What Do Indie Filmmakers and Creators Have in Common?

Turns out, more than I thought.

In proud defiance of the Missing Persons claim, I walked the 20 minutes from my front door to The Lighthouse (Venice) on a clear, sunny May morning to attend a daylong convening on the creator economy. Scalable Summit promised that “(f)ounders, creators, marketers, investors, tech executives and other industry leaders who are shaping the industry” would come together to address “scale” and “sustainability.” I read a lot about the intersection of the creator economy and Big Hollywood, but less so independent filmmaking, especially documentary. So with this event happening in my own backyard, I figured I’d go and see what’s what.

I was entering foreign territory. The majority of my career has been in the nonprofit sector, I am passionate about “legacy” media, I quit Meta platforms last year to protest their addictive business model and protect my precious attention span, and have never laid eyes on TikTok. So I approached the day with the mindset of an anthropologist, a curious observer of a culture not my own. As someone who can lean fairly judgy, I resisted the temptation to proclaim the “good” and “bad” as I listened to panels and chatted with other attendees. My guiding questions for the day were along the lines of: What’s happening over here we in the film community can learn from? Are there opportunities we’re missing? Is there stuff we do that they could learn?

This is hardly a comprehensive overview; after all, it was only a one-day event. I came away mostly struck by how similar the broad themes of the conversation in the two sectors are, even if the context is different.

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The business model works for only the very few

Given that the foci of the day were “scale” and “sustainability,” this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The conference website set the stage: “(f)or the creator economy to truly reach scale, brands must rewrite their old playbooks. Media companies need to adapt or risk getting left behind. And creators need to stop playing misunderstood and get down to business.” The subtext – and sometimes the text text – across every panel and breakout was revenue: how can independent creators earn more (or any) from the content they produce? How can brands partner with creators to reach new audiences (consumers), who represent revenue growth for their products?

I’m reminded of statistics Scott Galloway shares on the regular, including in an edition of No Mercy/No Malice following the 2024 election (“The Podcast Election”):

A scant handful of pods, those with the biggest listenerships, capture nearly all the ad revenue. By some estimates, of the 600k podcasts that produce content each week, the top 10 get half the revenue. Put another way, to build a business in podcasting that pays people well and keeps the attention of a host with high opportunity cost(s), you likely need to be in the top 0.1% by listenership. The odds of success are admittedly long. If you’re a high school drama student who goes on to join SAG-AFTRA, you’re 2x more likely to win an Academy Award than have a sustainable pod. As a member of UCLA’s crew team, I was 3.5x more likely to end up in the Olympics than telling dick jokes (and making a good living) on a successful podcast.

I heard someone at the Summit say there are currently 50 million active US creators. I have no way of verifying that number, but the point remains: the vast majority of creators aren’t making enough revenue to support themselves, let alone a business that pays other people.

Hey, filmmakers out there: sound familiar?

A Barbell Sector

It seemed to me that the Summit attendees fell into three main groups: employees of large corporations, independent creators, and those who are trying to build the intermediary organizations that scrape off some revenue by delivering efficiency or services to the other two. Based on what I heard in the panel presentations, I imagine the sector shaped like a barbell: On one end, Instagram, Twitch, Spotify, YouTube and the like sharing how their platforms support independent creators and expressing a seemingly genuine wish that they all be as successful as possible. The brands on stage felt similarly huge and impenetrable for a solopreneur: Visa, NFL, Adobe. On the other side of the barbell, an army of 50 million creators clamoring to get their (and our) attention.

The middle, the skinny bar in our metaphor, feels like the least developed of the three groups. I’d put creator studios/production companies in this band, as I would also established management firms trying to break into this space (CAA was in attendance), plus any other organization attempting to efficiently and profitably connect creators with corporations and audiences. I suspect there were more startups in this arena at the Summit, but because I don’t know what their company names mean I couldn’t tell you what they do. Perhaps the hypothesis that day – and in the sector more broadly – is that “scale” and “sustainability” will come from a more developed middle infrastructure of talent representation and service providers – as long as everyone can make the business model work.

In indie film, we have a similar dynamic. Plenty of filmmakers on one end, massive corporate entities on the other, and a collapse of the middle infrastructure in between¹. Sales agents, managers, distributors – all the services that broker connections between the independent artist and corporate entities (and, by extension, audience) finding it increasingly more difficult to derive revenue from business models that worked 10-15 years ago. Filmmakers are now expected to perform every function of the enterprise themselves: financing, production, delivery, marketing, distribution, etc.

Which brings me to…

The creator is responsible for audience development

The paradox I observed throughout the Scalable Summit is one that filmmakers will relate to, increasingly so nowadays: the creator is expected to make the content and develop an audience that can be neatly delivered to a brand in order to derive revenue. But the time and resources it takes to do all that work upfront? That’s on the creator’s dime. The revenue is what they need in order to build the audience, but it’s the audience they need in order to attract brand revenue. Classic Catch-22.

In indie film, distribution is hot and self (or “alternative”) distribution is increasingly a film team’s Plan A. The opportunity to develop your own audience and exploit revenue opportunities along the way is both liberating and a crapton of work. Just read any of the myriad case studies published on the topic to see for yourself².

At the moment, the prevailing notion is that it’s the filmmaker’s responsibility to build the audience. Is this a sustainable future? What resources, tools, mindsets, and actions does it take to connect audiences with independent film during these topsy-turvy times – or a year or two from now? Six funders have distribution initiatives underway designed to better understand just that. My gut says we’re at the beginning of a lot of experimentation and innovation in this space, and that someday we’ll live in a world where filmmakers retain a lot of the control, but have mechanisms and tools to lighten the administrative and logistical burden of reaching audiences. At least I hope so. Perhaps that’s where the new missing middle infrastructure will emerge.

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Key distinctions remain… and some related questions

While my mind was mostly drawn to perceived similarities, I did wonder about a few key differences and how they may or may not impact the future of each sector:

• Short form/constant vs long form/every couple years release. Burnout was on the agenda at Scalable Summit, with creators feeling the pressure to develop and release content at an unrelenting pace with little revenue to show for it. Filmmakers experience burnout, too, but for different reasons. Are there practices and lessons can each maker learn from the other, leading to more sustainable careers for both down the road? Or is everyone just screwed?³

• The creator is the brand (in front of the camera) vs the work is the brand (behind the camera). So much of what I understand to be the most popular creator content (remember, I’m kind of a Luddite) features the creator on camera doing stuff: getting ready, performing in skits, interviewing others, etc. They are their content, and they develop an audience around the thing they do and their approach to it. Filmmakers, on the other hand, usually make work featuring other people doing stuff. Eventually, a few do develop an audience over time, but filmmakers can create a wide diversity of work over a career that may not be as easily identifiable. Is there more overlap on the horizon, with these lines becoming increasingly blurrier? Is that what we want?

• Notably absent: art. I don’t want to offend anyone who identifies as a creator by claiming that what they do isn’t art, but I did notice that the subject wasn’t brought up explicitly at the Sustainable Summit. Given that the creator economy exists firmly in a market-driven ecosystem, this doesn’t surprise me at all; “art,” by some definitions, is inherently non-commercial. That being said, I feel like a lot of creators, deep down, wanna make movies. Open Gardens does a great job of tracking this convergence, and I’ll note that “long form is the future” was spoken more than once during the Scalable Summit. Is there a future where there is a space for artful — and revenue-generating —“content”? Is this where the push for vertical comes into play?

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Thus concludes my field notes. The big takeaway is that it’s not like there’s some magic mountain of money in the creator economy that we film people are too naive or stubborn to grab. But there are enough similarities, open questions, and coming convergences to warrant keeping an eye on it.

1. After I wrote this, Emily Best posted an excellent piece on this very topic.

2. Hot off the presses, an terrific case study from the Lilly team.

3. Because, capitalism.