Trading Revenue for Subscriptions

At Filmocracy we recently pivoted to hosting virtual film festivals in addition to our library of 2600 films. While generating between $1-10k per film festival was nice, it wasn't really adding to our subscriber base as much as we had hoped. The thought was that by hosting the virtual film festivals on our platform, the attendees would learn about Filmocracy and eventually become members. While that happened some of the time, it wasn't nearly at the rate we were hoping for.

Cue the trade. Instead of receiving payment from the festival organizer for hosting the event, we've made a change to host their festival for free and instead require the festival to be accessible only through our premium subscription. This way we generate the same amount of revenue as we would have from charging the festival, the festival is happy that they didn't have to pay anything (but still participate in the revenue), and we get subscribers. In the last month our subscriptions grew from $800 -> $3200! This is a new program for us so we'll have to see how it affects churn but at the very least we're getting people educated and interacting with our membership.