With New Service 'Drip,' Kickstarter Aims to Make Filmmaking More Sustainable

"Kickstarter is for projects; Drip is for people."

That's Kickstarter's tagline for Drip, its new service, launching today. Built as a tool to empower "serial online content creators" on an ongoing basis, Drip enables filmmakers to receive sustained support from their audiences. In return, filmmakers open the door to their processes, allowing subscribed audience members direct access to notes from production, in-progress cuts, and a system of rewards. Filmmakers decide whether to charge subscribers on either a project-by-project or monthly basis and can design multiple subscription tiers. According to Kickstarter, Drip is poised to become a powerful audience-building tool for filmmakers—as well as an opportunity to receive continuous financial support.

Drip provides an opportunity for filmmakers to receive continuous financial support.

For now, Drip is invite-only. (Enter your email at the bottom of the Drip homepage to be notified about when you can join.) Elizabeth Lo, who was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 Faces of Independent Film in 2015, has been invited to be Drip's first film creator. Her work has been broadcast and showcased around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and New York Times Op-Docs.

"I had always planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign when I got to post-production for my first feature," Lo told No Film School, "not just to raise funds but also to start building awareness for the film. But Drip feels like an opportunity to start even earlier in a softer way, and helps to pave a path for me to develop followers over the long-term so that when I do launch a Kickstarter that is much more time-sensitive, I'll have a built-in audience that I can turn to who I know already like my work and want to support it. Drip feels like a great platform to do that in a way that I wouldn't on Facebook to my friends or on YouTube to anonymous strangers."

Drip originally launched as a pioneering subscription platform in 2011 by the record label Ghostly International. Now, Drip launches with the "full weight of the Kickstarter experience, infrastructure, and community behind it," according to a press release. Since its launch in 2009, Kickstarter has facilitated more than $3 billion in pledges to more than 130,000 creative projects. In the Film & Video category specifically, the crowdfunding site has seen more than 23,000 successfully funded projects, raising over $330 million.