SnagFilms Moving Documentaries to Social Networking

The challenge to The Long Tail's hope of long lasting distribution and sustained revenue from the constant flow of niche markets usually fails on the fallacy of audience awareness. If a title does not appear on the first page of Amazon, Netflix, or Google, the chances of it ever being discovered go down dramatically. The Internet is great at maintaining access, but not very good at building an audience for old content.

SnagFilms is hoping to help documentary filmmakers overcome this challenge. In a Wall Street Journal report, Walter Mossberg described the new distribution strategy for SnagFilms. The company has created small widgets which can be placed on blogs, websites, Facebook pages and other sites. The company currently has a small roster of films, but will be accepting submissions from documentary filmmakers. The company shares a small amount of advertising revenue with the filmmakers, creating at least a modest opportunity for revenue.

The posting of a film takes only seconds. Each post creates a viewer for a particular film. Whether SnagFilms will develop a large enough roster to become a documentary film force remains to be seen. But at least documentary filmmakers have a new way to climb up from the tip of the tail.