In these days of economic uncertainty, we've brought you many a blog post about how the sudden unavailability of cash infusions will impact the independent film industry.  It's difficult verging on impossible to get any kind of consensus (fewer film festivals will be bad news because it will mean fewer chances for a movie to break out/fewer film festivals will be good news because it will sift the wheat from the chaff; independent film is dead because there's not enough money to take a chance on anything but a sure thing/independent film will thrive because it will become truly independent again and not rely on studio money and mass marketing), and contrarianism is the rule of the day.

Want proof?  Take a look at this post from the excellent Poverty Jet Set blog, in which the question is posed:  how important is an audience to the success of an film, anyway?  Inspired by the lamentations of Project Pedal over their inability to draw millions of online viewers to clips from their upcoming documentary feature For Thousands of Miles, it seems like an absurd question:  and yet, and yet..."In this age of mass amateurization and instant worldwide publication," argues Mark Schoneveld, "it doesn't matter how many people watch your videos, but rather, the quality of the folks who watch."  After all, he notes, there are YouTube clips that draw in tens of millions of viewers -- but it's purely for the sake of ephemeral novelty, and few if any transform their YouTube fame into money, a career, or anything that will amount to more than a whatever-happened-to moment on VH1 sometime in 2018.

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