Kieran Donaghy describes how his business, Film English, has grown from using film in the classroom to help students learn English, to a fully-fledged online enterprise.
Two-and-a-half years ago, I set up Film English, a website providing free lesson plans for language teachers and promoting cineliteracy (the ability to analyse and interpret moving images). I started the site, because I wanted to share all the ideas and activities I had for using film critically and creatively in the language classroom, and I also saw a gap in the market as there was no other website quite like it.
Film English has won various awards and also became a very popular resource bank. It is visited by more than 30,000 unique users every month. I now have 4,000 subscribers who receive an email message every time there is a new post. Since I’ve added a subscribe pop-up page to the site I’ve been getting 1,000 new subscribers a month.
My audience is not made up exclusively of teachers – there are also lots of students looking at and subscribing to the blog.
Although the lesson plans are completely free, I don’t accept adverts, as I want readers to have a pleasant and clean experience, so I rely on the generous contributions of readers to maintain the site (it costs me thousands of euros a year just to run – graphic designer, web hosting, back-ups etc. – and that doesn’t include my time).
I think this patronage model is one which will become increasingly important in English language teaching (ELT) publishing.
However, another model I am considering, which I think will become increasingly popular in the ELT publishing market, is a mixed model where some of the teaching and learning materials are free, but a paying premium service also exists which allows subscribers to access all the material for a yearly or monthly payment.
In five years’ time, I see Film English as being one of the leading suppliers of high-quality, creative language-teaching materials, with tens of thousands of loyal subscribers. Some of these subscribers will have access to a limited amount of material, while a smaller amount of paying premium subscribers will make a reasonably large profit for the site.
Kieran is an English language teacher based in Barcelona. He has won the Innovation in Teacher Resources award at the 2013 ELTons.