Over 190,000 people have seen my feature film, Wild Boys, on YouTube.

Sounds like an amazing success story, right?

This week we’ll talk about the reality of releasing your film on YouTube:

• Why YouTube won’t save your indie film
• The real numbers behind releasing our film on YouTube
• How to approach YouTube as a filmmaker

Filmmakers tend to have two polarizing views on YouTube: it’s either our savior or the devil. It’s the golden goose of indie film, or a cesspool of trashy video content. Today let’s break away from these extremes and have a more nuanced discussion of where YouTube fits into YOUR filmmaking career.

YouTube is not going to save your film

Earlier this year, YouTube officially became the largest TV streaming platform in the world. Not phones, laptops, or wherever people normally watch YouTube. On old school TV.

Bigger than Netflix. Bigger than all the other streamers. Bigger than cable TV.

YouTubers in every niche are making millions from their content. With a massive reach all across the world, YouTube seems like the perfect solution for distributing your indie film.

You can upload your film for free and make money from the ads YouTube puts on your film.

Sounds perfect.

But uploading your film to YouTube doesn’t mean automatic cash in the bank.

Here are three things to consider before you make YouTube the end-all-be-all for your movies:

• You’re competing against EVERYONE: You already know this, but you can find anything on YouTube. As a filmmaker, that means you’re competing against a giant variety of content for attention. The most successful YouTube creators tailor-make their content for the platform. It’s highly digestible content that gets the viewers hooked. Your feature film is probably not that.
• Uploading a feature every few years is not a strategy for a long filmmaking life: YouTube thrives on volume and consistency. The power of the platform lies in getting viewers to come back every time you release a new video. It’s almost impossible to grow and keep an audience if you can’t consistently put out new content. And if you want to monetize your content you need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours.
• It takes a LOT of views to make real money: We’re seeing rates of around $6-7 per 1,000 views on our film. Say you have a budget of $100,000. You would need north of 15 million views to recoup that in ad money.

Later I’ll show you how YouTube can have a place in your release and marketing strategy, but don’t count on it being the only place you release your film.

What’s it really like to release your film on YouTube

We partnered with indie distributor Indie Rights for the release of Wild Boys. They helped us get our film on Amazon, Google Play, and other rental platforms, and eventually got us on Tubi and YouTube.

IndieRights runs its own YouTube channel with almost 700K subscribers, and they have released over 1,000 movies for free.

From their point of view, releasing films under one banner on YouTube at the end of their release cycle makes a lot of sense.

In the last 6 months they released 114 new films, and got over 26 million views.

IndieRights is one of the most generous distributors in the business. They offer filmmakers 80% of the revenue their films make and take 20% for themselves.

Most distributors are not this fair.

The biggest reason this channel works for IndieRights is the volume of films in their library. They get 20% of the ad money from every single view on their channel.

They’ll have hits, they’ll have flops, but altogether they’re almost guaranteed a lot of views because of how much content they’re putting out.

As filmmakers, we only get 80% of the revenue that pertains to our film.

The reality is that with our 190,000 views we’ve made only a little over $1,300 from YouTube. That’s not a lot on a feature film scale.

Another argument I see from filmmakers is the idea that your film will keep gaining views at a steady rate, year over year, on YouTube. For us, that’s not been true at all.

We got to 100K views in the first two months, and to 140K in another three months. Since then, the views have slowed to a crawl.

YouTube is not linear. It’s unpredictable, and what you’re able to gain from one film is very hard to guess.

The truth is, even the most successful indie films on YouTube will have a hard time making back their budget from ad money alone.

So how should we, as indie filmmakers, take advantage of the opportunity YouTube offers?

How I’m thinking of YouTube as a filmmaker

The first thing to do when considering releasing your film on YouTube is that it should be part of a larger strategy.

Starting a channel and uploading your film has a microscopic chance of success.

Instead, think of YouTube as both a chance to earn revenue for your film and as a marketing tool.

YouTube is a great place to show off your storytelling and filmmaking skills, as well as your personality as a filmmaker.

There are two strategies I see working for filmmakers on YouTube:

• Strategy one is what we did with Wild Boys. We partnered with an aggregator who has a channel dedicated to releasing feature films. You get the advantage of releasing your film to an audience that is already looking for feature films. The downside is that you are not building an audience for yourself.
• Strategy two is to build your own YouTube channel. This takes time and effort, but in the long term, it can become a great asset for you as a filmmaker.

Having released our film through an aggregator, it’s been nice to see the views we’ve got. But I don’t think this is the best strategy for creating a sustainable filmmaking career.

Instead, here’s what I plan to do next:

• Build an audience by releasing a mix of behind-the-scenes, filmmaking-related tips and tricks and follow along on my journey as a filmmaker.
• Post consistently and show up for the audience. Engagement is the key to creating a loyal following.
• Pair every short film or feature film I release with at least 5-10 extra content videos (think an extended edition Blu-Ray).
• Host live Q&A and AMA sessions with my audience regularly to involve them in the process.
• Use YouTube to first market my films, and then release them there as the last link in my distribution chain.

How do you think of YouTube as part of your filmmaking career? Worth it? Not worth it? What are you planning to do?

And cut!

That does it for this week. Here are the key takeaways I want you to bring with you into your directing career from today:

• YouTube is a giant platform, and that comes with both opportunities and challenges for filmmakers. Have a plan and a strategy before hitting upload.
• You need A LOT of views to recoup a feature film budget. Don’t count on YouTube as your only revenue stream.
• Filmmakers who learn how to use YouTube both as a distribution and a marketing platform will have a huge advantage in the years to come.

As always, thanks for reading.

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