Randy Greenberg of The Business of Entertainment: Unfiltered has posted “Creators and Filmmakers: You Don’t Need Permission” on Substack.
In it he analyzes the recent successes of Kane Parsons (Backrooms), Curry Barker (Obsession) and Mark Fischbach (Iron Lung).
He then extrapolates their trajectories to outline his “Audience-First Pipeline” ladder with these four rungs:
- “Build the audience through short-form content.
- Escalate the format progressively as the craft develops.
- Prove the concept at feature length.
- Walk into the negotiation with leverage, or skip the negotiation entirely.”
“The job in Phase One is not to make money. The job is to build the audience that funds everything that follows. Short-form content on these platforms is your audience acquisition infrastructure, dramatically cheaper than any traditional marketing budget. [Phase Two] The eight-minute floor on YouTube is the first structural breakpoint. Mid-roll ads unlock. [Phase Three] This is where the filmmaker stops renting the audience to platforms and starts owning the relationship. [Phase Four] When you arrive at a distributor with a built audience and a proven concept, you are not pitching. You are negotiating.”
In summary, “Short-form builds the audience. Mid-form pays the bills. Long-form is the revenue engine. Direct-to-audience is where you own the business.”
This post is so great you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing!
My take: this is a great breakdown that codifies and quantifies the creator economy playbook. What’s so intriguing about this is that technology and digitization made it possible. Previously, the means of production for analogue media involved so many people and was so expensive that “success” was almost always granted by gatekeepers. Now your audience anoints you.