Couple interesting notes about independent distribution

Joe Falcon was nice enough to point out this case study about another aggregator I'd never heard of called Quiver. The article is here:
http://nofilmschool.com/2016/11/cents-feature-film-distribution

Also, Jason got back to me again about Distribber. There's a podcast about one of their better-selling low budget zombie movies here that I haven't listened to yet, but am planning on it.
http://filmmakingstuff.podbean.com/e/ep-100-how-self-distributed-film-range-15-leveraged-distribber-to-access-itunes/

He says that Hulu is in a bit of a transition period right now--changing their deals up, so they're actually holding off making new deals there I think.

I really would like to find some other filmmakers with super-low budget movies who have tried Distribber, just to see what we might expect. Haven't found any yet though...

And as a note--you may have noticed me removing numbers in the other posts. The powers-that-be really don't want any metrics shared as far as minutes and whatnot. Getting kind of dickish, but don't wanna bite the hand that feeds, you know?

Especially when it's currently the only hand that's feeding...

As for Terrortory--while it's going down quite a bit in the minutes category, it's falling far slower in the countdown. It's still #16 in Horror, still top 150 overall.

So...What Now?

No, not that. Not yet.

(Though I HAVE finished writing the wrap-around in case I do it)

I'm still talking the first flick. I think we're still on course to do about REDACTED minutes for November. Sure, it's a big down-tick, but it's NOVEMBER. People are getting into the OTHER holiday spirits...

One thing slightly concerning is Amazon's dashboard states it's all "estimates", and they don't appear to be kidding. Bounty in its first month, according to their dashboard, did 1.1 million but on the actual earnings chart they claim it's actual 957,000 minutes...

They also sent me this regarding a DIFFERENT month than that:

This message is to notify you that we made an adjustment to your estimated revenue for the month of September to be more accurate and align with the actual payment you can expect to receive. The royalty revenue displayed on the Dashboard report is an estimated amount. From time to time, you may notice an adjustment has been made to your estimated revenue, like the one in your account for September. 

As you might expect, that adjustment was not in my favor. Not a HUGE difference, but still less.

At a certain point, sure, you start wondering WHO'S auditing these guys to make sure they're honest...

ANYWAY

The question now is, do we pursue a distributor? (I've technically sent one screener out to a company I heard still gives advances, but haven't heard back yet)

Or do we use an aggregator to get the movie out elsewhere? I contacted Jason Brubaker on Distribber. He's always been a pretty upfront, reachable guy. I had talked to him before when he was working on Chill, another distribution service.

I asked him about Netflix, and submitting Terrortory to them now. He said that if it was exploited on Amazon Prime it probably won't get picked up by Netflix.

Now, it's not a big deal to me. I mean, let's say Netflix is going to give us $10K for 6 months or a year...and believe me, it could be less than that. Guess what, we just made that on Amazon in ONE month. So if I'm only going to put Terrortory on one of those, I'd just as soon it be Amazon.

He suggested trying Vudu or Hulu. Vudu costs around $1200 to submit through Distribber and Hulu costs $1000. If the outlets don't accept your movie, Distribber gives you all but $120 back(for processing).

I have NO idea what Vudu pays--doesn't seem to be details on the percentage. I don't like that they set their own prices(you can recommend, but it doesn't necessarily matter).

Hulu pays by the view OR by ads in your movie--if it's per view it's eighteen and a half cents per view...which is actually worse than Amazon unless your movie is under 70 minutes long...

Is it worth it to go through the rigamarole for those two outlets? Let's say I submit to one and they accept...am I ever going to make that $1K-$1200 back?

Questions I'm mulling over now...

Amazon Video Terrortory Finals

So we got to #6. Pretty incredible.

We're currently at #8, still hanging in the top 10.



In-freakin-credible.

We had a talk and decided to leave it up for free until we all decide to make it pay-only. At this point it still looks to be on track for a lot of minutes in November, and the odds that we're gonna make that much money on paid-streams...just not sure.

And to take the chance and make it pay-only, and then have to wait for Amazon's analytics to tell us how it's doing(and they've been up to 5 days behind on minutes, and they're currently 3 weeks behind on Earnings)...it could be dangerous.

What happens if we get very few paid streams, and we drop out of the top 100 super fast? Even if we switch it to free again, it's not likely we'll catch it in time to stop the drop.

And at this point it should all be profit, so why not make what we can? I'm thinking about sending it to a couple of distributors to test those waters. I'm sure they will frown at us exploiting the film on Amazon already, and I'd give a shit if they were paying any kind of reasonable advances nowadays, but...they're not.

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On my other movies' front, Hunting Humans continue to out-perform Fear of Clowns 2. I really can't explain it. To be honest, FOC2 is the least-watched of ALL of my movies on Amazon when I was pretty sure it would be the most-watched.

Not sure how to explain it, especially when it's still selling on DVD.