MovieChat Forums > Shop Talk Directors > YouTube as a Viable Distribution Option?

YouTube as a Viable Distribution Option?

posted 6 years ago by jsjohnson (6)
1 reply | jump to latest

Firstly I guess this is more of a "Producer's Shop Talk" ... but that does not exist. So I apologize in advance.

In 2012 I self distributed my feature film on YouTube for free, with a business plan that included returns from advertisement motorization. We created a bunch of bonus features to go along with full free movie.. for some bonus revenue...

In any case! The experiment did not work... per-say. We got to 1.2mil views and the movie got flagged for adult content, and thus we lost the ability to make money off advertisements. At this point we had already been working on promoting the movie for a full year... but we had also just reached our peak of 5k a day, if this trend had continued, we had forecasted that we would have made back our 10k budget in 1.5 years time... 2.5 years including the first year.

Anywho! I'm just wondering if anyone else has had experience distributing their feature film on youtube! I would love to hear your findings!!!

[–] rooprect (202) 6 years ago

Wow, that's a really interesting idea and good to know it was working. I've never put up a feature length film, just short 5 min bits like the average YouTuber.

My concern would be that the average YouTube viewer doesn't have a very long attention span (not like on platforms specifically designed for films & tv like Hulu), so you would only get a fraction of the YouTube audience. A way around this might be to chop your film into 10-15 min "episodes" uploaded separately. Of course this might compromise the integrity of your work. But it's an effective way to keep viewers and also maximize your presence in the search results.

Saturday Night Live does this; instead of uploading entire 70 min episodes, they break each episode into maybe a dozen skits,. I often go to their channel just to check out 1 skit but I end up getting hooked and watching a whole show's worth on auto-play.

Either way, I think you've got a smart business model of making your films free and generating revenue on ads. You'll definitely get much more exposure that way.