Docunomics

I've been in a lot of discussions lately about the economics of documentary production. There's a lot of interest in online models, of course, but selling DVDs seems to still be resulting in bigger royalty checks. For the moment.

So I'm fascinated to watch (from semi-afar) how the Doc Challenge DVD is doing at Amazon. (It includes one of our short films.)

I just checked. It's ranked #48,323 in sales in Movies and TV. That seems a bit less than overwhelming, but I really don't know. I didn't make a note of where it was ranked when it was first released, but my impression was it's moved up a lot.

So, will it jump up the rankings when there's a new Doc Challenge screening at HotDocs? Is it a "long-tail" item that keeps going for years? What level of sales is enough for a product to turn a profit?