Hi!

First off, I have to tell you that I'm not one of those people who make a big deal out of their birthdays, although I see nothing wrong with that. If your heart desires it, you should celebrate your birthday for 40 days and 40 nights. But, this year, I decided to make a big deal out of my birthday by writing a blog about it. So, yeah. Today happens to be my birthday, but this piece is more of a reflection on the past 5 years I spent at Film Annex.

That's right! 5. When I met Francesco in the summer of 2007, he was building the Film Annex you see today. In 2007, only a handful of people believed in the possibility and success of online film distribution. There was no such thing as video ads... YouTube only had user generated content. There was no Vimeo... or at least not like the way you know it today. I remember going to the Independent Film Week here in New York City and trying to explain to filmmakers what online film distribution is and why they should upload their films on Film Annex. Some of them looked at me with blank expressions, some of them nodded, some of them asked questions, but not a lot of people understood the freedom and power that lay behind it.

DIY distribution started getting popular amongst independent filmmakers within the following years. If you went to a convention or lecture series about filmmaking, you'd meet many people advocating it. But, Film Annex always followed a different path compared to others. In addition to advocating and enabling self-distribution, we created a business model to make sure that every filmmaker who has content on Film Annex gets paid. We came up with the Web TV concept and encouraged filmmakers to upload all their work, write blogs, build photo galleries, interact, etc. And we spilt 50% of the advertising revenues generated on their channels with them. We featured young, talented, and aspiring filmmakers from all over the world with promising films on our homepage and helped them earn up to $15,000 within a week's time, because as much as we know that filmmaking is art, we also know that filmmakers have to eat, pay rent, and make more films!

Within the past 5 years, Film Annex has gone through many changes, but stayed true to its vision: to enable filmmakers to promote, distribute, and monetize their work regardless of their age, gender, and location in the world. We have made Creative Commons licensing available before any other platform out there to increase interaction, re-creation, and flexibility amongst filmmakers. We built an online film library filled with public domain and CC-licensed content so that Film Annex users who are not content creators could also curate their Web TVs with high quality content. We created BuzzScore to encourage our users to be more influential on the web and we built The Annex Press, a professional news outlet for bloggers and professional writers. And now, we are building Internet classrooms in Afghanistan in collaboration with the best software company (CITADEL) out there.

Today, Film Annex is ranked number 34 on the list of top US websites and has 31 million unique monthly visitors. I guess this post was initially supposed to be about me, but wait...  it is about me. I'm very proud to be part of this team and thank you to everyone who made this day special.

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Take 2: 

Thank you Steve Jobs for the photos! I wish I had some make-up on, but celebrate natural beauty, people! Thank you Alexey and Semyon for the cake. Happy birthday to everyone and peace to the world!

-- Eren