Distribber

» see distribber.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You cannot hand a film to Apple. There is a list of approved companies allowed to deliver files into the iTunes store, and if your name is not on it then no amount of finished movie in your possession changes anything. Most people never learn this, because most people are not trying to sell a film. Every independent filmmaker learns it in week one.

Distribber was built on that fact. Adam Chapnick, who had been a principal at Indiegogo, started it in 2009 with a pitch aimed straight at how the aggregator business normally worked. Instead of taking a percentage of your revenue forever, Distribber charged a flat fee up front, around $1,295 at the start, and then got out of the way. Your film went to the stores. The money came back to you.

I have never released a film, so none of this landed on me. What did land, the way it lands on anyone who ships anything through somebody else's storefront, is the recognition that the gate is a business in itself. Somebody is always standing at the point where your work meets the distribution, and the only real question is what they charge to let you past.

It worked for a decade. Distribber was putting over a thousand titles a year onto the video platforms, mostly small documentaries and features that had no other route, along with a few things people had actually heard of. Chapnick's company got bought by Indiegogo in 2010 and, after one more sale along the way, landed with GoDigital in 2015.

~ the record ~

~ the actual end ~

In 2019 the royalties stopped arriving. Filmmakers who called got nothing back, and some of them had been waiting the better part of a year for payments that iTunes and Amazon had already made. In September the offices closed. There was no announcement and no farewell page, just a company that had gone quiet and a set of films still earning money somewhere upstream.

There was no bankruptcy either, which mattered. GoDigital used an assignment for the benefit of creditors, a faster and quieter procedure than Chapter 7, and brought in a restructuring firm in September to handle the claims. Creditors were then told that any distribution would take nine to twelve months, so the earliest realistic money was 2020. Individually the sums were small, a few thousand dollars a film. Collectively it was every independent filmmaker who had trusted the cheapest honest option on the market.

~ the funny part ~

Distribber existed to sell filmmakers an escape from perpetual revenue shares. Its parent was trapped in one. Under a licensing agreement from 2012, GoDigital owed 35 percent of its revenue to a related company for as long as the arrangement ran, and when a court confirmed that the money had to be paid, the offices closed shortly afterward.

So the thing that killed the company selling freedom from an endless cut was an endless cut, signed years earlier by people upstairs, on terms the customers never saw and could not have checked.

~ the next chapter ~

The trust went first. Filmmakers had spent ten years being told that these platforms were democratizing distribution, and the collapse taught a specific lesson that stuck: an intermediary you cannot audit is a risk you are carrying whether you priced it or not. Some moved to competing aggregators and some went direct, selling from their own sites at lower volume and higher certainty.

The gate never went anywhere. There is still a list of companies allowed to deliver to Apple, and you are still not on it. Distribber's decade was the stretch when getting past that gate cost a flat fee instead of a piece of everything, and the reason it reads like a good deal in hindsight is that the flat fee was the honest version of a toll that never stopped being collected.

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