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Is Phased Distribution the Future of Self Distribution?

09.7.10 @ 12:56PM Tags : audience, books, distribution, diy, publishing, revenue

Last week I wrote about bestselling author Seth Godin’s switch to self-publishing and what it could mean for filmmakers. Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker Magazine linked to the post in his invaluable Instapaper Sunday Morning Links, along with a pro-publisher argument written cogently at TechCrunch by author Paul Carr (whose book Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore has been in my queue for a while). The slug of Carr’s post — “Self Publish and Be Damned” — makes his views pretty clear, but upon further reflection I think both Carr and I are oversimplifying the argument and missing out on a viable distribution strategy for the published and unpublished alike. More »

1

What is Google’s take from the ads on this site (and all around the ‘net)?

05.25.10 @ 11:57AM Tags : ads, adsense, advertising, google, meta, revenue

To date, all of the ads on NoFilmSchool have been Google AdSense ads, which means that Google is filtering the keywords on my site — along with your browsing history, apparently — to serve ads that the big G thinks are most relevant to you (NoFilmSchool is no different than millions of other sites in this regard). In the history of the universe Google has never shared how much of a cut they take for being the middleman between advertiser and publisher; today, that changed. More »

3

What do musicians earn? What if we had these statistics for filmmakers?

05.20.10 @ 12:18PM Tags : analytics, charts, distribution, music, revenue, sales

For a musician to earn a meager living (defined here as a minimum wage of $1,160 a month), how many self-pressed CDs do they have to sell out of the back of a truck every month? If they have a record deal and their music is listed on a subscription service like Rhapsody (a former employer of mine), how many streams do they have to generate to take home the same amount? David McCandless, author of the book The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Consequential Trivia, has published detailed statistics for musicians (included below). What if we had these same numbers for filmmakers? More »

4

Why are box office numbers public, but not VOD, DVD, and PPV? A call for indie analytics

05.8.10 @ 12:00PM Tags : bryannewman, indiefilm, revenue

Indie film consultant Brian Newman (@bnewman01) has posted a call for better analytics in order to figure out the future of independent film. To Bryan, “the biggest problem facing the indie film field is the lack of transparency around the numbers. Which numbers? All of them.” I wholeheartedly agree and this is exactly why I’m trying to share my own metrics — for now, it’s just blog revenue, but in the near future it will be video views/income as well.

Some salient questions from Bryan: More »