascinating story of the modern world of Internet publishers. Nash has been forced to rebuild his website from scratch, to provide enhanced security and scalability to counteract the onslaught of programmatic data crawling. With Ai’s appetite growing rapidly, the plight of The Numbers underscores the need for websites to reexamine their business model of providing data for free and redouble their investments in technology and security.
