PARK CITY, Utah — Filmmakers who turn to crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo typically use campaign money for shooting and production. But getting a movie made is only one part of the filmmaking process: It still needs to be marketed.
Video-sharing platform Vimeo, which gets 149 million unique visitors a month, is offering $500,000 to crowdfunded filmmakers in need of marketing help. Selected filmmakers will receive assistance with website creation, targeted online campaigns and social-media initiatives. In exchange, the content will be hosted on the company's Vimeo On Demand site.
See also: 5 Reasons to Choose Vimeo Instead of YouTube
Vimeo announced the news this week at this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
"This program is for creators who don't already have a large fan community at their disposal," Greg Clayman, general manager of Vimeo's Audience Network, told Mashable. "Driving awareness is a key component in broadening a film’s exposure to grow audiences and in turn, sales for filmmakers."
Vimeo's in-house curation team will be looking at all genres of film for the program, but only distribution-ready movies that have successfully funded a minimum of $10,000 are eligible to participate. There's no hard number as to how many films will be chosen, but Clayman said between 30 and 40 films will likely be selected over the course of this year.
FIlmmakers can submit their work directly to crowdfunding@vimeo.com for consideration.
"While crowdfunding changed the game in getting films made, we wanted to create a program that would address the next step in the online-film ecosystem: marketing to broaden a film's exposure, and build a global audience," Clayman said. "Crowdfunding has become an integral part of the independent filmmaking community, and Sundance — being the tentpole event for this industry — was the perfect place to launch and build awareness for the program."
This is Vimeo's first program geared toward crowdfunded filmmakers. Last September, it offered $10,000 advances at the Toronto Film Festival to any filmmakers that premiered their films digitally on Vimeo On Demand. As a result, the company secured 13 films (about 10% of all world premieres at the festival) that will make their digital premieres exclusively on its platform.
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