How To Promote Your Movie With BitTorrent

Independent filmmaker / guest blogger Bojan Dulabic breaks down BitTorrent Bundle. Herewith, his advice on using BitTorrent in your movie marketing mix.

This article was originally posted on May 22, 2014 in Filmmaking Stuff. From Bojan:

I’m in the middle of self distributing my feature film, Living Life or Waiting to Die. If you’re in the same position as me, your biggest question is:

“How am I going to promote my movie without spending a fortune?”

A lot of us think social media is the answer. You can share news with your followers on Facebook and Twitter and you will reach a certain number of them. But even if you have hundreds or thousands of Facebook followers, Facebook has changed their policy regarding the reach of organic postings. The truth is, unless you’re willing to pay money, your Facebook posts will be seen by much less people than you think. Twitter is still free, which is great. But the problem is, tweets get lost in the noise.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying ignore these platforms. You have to be on them every day. I know I am. They are essential tools for promotion. But they’re not the only tools for promotion. In fact, I recently found a new way to promote movies. And this is a service most of us don’t even think about when it comes to reaching our audience: BitTorrent.

“Say what, you want me to pirate my own stuff?”

Yes, you heard me.

How To Promote Your Movie With BitTorrent

BitTorrent recently created an awesome free service called BitTorrent Bundle. And this allows you to promote your movie with BitTorrent.

This new service allows you to distribute videos, music, ebooks; pretty much any files that can be downloaded. You can give your files away for free, or you can ask for an email address in exchange for content.

Here’s how you can promote your movie with BitTorrent.

As I mentioned before, I recently finished my feature film Living Life or Waiting to Die. In order to get the word out, and get more people to subscribe to my mailing list, I decided to give away the following goodies away for free, in exchange for the user’s email address:

8 minutes of the film.
One theme song.
20 pictures of the shoot.
3 high resolution posters as PDF.
Behind the scenes video where I talk about the origins of the story.

The way I set up my BitTorrent Bundle page is that anyone can watch and download the trailer for free, but if they want all the additional content they have to provide me their email address. By doing so, they subscribe to my newsletter.

Results

I published my BitTorrent Bundle page on Jan. 2, 2014. And at the time of this writing, I have had 4691 views on my page. On average I’m getting 34 page views per day and out of those, one person per day is downloading the free bundle.

The technology is getting easy to use.

BitTorrent recently introduced a streaming feature where people don’t have to download the bundle using a BitTorrent client. Now people can just stream whatever video they want.

This makes the whole viewing process a lot simpler, which encourages more people to watch the content. This feature has only been around for a little while, but I have already had 54 views in addition to the downloads. I expect that number to go up and eventually surpass the downloads number.

One great plus is the home page where all bundles are displayed. This can generate a lot of traffic, especially, if you are in their featured section.

Search and Tagging

BitTorrent has also recently introduced a search bar. Additionally, all Bundle pages can now be tagged with custom words that describe the content. I have noticed a jump in my downloads number since they introduced this feature.

This service is still in alpha release, which means many more features will be coming our way. And that’s really exciting.

The Publisher Community

Because BitTorrent Bundle publishers are a relatively small community, you get to have a lot of input in the product. When you sign up you get to be part of the forum where the creators ask for your input as a user and you get to chat with them. I have submitted many questions and feedback to them directly.

Utilizing Bundle is a great free way to promote your movie with BitTorrent. It allows you to build up your fan base, not just for your current movie, but all movies moving forward. I strongly consider that you promote your movie with BitTorrent as part of your strategy. Sign up for a free account and create as many bundles as you like.
If you’d like to check out my page go here.