The Veronica Mars Movie

Comments (Archived):

1. I wonder if we can get a Kickstarter campaign to pay Google to keep Google Reader going? I’d be happy to contribute and judging by the number of Reader fans who are up in outrage about Google’s decision I’m sure it would get funded?

   1. Have you looked at some of the alternatives? I think G-Reader was becoming a dinosaur waiting to be extinct. It had been on life support for about a year anyways.

      1. Reader is providing the pipes that feed the alternatives in alot of cases. I use Feedly via my Google Reader account, frankly I always thought Feedly would shut before Reader. It’s an appalling decision imo.

         1. Seems like a very aggressive way to try to force Reader users in G+. Not sure that’s gonna work.

      2. Yup, the writing’s been on the wall for a while.

   2. That’s a lot like what happened with Veronica Mars actually. Rob had to get Warner to let him do this. But Google could just open source Reader

      1. Here’s why apparently it can’t even be open sourced. It’s too intricately tied to the rest of Google:http://gigaom.com/2013/03/1…despite users petitioning Google:http://www.fastcompany.com/…

         1. there is also that it would be a SaaS program – fundraise, google threatens, fundraise for even more. etc.

         2. Good links. Thank you 🙂 Does RSS interest you?

            1. It used to. I built my first business on it and we learned a lot about large scale RSS aggregation.Why are you asking 🙂

            2. email coming your way…

   3. i’m scared for feedburner more than the reader. rss feeds are important

      1. Yes they are! Long live RSS 🙂

   4. There are some great alternatives out there (that we should fund, instead!), like NewsBlur.Some people are using the product I run to put their feeds into more of a magazine/Flipboard/Zite type layout (but on the web).Lifehacker just published a post about good alternatives http://lifehacker.com/59904…

   5. OK I’m in – if you support my dream of getting Lotus Organizer re-built to work in today’s technology (cloud, i-everything and mobile apps) – deal!?

2. I noticed this yesterday from a tweet somewhere.As a marketer what is interesting is that Kickstarter is a transactional marketplace for communities and brands that already existed across the web.Not a place to build a brand or community, but the very perfect place to aggregate it around a single simple vote of support and confidence.Doing one thing really well even if that one thing is a huge game changer again wins.

   1. True, but we have also seen some dark horses emerge as well.

      1. Example where Kickstarter instigated the creation of the community. I don’t have one.Certainly events aggregate and grow community but it doesn’t happen in the marketplace.

         1. http://www.causes.com/ is trying to tackle that. They seem to have traction.

3. I think this is an awesome thing. I am a cult follower of another short lived tv show called Firefly that I would LOVE for Joss Whedon to goto the fans to fund something interesting and new, maybe another movie or another season of episodes. This really proves the power of the fans. I know in the case of Firefly I would put my money where my mouth is, and I’m sure everyone has some show they really like that would cause the same reaction in a lot of us.

   1. Yes! I must have outed myself before here as a total Joss geek — his sort of work, which requires a level of attentive commitment that doesn’t work with broadcast TV — is absolutely suited to the new forms. Between Kickstarter and the model Netflix used with House of Cards, more like Firefly! Awesome.

   2. Tweet at him and ask him to do it

      1. Excellent !

      2. Last time I checked, sadly, Joss didn’t really tweet.

   3. Joss Whedon has a lot of cult followers for various shows (me -> buffY)But you need to have a cult following and studio blessing. I don’t think the amount of money raised could work for say a “friends” movie – that is still franchised and no studio with rights would greenlight that. not enough of a following means you don’t have a base to start from, nor press attention to keep the ball rolling

   4. I immediately thought of this, too, when I saw the Veronica Mars stuff. But one of the main characters is dead (in the show) and another is busy with a very successful project (Castle). I have a hard time seeing this happen… although we can all wish!

   5. Firefly – my first thought too! Could online petition to Joss Whedon work? It could show him and a former crew how many people would potentially back the project. Come to think of it, this is an idea for a startup: pre-Kickstarter.com

4. Great points, also interesting to note that Warner Bros. actually owns the TV series (as they financed it) and therefore had to give permission for this movie to be made and for this Kickstarter campaign to be done. Also, notable is that they are using Flickster (owned by Warners as well) to distribute the digital version of the movie–though likely there will be others as well.

   1. I know a lot about the sausage making that went on here. But that is in the past. Now we can just eat the sausage

      1. Yes, what I find fascinating is that Warners was willing to do it, A year or two ago, highly unlikely. Slow change may becoming fast change.

         1. Hopefully, like so many stale industries, we have hit that moment of “gradually, until it is sudden.”

            1. don’t forget Academia!

      2. If the studios want to use Kickstarter to de-risk projects recognizing that the old model does not work so well, more power to them.

5. Working in the kitchen this AM, while my wife had News12 (local cablevision news)…I over heard a story talking about a kickstarter that raised over $ 2M.We are living in exciting timesSide note – word of the day = RABID

   1. One of the best practices of crowd funding is to publicize what you are doing. Let others talk about it.

   2. Kitchenstarter 🙂

6. Crowd funding creativity has been nailed definitely.I’d like to see the crowd sourcing model start to move mountains in other areas: policy, politics, corruption, poverty, world affairs, healthcare, etc.

   1. I’m looking forward to the first online crowd-funded war….or if you’re more comfortable with the term… rebellion.

      1. Exactly. This is real voting power at play.

   2. how about helping others? i saw a company the other day thats doing that….tapping in to the latent pool of good will in everyone.

      1. yes lots of those and many are really awesome.

         1. no one has cracked it yet……the one that does is an absolute monster for humanity….

      2. http://www.giveforward.com/ME ADVISE THEM. AWESOMELY.

   3. And curiosity-driven research!

   4. .I wonder what the tax treatment of this kind of fundraising is at the end of the day.JLM.

      1. PRICEY.IT COUNT AS GET FREELANCE MONEY.

      2. I’m very cynical. There wouldn’t be VC funding interest, by the same savvy VC crowd if it weren’t favorable. cc @FakeGrimlock:disqus

      3. Note that my comment does not reference Fred Wilson or USV as one of the VC’s. I still have enough sense not to be rude to someone whose hospitality I am partaking of. I tried to tell Jeff Jarvis that the other day, when he wrote a post about bad behavior on blogs. He needs to overcome his scruples about censorship and free speech. It is his house, his website, and he isn’t the U.S. government; no reason to tolerate impertinence, just invoke the power of the IP ban. Big Red Car probably knows this. He’s sensible.

         1. it is fine to speak your mind here

7. If this is the end, I just want you all to know I’ve never seen an episode of Veronica Mars or Breaking Bad.

   1. Me neither. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

   2. Count me in too 🙂

   3. nor me

   4. Me too

   5. me too.

   6. Me six.

   7. ‘Breaking Bad’ = brilliant writing.

8. this is absolutely frikin awesome. No other way to describe the power of this.@umair must be doing backflips on the signal that this type of thing gives off, and what it can potentially explode going forward.power in the hands of the few when it comes to the arts is over? music labels? studios? whats next?If there would only be a company that could harness this model and tap in to people’s latent sense of good will in helping others with real life problems, not just creative projects – that would be transformative. …..

   1. I agree.

      1. this company i saw last week watched a cause raise 20K in 3 days for a terminally ill guy who’s wife and 3 children will be left in a traumatic state. As of this morning the amount was over 45K and the guy passed on tuesday…. this is very powerful stuff when people can pitch in and help.

         1. Wow. Powerful when causes tap into your mind before they tap into your wallet.

            1. yes – its a social goodwill network…its a big big idea.

            2. The crowdfunding of science projects is where art/music/games? were 4 years ago. It’s still a pup.Think about it this way: 99% of scientists are 0% crowdfunded today. That 0% will go up. I don’t know how fast, but it will rise. What more proof do you need than the sequester?

         2. that is awesome

   2. Just wait till scientists start amassing fan bases..

      1. @microryza is doing this, and I totally buy it. Someone needs to light the spark

         1. what about disease research? or is that too difficult to understand?

            1. why not? as I wrote on the Microryza blog, start small: http://bit.ly/10grnZb

         2. I know, I blog for them! 🙂

      2. I’m a scientist fangirl. You’re right!

      3. scientists are sexy

9. I must have missed it, the series.

10. VM ran for 3 years/seasons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

11. Giveforward.com is the kickstarter for charitable giving. Howard Lindzon is an investor.

12. Nielsen just came out with a study that says “prime content” like those higher-end rewards Fred mentioned could bring in incremental revenue of up to $2.6 billion for the crippled music industry. There is unmet demand for access and exclusive content. Fans want to engage in a more meaningful way and crowdfunding has shown that they are willing to pay for it. People want to be part of the creative process even in a small way. Previously little-known “punk-torch singer” Amanda Palmer recently raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter for a new record and has gotten more loyal fans and national acclaim for it – and even a Ted talk!

13. I wonder what the entire financing picture is though. They did this with the permission of Warner Bros. (who owns the rights) and a movie costs more that $2M to make. It’s not exactly crowd-financed, almost more like market research for WB. I wonder what the behind-the-scenes agreement was: “if you raise X, we’ll finance the rest, etc”.

    1. Crowdfunding as milestone?

       1. Crowd funding is a way to go around the gatekeepers.This is more like going to the crowd to get evidence for the gatekeepers so that they’ll let you through.I think it’s a good thing, but it’s a little bit different than the first scenario.

14. This is great. Crowd funding works because it attracts risk seeking personalities. In the past it took champions like Howard Hughes, In the 1920s Howard Hughes produced and funded his own motion picture co, including the film hells angels which he personally invested 4 million dollars to produce. Talk about an entrepreneur!

15. Have to admit I had never heard of Veronica Mars until yesterday. So congrats to them, their great fans, and Kickstarter (which is something special).Believe this speaks to a much larger point though… the internet is massive. Think big, then times that by 10. My main point being that niches can actually be quite large now, quite lucrative, and quite powerful when they move together like a flock of starlings. It’s amazing to watch. It also bodes well for my theory that “winner takes all” is (mercifully) a thing of the past. Long live niche-power, engaged users, and rabid fans!

    1. .This is crowd CULT funding and if you think about the nature of a cult that is HUGE.This is why the Reg D changes of the JOBS Act are so important.Nobody has said this but — this is where jobs can come from. Funding “shovel ready” projects which will create jobs.Using the power of cults to fund jobs and projects.The parallels with political fundraising — speaking of cults — is a road map particularly when one notes that well over $1B was raised in the last cycle.JLM.

    2. Fodder for breakfast conversation

    3. (uch lost my page let me try this again)heard a guy talking about the music industry moving from a super star model with only a few making huge dollars to the networked model where many more bands/musicians are able to connect with a smaller but highly engaged audience allowing them to make a much smaller but real living.Same goes with entertainment… The current Hollywood film model isn’t built to support niche passionate and engaged audiences — but if we cut out the middlepeople who make most of the money anyhow and get rid of the distribution and marketing challenges (ala the network) we will now be able to see many more content producers being able to make a living off of their art.It’s going to turn their industry upside down and most of them don’t even have a clue about it.

       1. I’d like to see that happen. Not sure the majors and studios will do it though.

          1. The same thing will happen in the sciences. It’s happening already, but it’s still early days compared to arts/music/film/games.In this analogy, Hollywood and Academia are cast in the same role. Some university departments are forward-thinking, others are not. I’m sure some studios will think this is awesome, others will hate the idea.

          2. Video stores didn’t want to go online either. Look how that turned out 🙂

16. I’m excited to see equity crowdfunding launch, hopefully in the next couple of months. We’ll have some exciting stories like this, but with tech entrepreneurs.While Title III of the JOBS Act (crowdfunding for the masses, but with all sort of limitations (and it won’t be legal for at least a year)) seems to get all the attention, the removal of the Reg D general solicitation ban in Title II of the JOBS act is a monumental change in securities laws. Startups will soon be able to pitch online to millions of accredited investors.

    1. .HUGE but the Rules even for the Red D modifications are still not issued. The Pres signed the JOBS Act in April of 2012 and here we sit. Still waiting for the Rules.In the end, the Reg D changes will dwarf the Emerging Growth Company implications.Well played!JLM.

    2. I agree. General Solicitation is the big deal

17. the future .. of journalism, too

18. 10k for a speaking role …new angle on launching an acting career? i wonder if there is a way to crowd fund your donation to a crowd funded project?

19. Its performance might mean that cult shows that find niche but highly engaged audiences no longer have to die after the first season on network TV. Imagine Netflix agreeing to match funding to successful kickstarter funded programs? Built in market + marketing push + netflix distribution + a lot of de-risking. Could be awesome.

    1. I totally agree!

20. I would love Ari Emanuel to engage here. Last summer at the ATD Digital Conference, he said that only he and the Hollywood infrastructure of agencies, studio, and cable distribution can deliver what he calls “premium content.” He also noted that the internet and technology industry are “tubes” that ultimately will recognize that they need the “premium content” and the Internet can only put together what he dismissively refered to as “cats on the couch doing who knows what” is a serious question.I blogged about it here:http://takingpitches.com/20…Your turn Ari!

    1. HOLLYWOOD HAS MONOPOLY ON TECHNOLOGY AND MONEY, NOT TALENT.TECHNOLOGY CHEAP AND MONEY AVAILABLE?END OF HOLLYWOOD.

21. Just don’t get in the way!

22. From the studio’s perspective, they have done something really interesting. Removed risk.Yes, it’s true that even established directors struggle to get passion projects made and this could be a great solution to that, but if you look at it from the studio perspective, they have basically proven demand before making the movie. They’ve never been able to really do that before.It will be interesting to see if they do this more and more. There are positives, of course, but if they do, it introduces a new problem – the audience doesn’t always know what it wants to see.Interesting times.

23. Hi Fred,I think this demonstrates again the value and power to focus on your core audience of most loyal fans to drive deep engagement – instead of being obsessed with quantitative (and vanity) metrics of achieving huge numbers of fans, likes, followers etc. Mediapost recently published similar story showing huge waste in the overall Ad industry by most brands wasting most of their budgets etc, worth a quick read I think http://bit.ly/Z6uBLi

24. I’ve always wanted a marketplace for buying and selling parts in movies, tv shows, and .. well, anything. Kickstarter is getting close to it.

    1. .If one can get $10,000 for a speaking part in a movie, there is a market there.JLM.

       1. Naming rights. I was thinking there is a business around sushi restaurants naming sushi rolls after customers. Or restaurants naming dishes (I’ve seen that but it’s normally gratis to a good customer). Much classier then placemat ads at the deli.

          1. .I used to have a crab cake sandwich named after me at Chez Zee in Austin, Texas.I knew the owner — Sharon Watkins, wonderful restaurateur and entrepreneur — and I used to have them make me a crab cake sandwich from time to time even though it was not on the menu.Crab cake, hamburger bun, lettuce, tomato, sauce tartar, pickle.I used to love a fresh crab cake sandwich from Dockside in Wrightsville Beach, NC and I imported it to Austin, Texas.The owner of Chez Zee said it sold very well.I had forgotten about this until I read your comment. I will have to see if they still have it on the menu.JLM.

             1. “I had forgotten about this until I read your comment.”Remember you are under oath!!!Through the magic of gawk.it and @falicon I was able to find that you actually testified to this fact back in December 2011:http://gawk.it/search?searc…One of my Wrightsville Beach faves is a fresh crab cake sandwich from Dockside on the ICW. I could sit and eat crab cake sandwiches and drink cold beer and watch the yachts go by forever.I was great friends with a woman — Sharon Watkins — who owned Chez Zee in Austin, an iconic restaurant in NW Hills in Austin, and always got her staff to make me a crab cake sandwich by ordering a hamburger bun and a crabcake.I used to eat there fairly often and whenever the kitchen got that order she would know I was in the house.So she put it on the menu and called it “Jeff’s Crab Cake Sandwich”. It apparently sold like crazy.I used to be a contendah!

             2. .Haha, you could write an encyclopedia of all the things I have forgotten since 2011. That doesn’t even qualify as recent history.I’m just happy the stories are both the same.Not even a foot fault.JLM.

             3. “I’m just happy the stories are both the same.”Suffering from the same affliction I usually [1] use words that give me leeway.I sometimes have people tell me things and thank me for stories I told them years ago that I don’t remember at all. I’m sure the same happens to you.As a recent example I was the one who coined and suggested “Back in the Day Friday” a few days ago and Fred forgot that and said “someone said”! Glad I’m not in a corporation and didn’t get “credit”![1] Example would be the use of “usually” in this sentence.

             4. ah nice…gawk.it never forgets 🙂

             5. I actually worry about this quite frequently telling the same story more than once. Would be nice if disqus [1] had a way to pop up on certain conditions or words almost like an auto complete type thing.So if JLM started to type Chez Zee he could see that he left a comment before with those unique words.[1] (As if.)

             6. The ‘did I say this before’ filter would be pretty cool…very resource intensive in many cases though (so prob. unlikely until/unless we all keep local copies of our complete data history and it’s easily accessible to the browser).Unfort. the current internet trend is to move more and more towards ephemeral data…but as I’ve mentioned many times before I’ve always been way more interested in ‘over time’ than ‘real time’ (for those that have kept tabs on the many different hacks and projects I’ve built over the years, they’ll notice it’s one of my common themes along with search and discovery).

       2. It was for a single tiny part, a waiter saying ‘your check, sir’. There was only one, and it sold out immediately. They might have gotten $50,000 for a 5 line scene, who knows.

          1. .If something sells out immediately, then they should add a bit to the inventory, no?Sell what sells?JLM.

    2. .I think there is a business there.JLM.

       1. Can’t wait till someone builds it so I can start buying parts.I’d like to gift you a role as an ax-wielding barbarian in the next season of Game of Thrones.

25. I had never even heard of Veronica Mars until this story popped up in my Twitter feed last night.So not only is Kickstarter helping fund projects/businesses, it’s creating new awareness – with support from Twitter in this case.

26. What I love about this story is it speaks to the power of segmenting fandom, and the goodness of a platform that supports the low bar testing of same.Love the show, support the movie. Really love the show, sign up for the red carpet package. REALLY love the show, name a character or get a part in the movie.It hearkens back to a great Malcolm Gladwell article from a few years back called ‘The Pitchman’ about Ronco infomercial king Ron Popeil (Showtime Rotisserie, Pocket Fisherman). In it, Popeil talks about the goodness of tying product making and product marketing together, and how he designs products with a clear eye to how they will be experienced in the infomercial, and vice versa.If you think about it, that is a big part of the magic of Kickstarter – collapsing the traditional boundaries between making and marketing.

27. One of my contacts/clients is a Hollywood producer of movies (“A” that people have heard of) who is looking to get involved in projects like this. Anyone who has a serious idea of something send me an email with the idea and I will pass it along to him. He’s got access to top talent and knows all ends of this business. His wife is an emmy award winning casting agent as well.

    1. FAKEGRIMLOCK: THE MOVIE OF AWESOME.

       1. what would happen in this movie?

          1. AWESOMENESS.AND EXPLOSIONS.

             1. .If you need a good demo man, call me, Grim.JLM.

             2. BOOM!

    2. actually, my boyfriend has an idea that was originally a tv pilot that is now being turned into a comic book that I think would do very well (it actually makes me laugh aloud when reading drafts while being the sort of stuff good comedies and sci fi works across america are made of, which typically make me go meh)

28. This is fantastic news for independent producers everywhere! We at Triggerfish Animation in Cape Town, South Africa are watching this unfold with much excitement as we build the continent’s leading film & entertainment company. The time is coming when small studios like us will start to challenge the dominance of the majors. In territories like Russia, Poland, Croatia & Benelux, our first film has already earned more at the box office than many of our rivals on a fraction of their resources. To infinity & beyond 🙂

29. Over on The Atlantic Wire, RIchard Lawson lamented the Veronica Mars Kickstarter project. The commenters pushed back at him though.IMO, he was on firmer ground with his criticism of Amanda Palmer’s recent Kickstarter project, particularly since, IIRC, she planned to go on tour without paying her accompanying musicians. At least with Veronica Mars, people making the movie will get paid.

30. Terrific campaign. One key takeaway for me was the sheer amount of different price points they offered for each contributor. This seemed to allow them to tap into a very deep market.So far they raised ~70% of funds from donations between $35 and $200, so this was clearly the sweet spot. Importantly though, the higher price points allowed them to take advantage of the long tail of demand at higher price points.If this was a business, you would probably focus on the smaller end of the market, but on Kickstarter it seems the advice is to go far and wide – you never know who you might hit.ps. the fact that products above $200 were limited hurts this analysis, but I would point out that the rarity of the products also help their demand (perhaps people would not have been so keen to spend up big if it was not so exclusive)

    1. I hadn’t seen the campaign data. 70% in the $35-$200 range is amazing. What do you estimate is the size of the Veronica Mars fan base?

       1. Tough one to guess.Some data points. About 45,000 people have contributed so far. The show averaged about 2.5m viewers in the US (which is not great). DVD sales have been strong with the show ranking in the top 10 sales on Amazon occasionally and in the top 20 for iTunes and these DVD sales would have driven the popularity higher than the TV audience figures suggestWithout suggesting any actual figures, it seems that the number at the moment would be smallish, not mainstream but devoted. But this will be changing very rapidly with the publicity of this campaign, which has received strong press coverage around the world. If I had to guess, perhaps this movie will be a top 50 for the year that it is released, so maybe the total audience figure would be about 5 – 10 million (but prob better to ask somebody with experience in the industry)

          1. What % of registered Kickstarters have donated to this campaign you reckon?

             1. I think there are about 3,000,000 active Kickstarter members, so I would guess somewhere between 1 – 5%

31. If the crowdfunding component is a piece of the funding structure for a movie then it could constitute an interesting new component of a financing strategy.

32. THIS IS FUTURE OF DOING THINGS.ALL OF THEM.

33. Do you happen to have any data on what percentage of the backers came from outside of Kickstarter versus inside Kickstarter? Basically, I’m interested to know if projects are mostly funded based on the projects ability to market the project versus the Kickstarter community being large enough to make projects possible for even someone who doesn’t have a huge community behind them.Any data on this that you can share? Is it just the popular getting more popular or is the community big enough to make someone with a great idea popular?

    1. you need both. you need your network to seed the project and then the kickstarter community will finish the job

       1. You can scroll through the funders page and it will show how many other Kickstarter projects they’ve backed. I wonder what % of the 50,000 Veronica Mars backers are Kickstarter virgins? If what we’re seeing is a finite Veronica Mars fan base catalyze a massive turnout from the Kickstarter community at large, then what’s the conversion rate? In other words, of all the registered Kickstarters, what % have given to this campaign?

          1. Ethan,Exactly. This would be really interesting data which I’m guessing they aren’t likely to share. From Fred’s comment it sounds like the key is the “bandwagon” fans are out in force on Kickstarter. So, you have to get the bandwagon started so that others will want to jump in on it.

34. cult?seriously… if it is not embraced by ‘mainstream’ it becomes a cult. better open up deprogramming centers for sponge bob and barney the dinosaur.

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