Posted December 7, 2008
I’m in Las Vegas – not necessarily the first place you’d associate with indie films – to give the keynote at the International Film Festival Summit on Sunday. I want to hear from film festivals from around the world, and share our thoughts about how the web can help them.
I also want to tell them a few of the milestones SnagFilms has achieved in its first 4 months. Here are some highlights:
· Our virtual movie theaters – those widgets you’ve seen on the site, filled with each of our movies or “multiplexes” with a number of titles – already have appeared on roughly 100 million web pages. You can see some of our partners in this effort – we call them Sites That Snag —by clicking here. And you can “snag” a film yourself by clicking on the snag link in the bottom right-hand corner of any widget; click here to learn more.
· With help from big media websites; community resources; bloggers; and individuals putting us on their social network pages, there are now more than 13,000 virtual movie theaters all over the web – that’s more than 25 times the number of screens that exist for a break-out documentary hit in the real movie theater world.
· We have nearly 500 films in our library.
· We just distributed our first revenue-sharing checks to every one of our filmmakers – we split with them what we get from the ads you see within our films. We’re just beginning to create this new platform making great films available to you for free, so none of our partners won the lottery with these checks – but like us, they’re happy to get help paying for the films you’ve seen, or getting started on their next documentary.
· And we’re delivering on our founder Ted Leonsis’ notion of filmanthropy – we are now featuring more than 150 charities, and making it easy for viewers inspired by our films to get involved, helping filmmakers and causes, and connecting communities.
We’re proud of how far we’ve come in 4 months, and I’m grateful to our tiny band of film fanatics who bring you SnagFilms, to our investors, to our filmmaking and distribution partners, to special friends like the Paley Center for Media and the Knight Foundation … and to you.
Rick Allen
CEO, SnagFilms
SnagFilms in Vegas
