OpenIndie DIY distribution

cameronchapman

cameronchapman

I just came across this website, OpenIndie.com, and thought it would be of interest to a lot of people here.

Here's what the site says about what they do:

OpenIndie is a site where anyone can discover films they’re interested in, request a screening in their area and put on a screening of any film on the site. Likewise, filmmakers can add their film to OpenIndie, and upload and promote their film via social media. We’ve developed this model with Co-Founder Arin Crumley’s experience of self distribution in mind and believe that this site can not only change the way that filmmakers distribute their films but also help make independent film production a sustainable enterprise. The key to OpenIndie is that anyone can screen any film!
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It looks like it could be a great way to build and gauge interest in your film, and they don't take any rights or anything, so it's not like you're really risking anything by setting up a profile for your film.

(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way, just thought it was a good resource for those doing their own distribution.)
 
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Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Unfortunately these little sites don't really amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things. YouTube is still the best promotion on the Internet by far.
 
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Blade_Jones said:
Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Unfortunately these little sites don't really amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things. YouTube is still the best promotion on the Internet by far.
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This isn't a competitor to YouTube. It's not about online screenings, so much as getting your film screened in actual locations, whether they're theaters, community groups, etc.

Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC said:
Only if you have enough ads and blogs to bring people to YouTube. Otherwise, YouTube is worthless.
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Great point. YouTube is a huge ecosystem, and if you don't have a following from outside of YouTube, it can be pretty difficult to get your videos seen by anyone outside of your family and friends...
 
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cameronchapman said:
Great point. YouTube is a huge ecosystem, and if you don't have a following from outside of YouTube, it can be pretty difficult to get your videos seen by anyone outside of your family and friends...
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Followings are built ON youtube not only outside of. There have been multiple web series and other artists who have started on youtube and built their fame from there. It is however very difficult to do without a good understanding of youtube marketing.

And about Open Indie, the website gets about 75 - 85 unique visitors a MONTH. The amount of people out of that 85 that will actually navigate past the first page, will be interested in your genre, will be attracted to your film over the others and will do something about, will be maybe 1 person and even that is very unlikely. I know you stated that YouTube is not a competitor but if you compare Open Indie to YouTube's 140 million unique visitors, you will have a much larger pool to attract (though you are also competing with a lot of other media for their attention).
 
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drc said:
Compete.com
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Their stats aren't at all reliable.

For June they show my site getting 92 unique visitors for the month, while Google Analytics shows me getting 1,782 unique visitors for the month (which is further verified by my WordPress stats plugin). I think I'll trust Google, since they're actually tracking visitors, as opposed to guesstimating them.

Compete, Quantcast, etc. aren't accurate at all for sites that haven't signed up to be verified. They're usually off by at least a few thousand visitors. In my case, they're off by over 1900%. Not exactly an acceptable margin of error...
 
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cameronchapman said:
Their stats aren't at all reliable.

For June they show my site getting 92 unique visitors for the month, while Google Analytics shows me getting 1,782 unique visitors for the month (which is further verified by my WordPress stats plugin). I think I'll trust Google, since they're actually tracking visitors, as opposed to guesstimating them.

Compete, Quantcast, etc. aren't accurate at all for sites that haven't signed up to be verified. They're usually off by at least a few thousand visitors. In my case, they're off by over 1900%. Not exactly an acceptable margin of error...
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Lol, I'll ask the site admin if I can access their back-end and install Google analytics and track it for a month and get back to you.

My point was that their is a smaller pool with that site, compared to other major sites. Even if they are off by 5,000%, after conversions from page-to-page, you are left with very little. When you are dealing with entertainment through very broad mediums, you need a massive pool of possible people to see anything significant.

I didn't mean to upset you.
 
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drc said:
Lol, I'll ask the site admin if I can access their back-end and install Google analytics and track it for a month and get back to you.

My point was that their is a smaller pool with that site, compared to other major sites. Even if they are off by 5,000%, after conversions from page-to-page, you are left with very little. When you are dealing with entertainment through very broad mediums, you need a massive pool of possible people to see anything significant.

I didn't mean to upset you.
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Not upset at all. :D Just showing that sites like compete aren't accurate enough to be relied on.

I guess I'm just of the opinion that if you're going to seriously market something, you should take advantage of every single avenue available to you. This is one avenue, that potentially could get some interest for a film. And it's something different from what YouTube and Vimeo et al are doing, which makes it interesting.
 
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I'm an Alexa.com guy. Okay it's NOT super accurate. However the site has a 3.2 million ranking as in over 3 million sites are higher ranked. Usually any site over 100,000 isn't really in the game of online promotion. Indietalk.com is 169K (so not too bad)
The compete.com, alexa.com sites are for basic guesswork. It's like you walk into a restaurant and all the tables are empty - you can say well "this place isn't probably doing well, they could have 10,000 to go orders, but probably not." 8-)

cameronchapman said:
Not upset at all. :D Just showing that sites like compete aren't accurate enough to be relied on.

I guess I'm just of the opinion that if you're going to seriously market something, you should take advantage of every single avenue available to you. This is one avenue, that potentially could get some interest for a film. And it's something different from what YouTube and Vimeo et al are doing, which makes it interesting.
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Seems interesting. I'll probably sign up once I have an actual film to show. For some reason the site layout reminds me very much of Kickstarter... I feel like OpenIndie, like Kickstarter, could probably grow quickly and become a nice source of promotion, but probably only if you know how to use it.
 
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