Jessica Ryan

The notion that non-profit culture is much smaller than for-profit because fewer people participate is flat wrong. What sticks out in the comparison is the disparity in culture monetization. Per-attendee economics, in round numbers, are instructive. Disney’s domestic parks pull about $190 from each guest in admissions and in-park spending. An NFL game with concessions runs $150 or more. A movie ticket: roughly $11. A nonprofit theatre seat: $25 to $50. A museum visit: $0 to $25, average closer to $10 once you weight free admission and discounted hours. a single Disney park visit is monetized roughly twenty times as aggressively as a museum visit. An NFL game extracts about fifteen times what a museum visit does.

The commercial cultural economy isn’t bigger because more people show up. It’s bigger because each attendance gets monetized at a very different scale. This isn’t a moral judgment: extraction at scale is what for-profit models are built to do and they do it well. But it means the non-profit sector’s economic “smallness” is structural on purpose, not evidence of marginal cultural standing. The free museum, the priced-for-access regional theatre, the subsidized concert ticket — these aren’t bugs in the design, they are the design.

There is a lot of talk about this community filmmaking movement. Ivan Askwith and I believe it will require the creation and adoption of a new above-the-line role: the Community Producer. This new role would designate an experienced practitioner who is responsible for cultivating, strengthening, and managing communities from project inception through distribution and beyond, with an understanding of the distinct patterns of how communities organize across fan culture, movement building, activism and impact.

Copy. Composition. Master. Royalties. PRO. Sync.