CollegeHumor Goes Digital for First Feature Film

CollegeHumor releases Coffee Town on Tuesday, the first feature length film produced by the hugely popular video site.

The film, which follows the love lives of flirtatious baristas and customers, will be available on iTunes, Amazon, PlayStation, Xbox, on-demand and cable. Prices vary, with iTunes charging $6.99.

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It will also be released in select theaters in approximately 12 cities. But the whole point of the project is in going directly to consumers, bypassing Hollywood's traditional distribution, and using the site's digital presence to make a successful film starring a group of relatively unknown actors and a production budget south of a million dollars.

It's an experiment, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen tells Mashable. But Van Veen is banking on the site's dedicated followers and internet viewers, not theatre goers.

"We think that's how people are now most often consuming films that aren't big tentpoles like Avatar or Avengers," he says. "Even if you make a low budget movie now, for say, a couple million bucks, the cost of marketing the movie can be 10 times that, thus toppling the whole notion of a low risk movie in the first place. But if you have your own brand with its own promotional platform, you can start to get the word out without that expense."

That's why the film's team isn't spending on commercials and billboard ads. Instead it's leveraging the site's built-in audience of 15 million monthly viewers. With the marketing that goes into a big budget film, Van Veen says, "you know pretty instantly if your whole effort was a colossal waste. But with this approach, success or failure will be a much slower burn."

That "slower burn" means the film's shelf life will go long beyond the normal theatrical release cycle, explains Brian Norgard, the CEO and co-founder of Chill, which last month released a direct-to-viewer, crowdfunded series.

"They're taking the risk that the traditional studios can't take," Norgard says. "I think they'll make money. But I think they're trying to drive awareness."

Plus, sending traffic to the CollegeHumor site is an indirect way to turn a dollar, feeding the metrics needed to keep advertisers paying for site visibility.

"What they have going for them is they have a tightly bound audience," says Norgard. "They have a twist on the model we haven't seen anyone experiment with yet."

CollegeHumor's plan eliminates dollars spent on middle-men, says Drew Baldwin, the founder of the online video site Tubefilter.

"Why spend so much on a series of middle-men, advertisers, marketers, and distributors who all take their piece, when you can market directly to your audience?"

Raoul Marinescu, CBS Television's digital sales manager, describes CollegeHumor's plan as part film-promotion, part marketing tool.

"If it's triggered as a hybrid of both, with big quality and unknown actors, you're getting pennies on the dollar," Marinescu says. "Exposure on the media end is what you're gaining. Even before the movie premiers, you're driving traffic to CollegeHumor that they'll be able to monetize, something that a traditional studio can't do."

This plan eliminates the studio model of playing catch-up to recoup fees, making the standard for success that much easier to achieve. Johnny Depp's The Lone Ranger is widely considered a failure at $215 million to produce, opening only with a $73 million weekend.

"That model is gone, it's out, you can't live on the big blockbusters," Marinescu says. "The low budget, good quality content movies are the ones that are going to survive and be able to monetize over and over and over again."

Image courtesy of Sam Urdank for CollegeHumor