What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

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What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all<br>The inside story of how one of film data's most trusted sites vanished overnight, and why every website you rely on is more fragile than you think.

Stephen Follows<br>Jul 22, 2026

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If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.<br>Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.<br>And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.<br>On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.<br>With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does - with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.<br>One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.<br>Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:<br>We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, 'Where's this page that you used to have and you don't have anymore?'

Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet.<br>First, some background

On Friday 17 October 1997, mathematician and former IBM software developer Bruce Nash launched a Geocities site that tracked 300 films.<br>Bruce described the launch in a 20th anniversary essay (which now survives only in the Internet Archive, for reasons that will become clear):<br>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.

From those humble beginnings, Bruce and the team he built around the site turned The Numbers into the film industry's most reliable financial source.<br>At the start of 2026, the database tracked 78,396 movies, 178,375 theatrical release records, and 236,176 people.<br>The robots arrive

During its lifetime, the challenges The Numbers has faced have changed immensely. For its first quarter century or so, the traffic was manageable and mostly polite. As Bruce puts it:<br>Pre-AI, we got human traffic, mostly well-behaved search engine crawlers, and a few people crawling the site for personal projects. If someone got too greedy, we could spot them and block them.

Over the past couple of years, website owners the world over have seen their web traffic change. What was initially only people browsing gave way to an ever-increasing number of bots. By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests.<br>The Numbers felt this shift in two distinct waves. The first started around 2024:<br>We saw a big increase in crawls as AI training joined the search engine crawlers. The AI crawlers are generally less well-behaved than the search engines, which increased the management tasks for us to keep the site running smoothly.

And the second wave was stronger and more damaging:<br>Around December 2025, we saw another big spike in traffic which I attribute to agentic AI: a combination of AI agents that scrape sites in response to prompts, and people being able to write agents that scrape sites.

Like every data-rich site, by early 2026 The Numbers was being hammered hard by AI bots scraping its pages over and over at an industrial scale. Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

Websites try to adapt to the new robots

This put enormous strain on the site, but Bruce and his team were able to take measures to mitigate the worst of it. One of the cleverest was talking to the robots in their own language:<br>There’s stuff on the site which is designed for an LLM to read, so that it can tell somebody ‘here’s how you licence the data’ rather than ‘here’s how you scrape the website’. It’s had a huge effect. We’re now getting probably ten times the volume of licensing enquiries.

But mitigation is not the same as escape. From December through early March, the team struggled to keep the site alive under the load. Bruce estimates that:<br>Around...