In the pre-internet dark ages, the most ignominious fate that could befall a film was going straight to video. This infernal tier – available to buy from a newsagent bargain bin or service-station rack near you – was reserved for cinema’s bottom-feeders: second-rate Disney spin-offs, dodgy softcore thrillers, Troma offcuts, over-caffeinated ninja rampages starring Michael Dudikoff.

But this cinematic silt had a certain trashy sustenance value and the random delight of the tombola. Now straight-to-video is no more, and instead we have straight-to-streaming: hundreds of feature-length films are dumped online every year (to be precise, 107 to streaming in the US alone in 2022, and then there is the TVoD pay-per-view market on top). A few of us at the Guardian sift these releases every week, and I am often stunned by the creativity and levels of invention on show down there. Especially since the pandemic, when the number of releases ballooned, streaming has been the place for a go-for-broke freedom rarely glimpsed in the ossified corporate mainstream. Chillwave dream odysseys, hipster sasquatch hunters, subwoofers grafted into human flesh … the sights I have seen.

The pandemic was indeed what upped streaming’s stock, confirms Guardian reviews editor Andrew Pulver. “All the cinemas shut and to give people something to read, we went into the digital release calendar – and then when cinemas opened up again, it seemed really ungrateful to suddenly relegate digital releases back to the ‘ignore’ bin.” He elaborates: “Digital releases aren’t just crappy thrillers or Netflix Christmas romcoms, there are interesting subsets, eg art documentaries, elevated horror and non-commercial studio films that should get a bit of coverage. Otherwise we’d be failing to cover vibrant sectors and succumbing to swamping marketing practices from the bigger studios.”

Amen. But I often wonder how many people in practice watch these online curiosities. Of how much benefit is a streaming release to film-makers’ careers? Even critics don’t seem to pay that much heed – niche streaming titles rarely, if ever, appear on end-of-year film lists. One that definitely should have was the Canadian thriller Violation, a devastating reinvention of the rape-revenge film that is one of only three films I’ve ever five-starred. Premiering to a socially distanced audience at Toronto film festival in late 2020, it was forced down the streaming route by the pandemic.

Even so, it was conceived to thrive in less-policed territory, according to director Madeleine Sims-Fewer, who says her initial conversations with co-director Dusty Mancinelli went like this: “This is our first feature, we have less than $500,000 budget, this is maybe the only time we have no one telling us what to do, because we’re the producers. So this is maybe the only chance we might have, at least for the next 10 years, to really just put balls to the wall and say everything we want to say.”

The film sold to the online horror distribution network Shudder. Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli say their experience with both Shudder and their sales agent, XYZ, was positive. But three years on they haven’t yet had any viewing figures on how Violation performed (Shudder say, like most streamers, they don’t release such figures publicly, but they do keep film-makers abreast). They might have had free creative rein, but as young directors, they had less power to dictate their deal to their financial advantage. “The system is designed to favour the distributors and sales agents, especially when you’re emerging and don’t have leverage. It’s really hard to change the status quo of how these deals are structured,” says Mancinelli.

Part of the imbalance is because sales agents are pressured to make quick money in the upfront sale, especially in the ephemeral online world. “A film like this has a very small window. After that window is closed, you get forgotten really quickly. It becomes a lot more challenging for the sales agent to make new purchases and new territory,” explains Mancinelli. It didn’t help that Violation was rapidly pirated – causing further sales to dry up. But this cut-throat digital business environment isn’t the nurturing place emerging directors need. “It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of distributors who are thinking about fostering long-term, meaningful relationships with film-makers,” says Sims-Fewer.

The Violation team sound like they had a relatively supportive experience compared with others backstroking haphazardly across the streaming-release pool. Yavor Petkov is an independent Bulgarian director who put $85,000 of his own money earned working in financial-crime prevention into making his debut feature Danny. Legend. God. Centred in an unforgettable turn by Dimo Alexiev as a coercive Balkans wideboy, this act of brazen audience-jacking seared itself on my brain. Like Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli, Petkov has no numbers on how the film did. “Very badly” is the director’s ballpark estimation. It had an even more opaque release in the UK through Trinity Creative Partnership, who put it out via a company called Reel2Reel Films. He has at the time of writing seen no royalties and no profit on his outlay beyond the initial sales licensing fee.

Petkov wanted to make a film about corruption in Bulgaria in the confessional and confrontational Man Bites Dog style. “I was thinking these kinds of films don’t come out any more. So I wanted to be the one who makes it,” he says. “But it’s not like no one else has the brilliant idea to make these kinds of films. It’s just that they hit the wall of how to actually get it out.” Which is what happened: acting as his own producer, he fruitlessly did the round of festival-film development labs, secured a small theatrical release in Bulgaria, then wound up speculatively marketing his project at Berlin film festival. One sales agent took an interest, successfully sealing a single sale in three years: to Trinity.

Petkov says Reel2Reel dumped Danny. Legend. God. on Amazon, Apple and other platforms with virtually no marketing. He believes its model to be based on acquiring films at scale: “I think that they’re like: ‘OK, of these 20, we typically make money off one. And then we don’t care about the others.’” (Reel2Reel did not reply to a request for clarification.) With only the Guardian initially reviewing the film, Petkov was forced to independently seek out critics who, based on their tastes in similarly discomforting films such as Wake in Fright, he thought might be sympathetic. But even with their help, Danny. Legend. God. sank into an online abyss.

Maybe his experience isn’t generally representative. But it seems in the straight-to-streaming wild west, there’s a trade-off to balance out between unbridled creativity and visibility. Unquantifiable hybrids such as Danny. Legend. God. – not quite commercial, not fully arthouse – don’t thrive easily. Known categories such as genre films more so. “I don’t see any other way things stand out from the 7,000 or however many films are made every year,” says Petkov. Burned by his long slog, he has no plans to make another feature. The online economics simply don’t add up, particularly if you’re putting up your own money. He refers to a friend who made an iPhone-shot film that racked up 160,000 views on Amazon, which has paid this director $500.

Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli, who have just finished a second feature, also lament the nebulous nature of online releases. It not only robbed them of close interaction with people who viscerally connected with a project that was highly personal to them, but also on a practical market research level, of a strong sense of who their future audience might be. Which is a strange thing to say, given all the data supposedly available through digital means.

They believe streaming can act as a launchpad for a career, pointing to BlackBerry director Matt Johnson having launched his career with the web series Nirvanna the Band the Show, and the recent Canadian horror Skinamarink. If you can get noticed, that is. “It’s definitely possible. It’s a good place. But you’re in a sea,” says Sims-Fewer. Given the fertile fishing down there, and audiences who seem starved for originality, we could be trawling it far better.