$1 goes to Four Eyed Monsters for each person who joins Spout.com

It’s live: Spout.com is officially giving us 1 dollar for every person we can get to join Spout.com.

So please, help us get out of debt by going to spout.com/foureyedmonsters and join their site.

Spout said the max is 100,000 dollars, so thats our goal, to get 100,000 people to join spout and that would put a serious dent in our debt. So we need your help. Click “get this widget” to put the below graphic in a bulletin or blog to help us spread the word and get everyone you know to join spout. And here is are some reasons why spout is awesome and forward thinking that you can copy and paste into an email blast to your friends.

Why Spout.com is cool:

Frills:
•It lets you keep a list of films you want to see.
•It integrates into your Netflix queue.
•It gives you widgets to put on your MySpace profile.
•It lets you see what your friends are talking about.
•It recommends films to you based on your ratings of other films.

Bigger picture:

The fact that Spout is collecting information about what films people would like to see and where those people are means that movie theaters might eventually start to book screenings based on the demand for a film. A system we custom built a few months back to uses a heart map to self-distribute our film by letting people “request” our film. A site like Spout.com is in a good position to make this completely ordinary for all films. And it might not require much effort on the filmmakers’ part. People just collect lists of films they would like to see because that helps them stay organized and helps them get notified when films are playing near where they are. It doesn’t matter if it’s a film festival or a blockbuster hit; if you want to see it, that is valuable information to make publicly available.

Even Bigger Picture:

If you look at sites like Last.FM that track the music you have listened to and think a little about all the talk in the industry about peer-to-peer distribution models and subscription content services, it’s fair to assume that the value of knowing what films people have seen might someday be the way filmmakers get paid.

Check out this article posted three years ago describing a vision of the future in which everyone gets every piece of music and video they want for free using things like Bittorrent and other peer-to-peer technology, and then they share the fact that they have watched the movie through a site like spout.com and maybe even automatically with software on their computer or portable device. Then people pay 10 dollars a month into a pot that gets divided up based on what got seen that month. That way you could really free up distribution of music and film and just let files go where ever they’d like, which sort of happens anyway.

The only down side to this model is that it rewards the popular content. What about content that hasn’t been made or released yet? The article addresses that with the author’s own ideas, but mine would be that half of your monthly 10 dollars could be dedicated to one artist and the other half is divided up based on views. That way, if everyone is a huge fan of some filmmakers who are trying to raise money for their next film, they stand a chance at being able to get that money through this system.

So join this social film experiment. For all we know it will become a huge piece of what the future of media holds. Join spout.com.

And Check out this widget we got from Spout that shares Susan and I’s top rated films on their site. Anyone can make a widget like this in a few seconds and paste the code on their blog or MySpace profile.