Personally, I don’t like the term “fanbase.” I prefer the simpler term “base.” I also like “core following.” I find those to be more instructive. Today’s media creators can learn a lot from politicians who understand things like kissing babies & shaking hands, galvanizing the base, and “all politics are local.” Political pundits have developed a shorthand for how politicans roll: there’s retail politics and wholesale politics. Retail politics is direct, one-on-one… shakin’ babies and kissin’ hands. Wholesale politics is broad, massmarket… reading a teleprompter on network television. I suppose in the Age of Obama we could probably add a third category: aggregator politics–the use of web-systems to create retail connections on a wholesale level. [I brought up Obama so I guess I should close out that thought: Obama is masterful as a wholesale politician and groundbreaking as an aggregator politician, but not so great as a retail politician. Then why did he crush his opposition? Is retail politics less effective than wholesale & aggregator politics? I don't think so. I think he developed aggregator politics into a science to offset his retail weakness, and he raised enough money to crowd out opposition in the far costlier battleground of wholesale politics. But that's just my humble opinion and I digress.]

There’s a theory that’s been circulating the past few years called A Thousand True Fans… basically if an artist can have 1,000 people who adore her work enough to buy everything she does as soon as she does it, that artist can make a decent living. It works a bit better for say a singer-songwriter than an actress or filmmaker, but that’s not the point. The point is “True Fan.” True Fan does not equal Fan and it does not equal Friend. It’s a very specific type of person… it’s basically a fan who feels they have a personal connection with you, but not so much that they’re actually your friend (because your friends want everything for free). Where does a True Fan come from? I believe a True Fan comes from retail politics.

I’ve Got 99 Problems and being famousish ain’t 1

I occasionally roll with famousish people. It’s a bit more fun than rolling with people who wish they were famous and a lot less fun than rolling with criminals. But most famousish people are nice enough.

A couple months back I was hanging with a famousish actress at a festival. I asked her if she’s psyched that she won the lottery and became famousish really early in life, and her answer was that she was happy about it because she “really learned a lot about people.” Really? Being famousish enables you to really learn a lot about people?

For the rest of the day, I watched her get hounded by fans who interrupted her conversations, asked her questions that had nothing to do with herself or even her public persona but simply about characters she’s played, and aggressively requested (demanded?) she take photos with them so they could grab her around the waist and smear sweat on her shoulder.

I don’t know what those kinds of experiences teach her about people, but if it were me I’d probably learn that most people are a mix of narcissistic dorks and overly-entitled assholes. I would think my fans were to be tolerated rather than appreciated and that they existed for profit not for connection.

So despite it being one-on-one, that’s not what I mean when I say retail politics.

That kind of relationship is the fruit of wholesale politics and massmarketing. It’s a relationship of “star” and “fan.” Massmarketing puts up huge barriers between stars and fans. On its face, the symbiotic relationship of mutual exploitation is fine, but it’s not built to last. The barrier between star and fan is erected by middlemen who profit from the transaction until the relationship inevitably sours. The fans and the middlemen move their attention to another star, and the star has no fanbase to call her own. Bummer for the star.

The key to retail-politics and base-building, in my opinion, is creating a direct, personal connection with your audience.

I’ve had a lot of different experiences marketing/promoting films and events, but there are two that really define the poles for me here.

My experiences in retail politics
After making the guerrilla-indie film Threat with the Kings Mob crew, we piled into a van and drove cross-country to Sundance. We were naive enough to think Sundance was some sort of halfway house for aspiring filmmakers, so it seemed like the place to take our film even though we weren’t actually invited (or welcome). I was 23 at the time and the internet was fairly new but it was already an effective means of organizing. Through hardcore-punk messageboards and the mailing list we’d developed during production, we turned our trip to Sundance into a little mini-tour. On the Atari Teenage Riot messageboard, we found a dude in Pittsburgh who offered to screen the movie in his apartment and let us sleep on his floor. Not only was the apartment packed full of awesome people when we got there, but he became one of my very close friends and ten years later he flew to LA for my wedding (I also eventually convinced him to make a vegan cooking DVD we put out). It’s weird to describe a relationship like that as retail politics or marketing, but it’s an instructive example of how marketing can result in real personal connections. On the way to Sundance, we met some of the most amazing, coolest people I’d ever met in my life, slept on their floors, ate the food they cooked for us, and played our movie for them and their friends and whoever else showed up. The audiences ranged from 10-300, which isn’t all that different from a lot of movie theater showings I’ve had over the years, except for the insightful conversations and personal connections that followed. I remember one night we played the movie in a bar in Iowa City and someone who really wanted to see it missed the show, so we went to her apartment that night and played it for a packed room (many of whom had seen it earlier in the night and wanted to watch it again) while we ate the bean burritos she cooked us and slept on her floor. This all probably sounds very small and unprofitable, but it is neither. Not only were these great times and great people, but the shows were more consistently profitable than a lot of things we do on a massmarket level these days, and without those relatively small pieces coming together I would’ve never had the base that’s enabled me to function on a massmarket level. If anything, I regret not being able to do more of those types of events today. Anyhow, we eventually made our way to Sundance where, of course, nobody gave a shit about us. None of the suits trying to get on the guestlist for the coolest coke parties wanted to see our movie. And if we hadn’t built our base along the way, we would’ve been fucked. BUT on the way to Sundance we’d learned that we didn’t need the suits to reach our audience. So we walked into a Doc Marten’s shoe store across the street from Sundance’s flagship Egyptian Theater and talked to the clerks, who later convinced their bosses to let us show the movie there. Then we went to WalMart and talked to the skater girl working in the electronics section about WalMart’s 30-Days No Questions Asked return policy. We outfitted the shoe store with as many TVs as we could put on our credit cards (all to be returned shortly thereafter) and promoted our shows to hardcore kids, skaters, snowboarders, and various young ne’er-do-wells in the greater Salt Lake City area. We wound up with lines around the block, all four showings sold out, and a 4-page feature cover story in London’s Daily Telegraph Saturday Magazine, which we later parlayed into a European tour. That was neither small nor unprofitable.

My experiences in wholesale politics
When I was turning 30, I’d been through the wringer a few times and was broke and working graveyard shifts in a print shop in Central LA. One night at around 4am, I was arguing with my supervisor about something ridiculous and realized I needed to get the fuck out of there before I wound up losing my temper and doing something stupid (as I’m apt to do). So I went out in the parking lot, sat on the tailgate of my pickup truck, drank cold coffee and decided to dig up Threat, stitch it into some sort of Frankenstein and raise it from the dead so I could get out of my job. The question was how to do that with a strange little movie that never got much interest from the industry and whose core audience seemed to be hardcore punk kids, anarcho-squatters, radical protesters, and black women (what? I have no idea, that’s just how Threat rolls). To solve that problem, I considered a few of the cultural shifts that’d occurred since Threat had its life cycle as an underground weirdo movie: DVDs became huge, hardcore-punk and its metalcore derivations became popular, and “mashups” became stylish. So… I decided to make a Threat soundtrack album of hardcore bands being mashed up by electronica DJs, take that to one of the major studios that distributes indie labels, tell them it’s a modern day “Judgment Night” soundtrack, and convince them to give me a bunch of money for my new DVD/CD movie & soundtrack label. And basically that’s what I did. I got a bunch of money from Sony and I was so sick of retail politics that all I wanted to do was spend someone else’s money and market the film to people who buy stuff (astonishingly enough, anarcho-squatters don’t buy a lot of DVDs) so I could pay off my debts to society for years of indie rabblerousing. All of this led to some questionable marketing decisions where Frankenstein-Threat was retrofitted for American malls. Nearly ten years after it took its first breath of life as a gritty little bastard of a film that played bars, basements, and anarchist bookstores, Threat was essentially dolled up in a spiked collar & mascara’d eyes as a “New Release” at FYE, Tower, and Hot Topic sandwiched in between Thirteen and Underworld with full page ads in Revolver and Alternative Press and commercials running on MTV2 and Fuse. The result? Meh. It sold ok, but at such astronomical marketing cost that it wasn’t worth the effort. Plus it made its money by selling to people it wasn’t suited for, so the initial audience and critic response was lousy and that did more harm than good. I’d basically gone out of my way to make all the newbie mistakes of chasing massmarket will-o-wisps that we’d been savvy enough to avoid the first time around. So, kicking myself for being an idiot, I went back out on the road and started the retail politics of Threat over again from scratch, playing it in small venues, hanging with the audience afterward to discuss the film, seeking out critics with the appropriate tastes to understand the film and champion it, shakin’ babies and kissin’ hands. I managed to salvage it again (or maybe it managed to salvage me again), and it finally settled into the kind of respected-by-weirdos movie it was intended to be. And it got me out of the print shop, so I guess the ridiculous scheme worked at the end of the day.

Here’s the lesson I took from all this:
Threat wasn’t sustainable as a solely retail-politics style release, but it wasn’t launchable as a solely wholesale-politics style release. It needed both. AS DOES EVERYTHING. Your boat needs both a paddle and a sail, otherwise you’ll either never get out to sea in the first place or you’ll exhaust yourself once you get there.

You’re not making movies or music or webisodes or whatever it is you think you’re making, you’re making personal connections with other people. A film is a personal connection between the filmmakers and the film watchers. If you ignore that connection, the product itself has no value.

Making a personal connection with members of your audience can take many forms. It can consist of sleeping on their floors, facebook-friending them, or meeting them in public and taking a picture with them. However, it doesn’t mean getting a spambot to autofriend them or holding your nose in the photo. That’s why I prefer the example of sleeping on their floor… you can’t get a bot to sleep on someone’s floor for you. I’ll get into aggregator-politics in a future post (and hopefully a more concise, focused one at that), but do not make the mistake of confusing retail-politics with aggregator-politics. They’re two different things, even though they can be done using similar tools.

Your job is to cultivate a core following that cares about your message and what you do, and will support you with cash-purchases and positive word of mouth as you create your body of work. That process cannot be outsourced to spambots and massmarket advertising, it can only be done one personal connection at a time. Only once you’ve built that support network can you potentially benefit from the wholesale-politicking of massmarket distribution.

I can’t remember ever feeling quite so smart and quite so stupid at exactly the same time.

There’s a concept you hear every so often from media pundits and technology providers: the last ten feet. Basically it refers to the process of digitally delivering movies and TV shows and other video content via the internet. Internet speeds and compression and bandwidth have gotten to the point where high quality video can be sent from anywhere in the world right to your computer… but you probably want to watch it on your TV… and your TV is only another ten feet or so away… but the internet just doesn’t know how to get there.

So there are all sorts of proprietary solutions for how to connect your TV to the internet. If you want to buy an Apple TV, you can port your iTunes videos to your TV through Apple TV… but Apple TV is lame so it’s not being broadly adopted. Microsoft has its cumbersome home network system or its Xbox Live system where you can buy downloads of TV shows & movies or stream Netflix movies if you have an account… but you can’t just download or stream anything you want, only what Microsoft or Netflix has negotiated to sell you—and Netflix has a particularly weak catalog since suppliers are sick of getting nuggied by Netflix’s business model that seems to help Netflix and nobody else. Playstation 3 has a similar operation developing, as does Wii and Roku (formerly a Netflix-only box) which are offering broader catalogs from Hulu and Amazon Unbox. And there’s plenty more… it seems like every day someone is popping up with a new set-top box that will finally connect my TV to the internet.

Basically, everyone wants to be the iPod of movies and TV. Apple figured out how to integrate your stolen mp3s with your walkman in a seamless configuration that was hip, stylish, and integrated into Apple technology… the rest is a CNBC special on the genius of Steve Jobs, rugged capitalist individualist.

But iTunes and the iPod were integrating my access to *everything* into a newfangled walkman. It worked because the internet was already providing me with all the music I could possibly want to hear, Steve Jobs just gave me a simple way to organize and enjoy what I already had. iTunes did not generate false scarcity, it managed abundance.

These set-top boxes, however, are creating a false scarcity of available video content. They’re trying to tell me what I’m allowed to see and how I’m allowed to watch it. I want to watch Battlestar Galactica so I download it on my Xbox, but then I’m not allowed to take it off my Xbox without Xbox-branded plugins. I want to watch Season 1 of True Blood, but HBO only seems to have it available digitally on iTunes… who imposes DRM that prevents me from watching it on my TV unless I buy their stupid set-top box. I can’t even watch it on HBO On Demand through my cable provider, even though I pay a monthly subscription to the bastards and I hardly ever watch any of their goddamned programming. So I wind up calling Blockbuster (since both my local indie videostores have gone out of business thanks to Netflix) asking to see what discs they have in stock like I’m back in 1992 or something. Ridiculous.

Don’t these disservice-providers understand that I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it? I don’t want to wait 2 days for Netflix to deliver it by mail like this is some Benjamin Franklin pony express bullshit… 2 days from now I’ll want to watch something else. And I certainly don’t want to have to choose from Netflix’s paltry Watch Now catalog just because they’re too miserly to offer suppliers enough incentive to sign on their streaming service.

So… I wanted to watch this mumblecore movie and of course it’s not on Xbox Live, it’s not on Netflix Watch Now, it’s not on Amazon Unbox, it’s not on Hulu, and it’s not on my Time Warner Cable On Demand. It’s not available for download on the filmmaker’s website or on the distributor’s website. But it is on Pirate Bay. So fuck you set-top box providers and fuck you filmmaker and distributor, you make it so I can’t see this thing legally and conveniently I’ll just download the torrent.

So I download the torrent and I’m about to watch it on my computer when something occurs to me… why can’t I just walk it over to my TV? I dump the file on one of the USB flash drives I have laying around. These days they’re like $20 for 15 GB and I keep accidentally leaving them in my pants when I do my laundry so I have like a gazillion of them laying around.

I drag the avi file I just downloaded from Pirate Bay onto the USB flash drive and I walk ten feet to my TV. I start looking for USB ports. Voila! Xbox has USB ports. I plug it in. I navigate to Video Library and it shows my USB drive. So I click it and there’s that little whippersnapper of an avi file. I click there, Xbox downloads some driver automatically, and 10 seconds later I’m watching the movie on my bigass flatscreen TV and it looks pretty fuckin sweet.

Am I an idiot? Does everyone else already know you can do this?

I did a little more research and found that on Amazon I can buy an iPod-to-RCA adapter for 53 cents. If you aren’t a techie, RCA outputs are the red/white/yellow plugs that come out of your VHS player or DVD player (if you’re not using one of the newer options like HDMI) and plug easily into just about any TV on the planet.

So then I wanted to see what else I could play on my Xbox besides avi files. On our website Televandalism we sell all our movies as DRM-free m4v files because that’s the file type we found to be most compatible with iPods, and we figured at the time that the most likely reason to download a movie rather than stream it would be for portability via iPod.

So I downloaded an m4v of Pilates For Indie Rockers, dropped it on the USB flash drive, plugged it into the Xbox, and goddamn it played easy and looked awesome. No fuss, no muss… does that mean I can finally get rid of this goddamned bookshelf full of DVDs?

Maybe the rest of you already knew how easy it was to download movies and watch them digitally on your TV, but I didn’t… and I’m the kind of guy who’s supposed to know these things. Why didn’t I know it? Besides the fact that I’m a dumbass? Because it’s not in the interest of the massmarket aggregators, technology providers, and set-top boxes to market how simple it is for audiences to download platform-agnostic video content playable on whatever player they have handy and how filmmakers can sell their movies digitally on their own websites without having to lose 75% of the revenue to all these various pipeline providers.

But aren’t those revenue losses made up for by the fact that digital distribution is cheaper than manufacturing shiny plastic discs? No! Everyone talks about how the cost of distribution will decrease because of digital distribution rather than plastic DVD manufacturing, but in order to get into the iTunes store Apple has required an encode fee that is MORE than the cost of DVD-authoring plus manufacturing an indie-sized run of shiny plastic discs. Adding insult to a kick in the balls, the Apple encode is (a) the same fucking thing as outputting to h.264 quicktime for free in any number of applications, and (b) not transferable to other digital stores which have their own unnecessary encode fees. Basically, they’re all creating fabricated profit-centers that make digital distribution MORE expensive than traditional distribution. The middleman is boning both sides of the transaction.

It’s like if you and I wanted to hang out and there’s a perfectly safe path between our houses, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates erected bridges and demanded we pay tolls and they spent millions marketing their bridges so we think we have to take them… but their bridges aren’t crossing a raging river, they’re just crossing a path that’s actually EASIER for us to take than their stupid bridges.

Microsoft loses money on Xbox sales, so they actually have to sell software and licenses and subscriptions etc etc–they need to sell content, not just Xboxes, so it’s not in their best interest to market the fact that you can buy video online and watch it through Xbox. Apple is a bit different… since the iTunes store is free and their margins are slim on downloads, they want you to buy iPods–so it’s important to them that whatever you buy in their free store encourages you to buy their proprietary hardware. As a result, no one’s running around raising a ruckus about how simple it is to watch a movie from the internet by using their hardware without using their pipeline. To be honest, I’m astonished they even allow their hardware to support it.

To be fair, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates aren’t the only ones doing this, I just use them as prime examples because they’d make particularly funny looking trolls. Last year Time Warner Cable rented me a DVR with USB inputs and I excitedly asked the cable guy if I could send in video files through the USB ports and he said “probably, but Time Warner Cable disabled all the USB ports before distributing the set-top boxes.” Fuckers.

There’s actually tons of simple ways to move video files from the computer to the TV, but these are discussed mostly in tech blogs not in consumer media. Brian just mentioned to me that LaCie is releasing a hard drive designed specifically for this purpose, but at $349 it’s no cheaper than an Xbox. There are plenty of even cheaper solutions.

The problem is that by muddying all this, they’re actually encouraging piracy. I download and stream plenty of video content legally and pay Microsoft, Apple, Time Warner quite well for it. If that mumblecore movie was available for download legally, I would have bought it–but by creating a false scarcity they made piracy the only way I could get the content in the format I wanted to consume it. I actually felt kind of guilty downloading it and if it was any good I would’ve felt even guiltier. But don’t worry, Justice Department: I was downloading it as research for this very important blog post.

So why has the buying and selling of non-DRM, platform-agnostic movies not become ubiquitous yet? If I can sell you a downloadable movie on my website that you can watch on your computer, on your iPod, on your Xbox, and anyplace else you want to watch it… then why would you choose to download it from Xbox where you can only watch it on Xbox? Or from iTunes where you can only watch it on Apple-approved players? And what’s the incentive for me to distribute through those pipelines if I get more money by selling to you directly? Because I’m hoping that by being on iTunes and Xbox you’ll discover my movie? That’s not very likely. Then maybe because being on those services somehow gives my movie credibility? Puh-lease.

The cost-benefit analysis here favors consumers buying direct from filmmakers’ websites, distributors’ websites, and DRM-free digital stores; and filmmakers, distributors, and e-tailers selling direct from their own websites while also hypersyndicating the content to all those other bridges for the suckers who want to use them. The only thing standing in the way of this model taking hold is the marketing campaigns of the service providers who all want to control the last ten feet between your computer and your TV.

I solved the crisis of the last ten feet. It’s called get off your ass and walk, ya fatass.

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]

If you want to go BIG, there’s no better model than the bigass Hollywood studios and their bigass tentpole movies. But already the logic is flawed because hardly any of the tentpoles’ underlying properties were big right out of the gate.

There’s a reason why the biggest studio movies are remakes, reboots, sequels, and adaptations… it’s just too damn costly, risky, and most importantly ineffective these days to market an entirely new property from the ground straight up to the stratosphere of massmarket, major motion picture distribution. It’s rare to accuse Hollywood-types of being fiscally-conservative, but just as ‘we’re all marketers now’ we’re also ‘all beancounters now.’

Hollywood isn’t rebooting and remaking movies nonstop because there’s a lack of new ideas… there are zillions of unmade spec scripts circulating around town that could make perfectly good films. But they can’t go big if they don’t have a core audience, because it’s simply bad business to try and make something out of nothing. Here’s the sad truth: film is a terrible incubator for new ideas.

The solution? Well, the studios have existing brands (that they own or that they have the warchest to license), but we all share niches. Vampires and zombies are popular right now for this reason, you can’t afford Will Smith but zombies and vampires are public domain box office superstars. It’s also a reason why indie H.P Lovecraft adaptations are so popular, his stories are public domain and have a huge built-in core audience. Adaptations and marketable monsters are shortcuts, you can start with an original idea… but you shouldn’t start big and you shouldn’t expect it to go big quickly (or anytime soon).

A niche is a portal to a core audience. That core will enable you to start with a targeted base that can be galvanized into supporting your project, and once you’ve got the base you can potentially grow it into something BIG. You don’t have to, you can subsist for a long time catering solely to your core audience and that’s great… but there’s another possibility: a project that was initially geared for a specific audience could grow far beyond that into BIG… like Harry Potter or Batman. Those properties were not strategized in a corporate board room and taken out in their infancy to market BIG. They started relatively small with core audiences and then grew incrementally and later exponentially. Even Transformers had humbler beginnings than a $200M Michael Bay effectsapalooza. Batman had 50 years of marketing behind it before Tim Burton’s major motion picture adaptation took it BIG, and 70 years before Christopher Nolan made it respectable. Lord of the Rings brewed for 47 years before Peter Jackson took it BIG BIG BIG (no disrespect to Ralph Bakshi). Transformers had 23 years of marketing before Michael Bay’s re-imagining took it BIG. Sure Harry Potter was relatively young at 4 years when it got taken to the major motion picture level, but hell sometimes you win the lottery… plus JK Rowling had that property in the incubator for 7 years prior to the first book being published, so you could just as easily call it 11 years. Will the ‘Half-Blood Prince’ movie outperform the ‘Sorcerer’s Stone’ movie? I certainly hope so… Half-Blood Prince is benefiting from 19 years of incubation/marketing whereas Sorcerer’s Stone only benefited from 11. Going BIG takes longer than most marketers would like to admit. Can you imagine bringing an investor a business plan for a superhero franchise with a 70 year marketing campaign?

Of course, it’s not as simple as throwing a vampire or a wizard or a punk or a robot into your project. Studios can buy access to niches by licensing existing, credible properties… indie creators have to earn their access to niches by creating new credible properties. That takes time and it requires starting with a small core audience that will support you in the long term.

If a project has no core audience, it is not marketable. The massmarket will never champion your project, no matter how good it is. If you build a core audience and deliver the best project for them, they will champion the project. That way, if it’s not crossover-material, you’ll still have an audience to support you… and if it is crossover-material, your core will do the legwork of getting it to the next level. Then you can go big and go home.

[Cautionary notes: When thinking niche, there are two things to keep in mind. 1- it is problematic for your project to be confrontational against its own niche, this is a hurdle I personally face all the time since I’m inflammatory to a fault. From a marketer’s point of view, the best kind of niche marketing is a Robert Greenwald or Michael Moore movie where they sell to a niche that already believes what they’re saying and feels vindicated by seeing it onscreen… if it’s successful it expands to less sympathetic audiences who might welcome an intellectual debate, but Outfoxed’s core audience was people who already hated Fox News. So if you want your marketing effort to be financially successful, you’ll want to pander to your niche, not challenge it. 2- if you can organically and authentically cater to more than one niche that’s great, but it's risky. Each time you add a niche, you dilute the core. I’ve seen so many projects and marketing campaigns fail by trying to incorporate something for everyone. Find your niche and be the best for that niche, don't spread yourself thin by going too broad -- better to be the best for a small audience than to be mediocre for a huge one.]

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]

To a certain extent, it’s completely accurate. There is so much content already out there and so much new content being generated every second that you literally have to be everywhere just to be noticed. But there’s a dark side to hypersyndication… the same dark side as massmarket distribution.

Massmarket/hypersyndication is for mainstream, broadly-accessible content that requires no context. That’s fine for major studio tentpoles, but the trend these days is more toward niche/narrowcast than mainstream/broadcast. When niche/narrowcast content is seen out of context, it does more harm than good.

An example… Iron Man (directed by Jon Favreau) is mainstream/broadcast. 95% of people who stumble across that movie randomly could instantly be pulled in on some level. On the other hand, Tetsuo the Iron Man (directed by Shinya Tsukamoto) does not have the same broad appeal. Even someone who might fall in love with Tetsuo the Iron Man would probably not enjoy it immediately based on seeing it play in someone’s embedded video on their Myspace page. The viewer needs to know what they’re getting themselves into… they need to commit to Tetsuo the Iron Man before watching it. Iron Man requires no such prior commitment.

Does that mean Iron Man is a better film than Tetsuo the Iron Man. I don’t think so, I think they’re both great at what they are. It’s meaningless to compare them, they have nothing in common other than they are stories on film that we collectively label as “movies” or “films.” To Netflix, they’re the same thing. Netflix offers hardly any context. And once you have a Netflix subscription, the movies are essentially free. FREE means that there is no commitment on the part of the consumer… there is no due diligence required, and thus FREE further diminishes context. As Michael Ironside says in Starship Troopers “something given has no value.” I could see a mainstream Netflix customer who enjoyed Iron Man happen across Tetsuo the Iron Man, think to himself ‘I liked Iron Man, I’ll check this out’ and add it to his Netflix queue… then a week or so later it winds up in his mailbox, a week or two after that he pops it in the DVD player forgetting everything about why he selected it in the first place, and then he gets immediately annoyed by the movie, stops it after 3 minutes, mails it back and writes a bad review on Netflix about how it’s unwatchable and pretentious. That’s a bummer for Tsukamoto… he doesn’t deserve that kind of aggravation.

Most people will argue that hypersyndication still works because a small percentage of an exponentially larger audience is still far huger than a relatively large percentage of a tiny niche. The problem with that model is the Tyranny Of The Naysayers. Someone who dislikes a movie is far more likely to write a bad review than someone who likes a movie is apt to write a good review. If you exponentially increase the number of people who see the movie (knowing full well that the number of viewers it’s truly geared for is disproportionately smaller than those who simply won’t get it), you’re setting the film up to be tarred and feathered on the public stage. You’ll have no niche audience to champion the film, only naysayers hating on it… and most consumers can’t discern the comments of people who ‘don’t get it’ from people who ‘do get it.’

Some of the coolest, most exciting, most compelling films simply should not be seen by everyone. They’re great films, and they’re not for everybody. That statement flies in the face of the given wisdom about great films… about Oscars and box office and the meritocracy of great storytelling. Being a best-seller requires appealing to the widest possible audience–sure that can mean it’s a great transcendent film that every human being can relate to, but more often it means that it’s lowest common denominator cotton candy. There’s nothing wrong with cotton candy, but is it a better made food than sushi? Not everyone likes sushi… and even people who may like sushi wouldn’t like it if I put it on a stick and sold it to them at a theme park next to the funnel cakes and cotton candy.

One of my first questions to filmmakers is “who is the audience of this movie?” The answer is generally some variation on “people who love great films.” That is not a type of person. Iron Man is a great film. Tetsuo the Iron Man is a great film. If your audience is people who love BOTH movies, then your audience is smaller than you think.

Scarcity creates value. It’s better to build a core fanbase and grow your audience from there than to hypersyndicate and try to reach the largest possible audience as quickly as possible.

[BTW- before I get called out on the fact that Tetsuo the Iron Man is generally favorably reviewed on Netflix (despite it being a lower score than Iron Man or even the dreadful Invincible Iron Man animated movie), let me just point out I was using Tetsuo the Iron Man as an example that most readers could easily identify (and also I was being a bit clever, sue me). Tetsuo the Iron Man was not hypersyndicated upon its initial release back in the 90s, so by the time Netflix came along Tetsuo had already protected itself with a core following and a cineaste pedigree... precisely what I'm suggesting you do before you consider hypersyndicating. Also, I recognize Netflix has the 'Ratings of Users Like You' addition to the ratings system, which is an appreciated effort but not a silver bullet for the problems faced by content creators/suppliers.]