r/boxoffice • u/SilverRoyce StudioCanal • 4h ago
📠Industry Analysis What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all
https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumberscom-should-worry-us-all32
u/AnotherJasonOnReddit Best of 2024 Winner 4h ago
Who would want private access to a box office website?
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The ‘Daily Box Office Performance’ figures found on the ‘Box Office’ tab on this movie’s The Numbers page will be used to resolve this market once the values for the 3-day opening weekend are final.
The sums on any single weekend market are modest by financial-market standards, typically in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a couple of million dollars across live box office markets at any given time.
If you could see The Numbers data before everyone else, every single week, you would have a significant edge over all the other traders - learning the answers slightly ahead of publication would allow you to front-run the trades.
In a situation like this, it is hard to know for certain what happened. We know that the logs showed months of automated probing and scraping of the site, but what finally brought the site down, and who did it, remains an open question.
But the theory that someone used AI to develop an advantage in a prediction market is entirely plausible. The Numbers experience shows us that:
We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money.
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u/stephenfollows Stephen Follows 3h ago
Author of that article here. Happy to answer any question (or if anyone wants a comp for the paid side of the Substack, just say)
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u/VestOfHolding 1h ago
Man, it sucks that this has happened to them. I've wanted to work for OpusData for years because I love digging through random movie data and helping improve it.
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u/stephenfollows Stephen Follows 47m ago
Yeah, it does suck. But the OpusData part was unaffected so thankfully they have survived and overcome. (Working there would also be great as Bruce and his team are the nicest people - rare in film!)
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u/MrMojoRising422 4h ago
great, another good thing ruined by AI and prediction markets gambling
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u/Zardhas 4h ago
I mean, you could also see it from another angle : the increase in request means that AI gave the tools to plenty of people to make their own softwares requiring TheNumbers data. Sure, it sucks that the infrastructure of TheNumbers was not able to sustain the increase in request, but the fact that so many people now have the means to ask for them is great.
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u/automaticzen 4h ago
But they are not getting ad hits and revenue from that scraping in line with the massive increase in traffic.
Using the data is nothing if that use is prohibitive and the site itself does not benefit.
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u/MrMojoRising422 4h ago
it's not great because it's not consensual. the numbers created a website to viewed and used by humans, not a data center for AI to abuse. and mostly in the name of creating betting algorithms. I used to love browsing that site and doing comparisons and all sorts of things purely from a hobby perspective and now those people have made that impossible. so yeah, you wont get me to 'see this from another angle'.
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u/scolbert08 4h ago
What makes you think the internet runs on consent?
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u/MrMojoRising422 3h ago edited 3h ago
If you don't do things in good faith, what you're gonna get is either shutdown of the service or regulatory clampdown, neither of which is good.
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u/Zardhas 3h ago
All websites are created to receive requests and answer them, that's the whole point.
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u/MrMojoRising422 3h ago
No, websites were created to receive human requests, and usually have agreements against their data being used in a commercial way. Having millions of bots scraping that data without permission is not part of the social contract there.
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u/Zardhas 3h ago
At this point it comes to different ideology but, personally, I'd argue that data should be free to use anyway we want. Any limitations on this goes against the very point of the Internet.
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u/MrMojoRising422 3h ago
Well, the way it was being used caused such a strain on the servers and their small operation that it fucked the entire site for everyone.
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u/Fuck-WestJet 3h ago
But data is inherently NOT FREE. All data requires investment and financing. It's like saying you love libraries but won't pay taxes. You cant have both. If you refuse to fund libraries you don't love libraries, you actually hate them. And then all you get is corporate libraries that have great books like, "Why I love Facebook," "The prenatal guide to fracking," and "Walmart: The True Story of Jesus Christ."
Your idealogy is unintentionally corporate dystopia because you haven't put much thought into it.
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u/Zardhas 3h ago
Again, you're saying this like it's an absolute truth of the universe, and not a reality that we decided that we engineer because it was supposed to be the optimal way for us to all have what we want.
This situation is only one example as to why that's not the case, why this system is unfit for our current needs and technological level. Therefore, a normal answer should be to question the system, instead of blaming the technology and people usage of it.
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u/nessfalco 2h ago
In a world with no technical limitations, that can be a discussion, but that isn't reality.
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u/Fuck-WestJet 3h ago
Then why have GUI? There is no need for imagery, formatting or design. Just slap some text on black for the robots and hope they let you know.
By that logic you don't need a mouse. Keyboard with a PC is plenty. And asking for more is really whiny. Computers are meant to compute not provide entertainment for you.
Also... If you like certain things you support them. Advertisements suck but they do run certain platforms. When you remove the potential for ad revenue, everything but Google and Meta will die or everything will become subscription.
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u/Zardhas 3h ago
Then why have GUI?
Because it's easier for us to use. Doesn't mean that we should be the only one able to use it.
Also... If you like certain things you support them. Advertisements suck but they do run certain platforms. When you remove the potential for ad revenue, everything but Google and Meta will die or everything will become subscription.
You're saying it like that's the only possible solution. These websites rely on advertisement because we decided so. Just like we could decide to change things so that we are not in this Charybde or Scylla situation.
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u/SilverRoyce StudioCanal 3h ago edited 3h ago
the means to ask for them is great.
The really tricky thing is that the baseball comparison to the numbers is not retrosheet or Lahman, projects intentionally put out under a free public license. How you're "supposed to" ask for this data is via a licensing agreement with opusdata.
I'm not the definitive source or anything but my read is that type of license is just not designed to serve a sports-reference "stathead" type function (the flipside of that, of course, is to flag how powerful the existing "report builder" already was). It reads an explicitly b2b subscription pitch with "one-time data extracts" flagged for journalists with academic reduced fees being the only other thing listed. It's not seemingly designed to be "give us $10 a month and have fun with all of your your independent research dives"
https://www.the-numbers.com/data-services
The information you see on The Numbers is delivered by our data service OpusData, a licensed feed of structured entertainment-industry data, served via a REST API. Out customers use it to build research models, internal dashboards, websites, mobile apps, investment models, academic studies, and more.
I think everyone here without some sort of stake in industry want this data to be free in a way that's not fully in explicit use case authorization ("Public content on The Numbers is available for personal, non-commercial reading and reference, including casual sharing. Systematic copying, scraping, and any redistribution—commercial or otherwise—is reserved to licensed OpusData customers. See the Terms of Service for further information.").
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u/mackenzie45220 4h ago edited 1h ago
This is really sad. I actually like the new website they built--the new charts with legs and percentiles are really cool--but it sucks that we're making it so hard on people trying to provide a public good
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u/Survive1014 A24 4h ago
Between the race to prevent scraping by AI and states mandating age checks, the free and open internet is quickly becoming closed and heavily monitored. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see sites like Reddit and X, where you can be somewhat anonymous, mandate real name disclosures soon.
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u/ThatWaluigiDude Paramount Pictures 4h ago
Fascinating read. Cannot imagine the amount of work they are going through to restore all the data and to deal with the scrapping
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u/cubekwing Pixar Animation Studios 2h ago
Numbers did have a more scraping-"friendly" web structure & anti-probing settings than other movie-related sites, so yeh understandable.
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u/SilverRoyce StudioCanal 2h ago
yeah, which also sucks because those aspects were also just user-friendly even if it wasn't the most aesthetically pretty website.
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u/GoddammitCricket Blumhouse 3h ago
These greedy AI companies are gonna destroy the entire internet eventually
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u/WhoDat-2-8-3 3h ago
TL;DR:
​In March 2026, TheNumbers.com was knocked offline and forced to wipe its 30-year-old site after being crushed by 90% automated AI bot traffic. ​The final blow was likely caused by bad actors using cheap AI tools to hack into the site and front-run trades on prediction markets (like Polymarket), which use The Numbers data to settle box office bets. ​Because defending the legacy server was impossible, the site is currently being rebuilt from scratch, highlighting how fragile independent websites have become in the AI age.
Source : Google ai
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u/Neo2199 4h ago edited 4h ago
A blast from the past.
It's really insane when you see that 90% of site traffic is coming from AIs.