Toward the end of Four Eyed Monsters, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice get a phone call from YouTube congratulating them for becoming the first filmmakers to land a feature-length narrative on the site.

The autobiographical movie, financed with $100,000 on credit cards, runs 71 minutes and has been viewed more than a half million times since it was posted on YouTube last week. The drama follows the couple's unusual dating rituals, as they abandon typical small talk and resort to writing each other paper notes.

The genius part: In the past week alone, Crumley and Buice say they've earned more than $20,000 in referral payments from sponsor Spout.com, a movie rate-and-review site that's giving the filmmakers $1 for each new recommendation for Monsters made by a site visitor.

"It's pretty insane that an independent film has made $20,000 in one week showing itself for free online," marvels Crumley, who also sells DVDs and DRM-free downloads through the Four Eyed Monsters store.

Indie filmmakers seeking success on YouTube are no longer content to bask in the validation of a few thousand viewers. Instead, these auteur-entrepreneurs are using software, crowd sourcing and "virtual studio" sites to broaden exposure for their work and make a few bucks while they're at it.

In the case of Monsters, the YouTube coup capped a shrewd 18-month campaign that began when the tech-savvy filmmakers posted behind-the-scenes episodes on their MySpace pages. Then, Crumley and Buice asked fans for help to book the movie in local theaters.

"People were commenting on the videos, then commenting on each other's comments and becoming friends with each other," says Crumley. "We wanted to take that social-networking dynamic and bring it into the offline world, so we asked everybody to give us their ZIP codes if they would like to see our film."

Fan clusters emerged in six cities. "We needed to acquire a directory of art-house theaters in those towns, so we invited our subscriber base to suggest local theaters they could imagine a movie like ours playing in. We took the problem of not knowing where we should book the film and crowd-sourced that."

Operating on the principal that people need to see a film before they shell out money to buy a DVD, Crumley and Buice staged a Second Life version of Four Eyed Monsters before landing on YouTube.

Student filmmaker Chris Mais used less elaborate means to push his motion-capture short Smile beyond the user-generated universe. After spending $1,000 and two years making the nine-minute comedy, he posted a making-of clip on his MySpace page to build his fan base, then submitted Smile to a couple dozen film festivals.

"Festival screenings took it to the next step and legitimatized Smile so it would stand out from any other video on YouTube," Mais says. "That's where I met distributors and stuff."

Shorts International signed Mais and placed Smile with iTunes. Mais says, "I've sold about 3,000 copies so far, which is pretty good considering it was just an undergraduate film I made."

Tiffany Shlain uses her own website to self-distribute DVDs of The Tribe, a 15-minute documentary about Jewish history enacted by Barbie dolls. "Making the film is half of it," Shlain says. "The other half is being really creative about using the web to get it to the right audiences by tapping into different communities online. You do not need a middleman. You can have a niche film and make the numbers work."

Shlain and Mais used Withoutabox to gain exposure on the film-festival circuit.

Located in a one-story bungalow across the freeway from NBC Universal's massive production lot, the virtual studio couldn't be farther away conceptually from Old Hollywood. CEO David Straus, a former filmmaker himself who co-founded Withoutabox when he became fed up with the hassles of filling out festival entry forms, says "Filmmakers who have the power to make a film can use that same power to monetize it."

Withoutabox represents about 120,000 filmmakers and will soon introduce Critical Mass Ticketing, which automatically books theaters for a given movie if enough members in a given region pre-order tickets. Fans can also acquire distribution rights through the site's licensing tool.

"If a filmmaker comes to us, whether it's to self-distribute theatrically or online, we've created systems that give rights-owners the opportunity to do all of that," says Straus.

Other indie-friendly aggregators, like inDplay in San Francisco, Nashville-based fylmz and Austin's b-side, connect filmmakers with potential fans eager to sort the wheat from the chaff.

"The system is totally overburdened with content so what you have is a bottleneck problem," says digital filmmaking pioneer Lance Weiler, who created WorkbookProject.com as a DIY resource for other filmmakers and invented his own devices to promote a 17-city theatrical release for his horror film Head Trauma.

"I did this embed-and-spread strategy by creating this digital audio player people could put into their own pages. I'd call from the road on my cell phone and do my own quote-unquote radio broadcasts. What that points to is the widgitization of distribution tools and promotional tools people can use to build an audience."

Will this new model of viral-based cinema gain enough traction to displace Old Hollywood marketing muscle? All bets are off, according to Weiler. "Nobody really knows what that next model is, in terms of, OK, how do I monetize my content? But when you break it down, it comes down to human recommendation: I tell somebody, and they tell somebody else."