SnagFilms

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

~ the goodbye ~

There is no news story about the day SnagFilms closed. I went looking for one and there is nothing. Not a Variety piece, not even a paragraph in IndieWire, which SnagFilms used to own. A service that had been giving away thousands of documentaries for twelve years stopped answering its own domain and the American trade press, which covers the renaming of a streaming tier in four outlets on the same afternoon, covered it nowhere.

So the death has to be reconstructed from the archive. The Internet Archive holds a working SnagFilms homepage captured on 10 April 2020. By 21 April the same address returns an error, and it returns that same error on every visit the crawler makes for the next three years. Somewhere in those eleven days the thing went off. Wikipedia records the month as May. The crawl says April, and the crawl was there.

What it had been was a free library. Ted Leonsis founded it in July 2008 with Miles Gilburne and Steve Case backing it, which makes it an AOL project by everything except its date of birth: Case had co-founded AOL, Leonsis had run a large part of it, and both had money looking for a second act. The pitch was printed under the wordmark: discover something different. Documentaries do not fail because nobody wants them, they fail because nobody can find them. So put them online behind an ad and charge the viewer nothing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what free was paying for ~

By 2013 there were more than five thousand films on it, and by the end the number quoted was around ten thousand. You did not need an account. You did not need to be in a particular country to see the index, though the film itself often had opinions about that. Two ads, one at the start and one somewhere in the middle, and the film ran.

The distribution is the part that made the model briefly plausible. SnagFilms did not only run its own site. It syndicated its catalog to more than a hundred thousand affiliated sites and put apps on everything with a remote control, so a blog about food policy could embed a food-policy documentary directly into a post, and SnagFilms took the advertising revenue on the play wherever the play happened. That is a sensible answer to the discovery problem and it works exactly as long as advertising on free long-form video pays for the licensing. It did not pay for very long.

~ the thing it sold first ~

In the same month it launched, July 2008, SnagFilms bought IndieWire. That trade publication had been running as a daily email for independent film since 1996 and it is still running now, staffed and profitable and part of Penske Media. SnagFilms sold it on 19 January 2016 and the terms were never disclosed.

Four years later the company that sold it was gone and the thing it sold was fine. There is a shape here that shows up over and over in this file: the durable asset was the editorial one, the boring text business with a mailing list and a byline, and the thing everybody thought was the future was the video platform giving away inventory it could not afford. The video was the company. The newsletter was the survivor.

~ no notice at all ~

The one sentence anybody recorded from the end reads: with deep regret, we have shut down the SnagFilms service. Rick Allen, who had run the company from the start, put the reason down to the economics of free video collapsing under a crisis that had begun a few weeks earlier. March and April 2020 emptied the advertising market faster than any downturn on record, and a business whose only revenue was pre-roll on documentaries had nothing else to stand on.

I never watched anything on it. The catalog was American independent film sold to an American advertising market, and I was not in either. What makes it worth a stone is the silence rather than the loss. Twelve years of somebody's work at making unwatched films watchable, ended inside two weeks, with no announcement anyone bothered to file. The stub that survives on Wikipedia gets the month wrong and nobody has corrected it, because there is nothing to correct it against.

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