Here's the essay I wrote on documentary revenues (or how to make a living at being a documentary-maker). I publish it here in the hope it may offer guidance to aspiring filmmakers; or else convince you that you'd be better off getting a proper job!
‘How do you make living at this?!’
In search of new economic models for independent documentary-makers: the case of Phil Grabsky
It’s difficult to know if we were pushed or jumped: pushed out of ‘the industry’ by the scourge of reality TV, timorous commissioning editors and diminishing opportunities to produce ‘grown-up’ documentaries; jumping to take advantage of the possibilities opened-up by affordable digital technology and novel ways of reaching audiences for ourselves. Either way, many more of us were carried away with the creative possibilities than gave serious thought to how we’d make a living at it. There’s been little to cushion the fall. The occasional freelance gig and the odd corporate is an acceptable way to fund ‘projects’ but if you’ve ever seriously contemplated doing a wedding video, even for a moment, it’s time to re-evaluate.
Success story
British director Phil Grabsky (and his company, Seventh Art Productions) offers a useful case-study because he seems to be doing something right. His award-winning documentaries encompass both the arts and politics and include Escape from Luanda (2007), In Search of Mozart (2006), Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl (2006) and The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2003). His is also an attractive example because he hasn’t ‘sold out’ to purely commercial interests but continues to produce films that he cares passionately about. But when I interviewed him for this paper, I found him grappling with the same concerns as many of us: ‘The hard work is how do you generate any money ... which allows you to stay in business and gives you the freedom to carry on? That’s tough and I’m not a success in that sense. I do sometimes want to chuck it all in...’ .
Some therapy
That he is ‘treading water financially’ is not the upbeat message we would hope to hear from one of Britain’s most successful independent documentary producers. He is afflicted, too, by a slightly maudlin nostalgia for the old days of television that many of us would recognise and the significance of which we need to reflect on. He describes himself as being ‘very fortunate’ to join Channel Four straight from film school, just as it was starting up: ‘I think there was this kind of a golden period where, all of a sudden, in my case a 21-22 year old could be making a documentary series for one of the four or five terrestrial broadcasters’. But deregulation, competition from other media, falling advertising revenues and tighter production budgets have led to a more conservative, ratings-driven commissioning regime which has been ‘ to the detriment of variety and imagination and creativity’.
The memory of television as a relatively comfortable home, offering a fair measure of both freedom and security, was fostered by ‘nearly a half century of stability’ and goes some way to explain the shock of the new and our consternation at the difficult conditions we encounter outside the shelter of its patronage. Whereas once, all we were required to do was make good films and hope for an audience, we now also have to raise capital, win audiences, promote the film and distribute it, and on ever-tighter budgets. And we are doing so in a radically new and shifting media environment. No wonder this is hard! But enough therapy - how are we now going to make documentary pay its way?
Dirty money
First recognise that you are now in business. Grabsky again: ‘you’ve got to understand that 50% of being a filmmaker is understanding that it’s commerce. That’s not a dirty word, it’s the word that allows you to do what you want to do’. But it can be dirty work. Financing a film no-longer consists of single commissions but the laborious pursuit of many, small pockets of cash. The list of sponsors on the end credits of one film I made ran to over 30 organisations and individuals; ranging from a private arts foundation in the States ($20,000) to the father of an acquaintance who chipped-in £20. Grabsky: ‘you’re constantly reinvesting, you’re constantly hustling, you’re constantly having to say to people, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t pay you for your performance or this interview’, and I’m not quite sure what is the answer to that’. It may be that filmmaking aesthetes are not the best people to answer that question. To be good at fund-chasing, marketing, promotion and distribution, as well as being good at making films, is probably too much to ask of one person. (One suggestion would be to find collaborators with an expertise in the money side of things).
Television isn’t dead yet
It’s important, before moving on to look at alternative revenue models and means of distribution, to understand what it means to break free of the direct patronage of the TV industry – because there are some real upsides, as well as downs. Grabsky still maintains a relationship with the broadcasters. But it is a very different relationship. For example, Channel Five supported his production of Great Artists with Tim Marlow (2003) with up-front funding, but this only amounted to a few thousand pounds . The advantage of this new arrangement, however, is that: ‘We own the work now. We can decide how it’s distributed ‘. So when Channel Five ditched the Tim Marlow show, Grabsky was free to take it to Sky Arts – though admittedly for less money: ‘license fees have gone down and down –and every time one of us accepts a lower licence fee it just encourages the license fees to get lower’. At the root of these steadily diminishing returns is an oversupplied market. Chris Anderson claims that ‘there are an estimated 31 million hours of original television content produced each year’ while only 876,000 hours of that are broadcast to the average American home, the resultant bottleneck creating a buyers’ market in favour of the broadcasters .
Find your own audience
The prospect of bypassing television’s gatekeepers and selling programmes directly to the audience is, as a result, a highly attractive one. It also offers the independent producer an advantage over the mainstream broadcasters. Whereas networks are constrained by ‘limited shelf space’ and are therefore driven to pursue mass audiences through a ‘one size fits all’ approach to programme-making, independent producers are able to offer a bespoke product to smaller niche audiences in the ‘Long Tail’ economy described by Chris Anderson . The infamous Neighbours from Hell series that I once worked on for ITV needed to produce audience figures with seven zeros on the end. Now, I’d be happy with just four. But in the ‘attention economy’ described by Davenport and Beck and others, where media content is overabundant, it is no small task to overcome the scarcity of audience .
Grabsky appears to have found his niche with a series of high-brow, high-production-value arts documentaries: ‘I know there’s an audience and it’s extremely time-consuming but I know I can reach that audience and I can reach them in new and inventive ways’. It’s no accident that having tapped-into a niche market with In Search of Mozart, he’s sought to retain that audience with his follow-ups, In Search of Beethoven (2009) and, currently in production, In Search of Haydn.
Social networking as audience building
In building an audience for your documentary , the internet and, in particular, the culture of social networking that characterises Web 2.0 offers a powerful and extremely cost-effective tool. The success of Loose Change (2005, 2006, 2007, 2009) –which in just two months scored ten million online viewings - was not just down to way in which it tapped-into a niche audience of people with an interest in conspiracy theories but that these people were already part of active social networks through which information and debate about the film could spread like viral wildfire. While this was a case spontaneous combustion, the example of Robert Greenwalds’s Outfoxed (2004 ) shows how existing communities can be actively cultivated to virally market films –and not just online communities. Outfoxed, which challenges Fox News’s claims to fair and impartial reporting, was intended as a tool for political activism rather than a money-spinner. It was screened at 3000 house parties hosted by radical group, MoveOn.org , drawing-in an audience of 25,000 who were invited to join-in an online debate about the film . The buzz created from the house parties and online discussion resulted in more than 200,000 DVD sales in the following two months, creating sufficient interest to later secure a theatrical distribution deal .
Phil Grabsky’s use of the internet is more conservative and makes limited use of social networking but he is also using it to build an audience for films, even while they are in production. Due for release in 2011, The Boy Mir follows the life of a young Afghan over a ten year period. The stand alone site created for the production includes ‘news updates’, production stills and even an invitation to donate towards production costs .
Some Good News
There is an audience out there! Although creative and innovative long-form documentaries have largely disappeared from our TV screens, in the cinema they have seen an unprecedented and perhaps surprising revival over the last decade. Eight out of the all-time top-ten grossing documentary films were released between 2002-2006 –including the top three Fahreheit 9/11 (2004)($222.4 M), March of the Penguins (2005) ($127 M) and Bowling for Columbine (2002)($58M) . This boom has also been helped by the advent of digital cinema, which has drastically cut costs. Digital Screen Network, for example, has installed digital projection facilities in 200 UK cinemas, opening-up opportunities to screen a greater diversity of independent films that would previously have struggled to meet distribution and print costs. It’s an opportunity that Grabsky has been quick to take advantage of: ‘I think that there is a developing and increasing audience for documentaries in the cinema’. But: ‘that doesn’t tend to make you any money, if fact quite the opposite’. So, even when we’ve found our audience, the next difficult step is to turn that into revenue. As Grabsky puts it: ‘how do you...‘monetise’ that audience?’
DVDs
One highly lucrative outlet is to produce and sell DVDs of the film. For Grabsky, ‘DVD sales are very important’. The production of a DVD in six language versions added £16,000 to the overall cost of producing In Search of Mozart, but produced impressive returns: £200,000 gross from just 10,000 sales . The huge advantage of DVD sales for producers who retain the rights to their films is that they can achieve profit margins of 90 percent and higher. Online distributors such as Amazon take a much smaller cut than conventional distributors (a 17.5% ‘referral fee’) but that’s still enough of an incentive to handle DVD distribution directly and Seventh Art sells all its films from their own online shop .
Video on Demand
Video on Demand (VoD), offered either by cable platforms or via the internet, has been seen by some as the Holy Grail of documentary-makers . It offers the inviting prospect that filmmakers can simply and cheaply stream their work directly into the homes of their audience, reaching further and deeper into the niches of the Long Tail. The most widely quoted documentary success story is that of Loose Change, which although later gaining limited TV and theatrical screenings, is an almost entirely internet phenomenon. The convergence of TV and Internet into an a TV-like internet and internet-like TV has been widely predicted and anticipated since the 1990’s and in terms of infrastructure, particularly with the digital switchover, could be said to have arrived. It is certainly a growth area, with annual world revenue from rental transactions generating $2.2bn in 2008 and forecast to reach 3.7bn by 2012 . But there are still many issues yet to be fully resolved; including rights protection and revenue models. It is perhaps these uncertainties about the shape of VoD that account for Phil Grabsky’s scepticism: ‘It opens up lots of possibilities for me being ripped-off! It opens up lots of possibilities for people seeing my films and me not getting any money for it’. However, Seventh Art is about to take the plunge, if hesitantly: ‘We’ve been rather cautious and waited until we can partner up with someone who we felt could look after our films properly and eventually send us cheques. To date, I haven’t received a penny...but we’ll see’.
Beware the New Gatekeepers
In the search for a wider audience and more hits, independent producers are inevitably driven to place their work on third-party sites, but with the consequence that they take a smaller share of revenues, typically around 50 percent: ‘I would still rather somehow establish the contact direct to me rather than through another site because that site is in a sense just a distributer and so they’re going to take their costs’. It also raises the issue of whether these ‘aggregators’ might become the new gatekeepers of media content. The meteoric, winner-takes-all, rise of companies like Google, You Tube, Amazon, and Netflix gives them the power of near-monopolies, offering scarce audiences to abundant content.
Why charge £1 when you can charge £20?
Another crucial factor is that the revenue from downloads is much less than from DVDs. One of the greatest successes on the Nomadsland social documentary site has been From Dust (2005) which was downloaded 22,000 times in its first two months, but at just $1 per download (50/50 shared with Nomadsland), even this success story only brought in $11,000 . By contrast, a documentary film I produced and directed (which was not available for streaming) has sold just 1,400 DVDs but, at £12 a copy, that brings in £16,800 (The Stones of Famagusta (2008)) . There is also the danger that VoD can undermine DVD sales: ‘If people can just sit at home and they’ve got their iPad and they can say ‘I’d like to watch this’ and its wirelessly transmitted ..., apart from people who like having things on their shelves, why would they buy the DVD?’
Screaming in Cyberspace
The internet does not offer a panacea for documentary-makers. Even if issues of revenue sharing can be resolved to the satisfaction of content producers, actually finding an audience over the internet is far from straightforward. As Aufderheide writes: ‘This ability to watch digital video on command makes it even easier to get a film to the user –but of course does nothing to solve the problem of making them want to watch it in the first place’ . Grabsky makes a similar point: ‘there was a quote in the paper today saying that putting music on MySpace was like screaming in space!’. There are many specialist portals that claim to offer an outlet for documentaries to be streamed; as a result of which, their content can often seem very thin: ‘What is the one site? ‘Shooting people’ –no. PBS-no. Sundance? There isn’t really one site that does it. If I want to see a documentary, I’m probably still typing in the name of a documentary and seeing what comes up’- which means finding other ways of telling people about your work. Julia Knight makes a comparison between today’s response to technologies like VoD and the strategies employed by independent, radical filmmakers in the 1980s to distribute their work on video cassette, claiming that little of substance has changed: ‘Although the internet can in some cases extend the reach of promotional activities, the use of digital technology in and of itself is not sufficient to develop audiences. Achieving real-world visibility and persuading people to watch remain crucial accompanying activities’ . For Grabsky, ‘The internet is not a replacement for everything. Selling DVDs is important. Cinema release is important. It’s a delicate balancing act between these different things’
Give it away for free!
There is an argument that we should be offering our work for free. This is not the crazy talk it at first seems. After all, outside of license fee models such as the BBC and subscription services, television has for half a century been making content free to audiences by selling the attention of that audience to advertisers. In other genres, online programming has been making this work. Rocketboom, a low-budget satirical show along the lines of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, is streamed into around 215,000 homes per day and in its first week of offering advertising slots, secured $40,000 of revenue . Such a revenue model has yet to prove that it can sustain documentary production, but that isn’t to say that it won’t. With sites like Revver offering content producers a 50/50 share of advertising revenue, it’s an option worth keeping an eye on.
Another model for distribution really does suggest that we give-away some of our content for free, without any expectation of a direct return on it. Michael Masnick, the editor of Techdirt Blog, cites the example of musician Trent Rezner and his band, The Nine Inch Nails . From their website, most of their music is offered for free, along with hi-definition footage of concerts for re-editing and the opportunity to upload materials directly to the site. This has allowed them to build an enthusiastic and engaged fan-base from which they generate revenues in other ways: the issuing of premium products like ‘special edition’ CDs, downloads of ‘extra’ music tracks and ticket sales for gigs. It’s an interesting model but does raise the question of whether documentaries can generate ‘fans’ in the same way.
The way forward?
If all of the above doesn’t mark a clear path towards financial and creative independence for the documentary-maker, it is because there is no clear path. To survive, it is necessary to utilise a range of revenue models and channels of distribution and to adapt quickly to a rapidly evolving marketplace. It is also necessary to actively develop an audience for your films, making use of social networking through the internet to achieve this. Grabski adds that we should also be looking to develop a range of ‘products’: ‘Those filmmakers that I know that try to make one film at a time, by and large they have to live at home with their mums’!
The one lesson that I can impart (and it’s been learnt the hard way) is that you need to get serious about the ‘dirty’ business of marketing, selling and distributing and cannot afford to assume that if your film is good enough, the rest will magically sort itself out. There is a caveat to that though: good documentaries are a product of our passionate engagement with a subject and a commitment to our craft. Chasing dollars should never be allowed to get in the way of that. As Grabski puts it, ‘At the end of the day, the key thing is to only get involved in projects that you really do feel are important because otherwise, why are you bothering?’ Grabski sets a fine example; not because he’s resolved the problems we all struggle with, but because he’s achieved a balance between the need to survive and passionate engagement in his work: ‘We’re breaking even but we’re making films we want to make and are therefore extraordinarily well rewarded’.
Bibliography
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (New York: Hyperion, 2008)
Pat Aufdereide, ‘The Changing Documentary Marketplace’, Cineaste 30(3)
Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Eds), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008)
Davenport, T. H., Beck, J. C., The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. New York:Harvard Business School Press, 2001)
Ulla Jacobsen, ‘Potential Source of Income?’, Dox 68 (Copenhagen:EDN, 2007)
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006)
Julia Knight, ‘DVD, Video and Reaching Audiences: Experiments in Moving-Image Distribution’, Convergence 13(1) (February 2007)
Martin Lister et al, New Media: A Critical Introduction (London/ New York: Routledge, 2009)
Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002)
