And the iPod has done just that. Allowed me to buy movie soundtracks, collections of sea shanties, jazz from people I’ve never heard of.  Not so much through the iTunes store, which I find frustrating in its taxonomy (or lack thereof).  But via Amazon, which does a much better job of organizing its music and seems to be slightly cheaper to boot.

Yes, I’ve actually been paying for my MP3s, because the online stores have made it easy to do. It’s about as close to frictionless as a transaction can get. They’ve finally gotten that part right. So I buy the music- I’d rather the artists make some money if at all possible.

I’m very late to the iPod game, but it’s easy for me to see that the MP3 player technology really needed a broad, deep-inventory storefront to truly create a marketplace for the software. There were plenty ways to buy digital music prior to iTunes, but there needed to be a large central repository to make the concept really take off.  Once the marketplace accepted iTunes,  it became possible for others to follow.  Amazon has at least some choices in nearly every category I’ve looked for. It’s much more convenient to buy through one general location than a dozen specialized ones. The market itself has been made viable by the existence of a particular retailer.

Something similar is happening now in e-publishing. For years there have been individuals, publishers, and retailers offering digital books. But it’s taken Amazon’s Kindle to start to really raise awareness and excitement for the market. By providing a good reading experience, the Kindle has gotten more and more people to consider ebooks as a legitimate option for their reading material. The Amazon ebook storefront also provides an easy one-stop-shop for a very wide range of titles. It’s not a mature market yet, there are many details to work out. But it’s becoming safe to say the market exists.

With both music and books, it’s taken a combination of a slick device and a unified storefront to give the users the experience they want and to get the market going. Will the same be true for movies?

The marketplace for the  digital distribution and sale of video entertainment is highly fragmented. Movies and shows are available on a number of websites, but they’re often restricted in how and where they can be viewed. There is no one-stop-shop. There’s also not a dedicated device that’s caught on. Roku seemed like it was a step in the right direction, but it has yet to engage widespread attention. It’s possible something like the XBox network could be the delivery device. Or the rapidly spreading netbook computer could provide the platform. Netflix could provide the central content hub. Or Amazon, or Apple. But none have thus far. It’s an opportunity that has yet to be seized.

It’s not enough that the technology allows movies to be delivered and watched anywhere at any time, the technology has to also make the experience enjoyable. As free of friction and confusion as possible. The marketplace is ready for movies on the go, we should see someone take advantage of the latent demand in the next year or two.

Once the digital marketplace for film is established, we’ll start seeing a lot more independent working getting made- and being rewarded.  The creation of the market benefits everyone.  And once this key piece is in place, it will viable to build a profitable transmedia work completely as an independent.  The distribution and sales channels will all be in place.

So with my web sketch comedy group Monkey With A Shotgun, I’ve got an actual revenue-generating video series over on Babelgum.

Babelgum is a distribution channel, like YouTube.  Much lower traffic (less than one-half of one percent of Youtube’s traffic), but still a solid, reliable delivery system.  What they are not is a marketing or promotional company.  In fact, the whole reason they’re paying for webseries is to bring more traffic to their site.  So for that to work, the series has to, you know, bring in traffic..

That leaves the filmmakers responsible for marketing.  This is true for any independent project, from video series to feature film.   If you’re on a studio project you’re less responsible for marketing the project, though you should still be very aware of marketing your personal career.   But even if an indie feature gets theatrical distribution, the filmmakers will still be the primary marketers.  Direct to video, you’ll live or die by your own promotion. And internet shorts? There’s no one but you.

The good news is that the internet makes it possible to pull off your own promotion.  You still might get lucky and get some mainstream coverage, say a NPR interview, but even if you don’t you can do much for yourself.

The secret of a good internet marketing campaign is simple- Allow as many entrypoints into the campaign as possible and feed them all into a sticky, central site.

By entrypoints, I mean that you want people to have as many ways to stumble on your work as possible.  You want to be on as many sites as can, hitting as many different audiences as you can.  You don’t really know where your fans are, and you can’t rely on them to come to you, so you want to cast your net wide.  To some extent this is a numbers game.

What does this mean in practice?  Well, ideally you’d put your video on every single video site there is.  That’s not practical with this particular scheme since the revenue is only being generated by Babelgum views, so you want people to watch there.  That could change with other revenue sources, if you had a brand sponsor, or the video itself was promoting other sales, or merchandising of elements of the series itself.

But even in this case there are many other venues for promotion.  There’s mentions on blogs.  On sites that cover the internet video industry.  Interviews with the filmmakers.  I’d push hard to get every reviewer I could, pro and amateur to review the series.  It almost doesn’t matter what they say, as long as they link back to you.  Even a pan review will pique curiosity.

This goes back to an old web aphorism – “Links are the currency of the internet.”   That is, links to your work have a definite value.  The beauty of the web is that it is a web, a mass of interconnections leading from point to the next.  It can all tie back into your site, everything leading to your point of revenue generation.  You want those links, they’re your gold.

You can also use social networks.  I’ve seen some effective work in promoting web series via facebook fan pages.  Fan pages are an easy way to keep people in the loop and aware of what’s going on with your series.  New episodes, where you’re planning to take things, etc.   It’s not something you have to do, but it’s definitely a missed opportunity if you don’t.

Then there’s the king of the social media hill these days, Twitter.  Twitter is a complicated beast to tame. A lot of people give up too soon on it, but Twitter is potentially the most powerful tool in your internet marketing arsenal (at least this year).

The one thing you need to know about Twitter is this- Twitter is personality.

It’s not about hawking your wares, not directly, it’s about making connections with people on the basis of you personality. Your Twitter persona can be a selective version of your personality (or maybe even a constructed version), but it has to be a personality. It’s about being intelligent, interesting, and entertaining.  If you pull that off, people will naturally be interested in what you’re doing, and since they have that personal connection with you, they’ll help you spread the word.

I’ve been watching people build their careers with Twitter being a primary source for their advancement.  Making the connections, building the interest in what they’re doing.  It may sound sales-y to you, but I’m actually saying the sales-y stuff doesn’t work that well. Remember- intelligent, interesting, and entertaining.   Personality.   And if you’re excited about what you’re doing, it’s not exactly work to talk about it.   And if you’re not excited about it, why are you doing it at all?

The nice thing is that a lot of the indie film community- filmmakers, reviewers, reporters, festivals, distributors – have really taken to Twitter, and there’s a nice community already there.  For any of your projects, you really want to get as many of your cast and crew on and talking about the project as possible.  Make those person-to-person connections.

So that’s many-entrypoints part.  What about the sticky, central site part?

What you really want a central site that keeps people coming back once they’ve come to visit it once or twice. The key is to build a community around the site itself.  The filmmakers should be producing longer form blog postings about the experience of making the project and the aftermath.   More insight into the process, into the people.  Allow comments, and RESPOND to those comments! Interact with your audience.  Provide forums for people to discuss your project.  What they think about it, what they would like to see, etc.  Again, INTERACT.  You want people to come to your site for your content discover there’s a whole world there to explore.  And to return to.

One very important note here at the end- NONE OF THIS WORKS IF YOUR PROJECT SUCKS.  Your project has to be good or all is for naught.  Content is still king.  But community has moved into the prince’s seat.

Anyway.  Longer than intended, but there’s much more to say.

Later!

It’s true that the real successes of web video series can be counted on one hand. But then we’re still very early on in the game. The things people are trying now are different from what they were trying a year ago, or two years ago. It’s a field that’s still evolving, month by month. Different models come and go. Just because most of what’s been tried hasn’t worked doesn’t mean that nothing can work.

In my opinion, the major problem is that most models aren’t bold enough. No one is trying the full-on assault yet, everything is either aimed at being under the radar weird or boring mainstream. The same categories we’ve been with for years. Until we get new models that break out of those paradigms, we can’t even proclaim the birth of online video, much less its death.

For me, the key thing to realize is that it’s more than just production and distribution that have been democratized, it’s the whole shebang. And the big success will come from a model that incorporates all aspects of the filmmaking business process, not just one or two.

Of course, that’s really, really hard to do. Therein lies the adventure.

Over the last 6 weeks or so, Monkey’s 20th video, Spanish For Your Nanny, has succeeded in hitting a target, and is approaching half a million views on the sites we track (and likely many more on sites we don’t!). There’s several reasons for the success of the video, but those are for a later post.

Instead, I’m going to look at how the video has spread and what that might indicate about the nature of a viral video.

All of Monkey’s videos are posted to a variety of sites, about a dozen in all. We’ve found that there’s no real way to predict which video will succeed on which site, so we post all our videos on all our sites. We’ve been featured on a number of them, but that always occurs at the whim of the site’s editors, and isn’t anything we rely on. While a featured spot on the front page of Yahoo or Myspace can certainly bring in a number of hits, it’s usually a brief burst and doesn’t seem to carry over to other sites very often (though it can provide an ancillary boost to our other videos on the same site).

In this case, we’d posted Nanny to the usual sites, and we were getting a bit more than the usual number of views, and the video had been “stolen” and posted on other sites a fair amount, but nothing really spectacular, outside of one site where we had been featured (JoeCartoon).

A couple of weeks after I had posted, a friend sent me an IM “Hey, you never stumbled Nanny”. He meant that I’d never given the video a thumbs up via the StumbleUpon browser plugin. StumbleUpon is a social network / link sharing site, in which your friends in your network see sites you’ve given a thumbs up, and vice versa. We’ve had some success using this and other similar sites, and I usually Stumble a new video post on YouTube as a matter of course. I use YouTube as the preferred Stumble site because it’s the most popular video site, and a video there benefits more from a greater view total than on any other site.

In any case, my friend Stumbled the site, and I immediately seconded it. The seconding serves two purposes, one it’s a vote of confidence in the first Stumble, which makes it more likely to be seen by others, and two it combines my stumble network with my friend’s, increasing the number of people the video can be exposed to.

Nanny caught on with the Stumble crowd, and racked up a number of views from people Stumbling on the page over the next couple of days.

But then the big step happened- the video got added to the FunWall application on Facebook. Someone, likely one of the Stumblers, started “forwarding” the video via FunWall, and the view count really took off.

To understand why, it’s important to understand the nature of FunWall, and of Facebook in general.

Among other things, Facebook is very good at reducing what I call “link friction” to almost nothing. The key element of a viral video is getting the link to the video into new hands. Thus the ease of passing the link is crucial. The effort involved in passing the link can be seen as “friction” working against the momentum a link builds as it’s passed from person to person. Having to cut-and-paste a link, for example, is a relatively high level of friction, as each stage of passing the link on requires that each person actively take several steps to do so. Something like StumbleUpon has somewhat lower friction. All you have to do is click the Thumbs Up icon in the plugin. Then others are more likely to see what you’ve approved.

But this is a sort of passive forwarding, low friction as it may be. Facebook encourages a more active level of participation. Since the advent of the application platform on Facebook, the culture of the FB community has become such that sending invites, links, and applications to your friends is a natural part of your Facebook usage. One of the most popular applications on Facebook is called FunWall. FunWall extends the functionality of your “wall”, which is the part of your Facebook profile page where friends can write messages for you. FunWall adds two features relevant to viral videos- one, it embeds video from sites like YouTube. Two, and perhaps more importantly, it includes a “Forward!” button on each FunWall post. Clicking this button allows you to forward the posts to any number of friends.

So FunWall both encourages active participation and does so with almost no Link Friction at all. It’s like magic pixie dust for viral videos.

Soon after the FunWall wave started, I started getting reports of Spanish For Your Nanny being emailed around as a file attachment. People I don’t know were sending it to other people I don’t know and it was eventually making its way back to me. This was Old Skool virality! Spirit Of Christmas stuff! It’s interesting to note this came later than the social network spread. It’s a good example of a higher friction process, but one that a viral video may grow into if the circumstances are right.

In recent days the video has gotten boosts from being featured on high profile sites such as those of talk radio hosts and so on. In some ways, this is sort of last stage virality, when the video bubbles up high enough for at least minor attention from mainstream media.

The important thing to note in this whole process is that the big gatekeepers have come at the end. Prior to that, the spread of the video has been accomplished by thousands of nano-gatekeepers, individuals deciding to either pass the video on to their friends or not. No one of these individuals has a lot of push in making the video spread, but collectively they can make a video spread much further and much faster than any one give large gatekeeper.

The ultimate lesson is rather straightforward- get your video in front of as many people as possible, using as many tools as you can to do so. You don’t know which of them will work best, so use them all. Take special care to use those tools that put your video in front of people in a way that makes it easy for them to spread it.

I hope this has all made at least some sense, and I look forward to adding to it as Monkey With A Shotgun has more videos on the loose!

But the blog Divided Hollywood has some more information on the workings of the project. It’s apparently intended to be a clearinghouse for WGA member web video projects, presumably including some intended more for entertainment than agitprop purposes.

Reading the comments, there’s a fair amount of concern about the idea that members of other unions would be asked to donate their time and work for what could turn out to be for-profit projects. STRIKETV.com says they will be donating all profit from the site to support striking writers. But the creators (ie producers) will retain ownership, and could potentially profit from the show later or through different venues.

The irony of asking union members to work for producers for free since it’s an experimental internet project has not been lost on many people.

In later comments, it looks as if STRIKETV.com is willing to work out these issues in a manner favorable to the crew, but details are scarce. Details on the whole project seem to be scarce at this point. Hopefully it works out, it really could be a watershed moment. But producers are producers, regardless of their status as writers, and there’s still a lot of questions to be answered.

“Starting in January, the WGA will commence STRIKETV.com, where clips
of video material will be put up and advertiser support sought.”

And yeah, I was checking because well…I always check.

Some people don’t,

It’s worth nothing the reported total of 2,000,000 views is still considerably more than you can track on the main video sites, at least for the episodes. Unless QL is counting total views for all the videos, including the little interstitial-like things and then dividing that by 8. Hopefully not, hopefully they really do have about 500,000 total views at the main QL website.

In any case, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t think the web audience was ever more than the cherry on top of the network pickup for this show.

Not doing as well as it was hyped to do, but hard to call it a failure since web success may never have been the true plan.

Looking over the history of how the got to where it is, it seems reasonable to assume that the net launch of the episodes was never intended as much more than a PR push for the TV version.

A while back, the producers put together a pilot for a show called 1/4life. That pilot was rejected by ABC, so the producers decided to put together a different pilot called Quarterlife, and promote it as a web series in partnership with MySpaceTV.

Quarterlife the web series was then picked up by NBC amid all sorts of commotion about the WGA strike.

The webseries continues to “air” on MySpaceTV and YouTube, but hasn’t been logging numbers in line with the hoopla surrounding the show. The hoopla has been huge indeed, with front page placement for epsiodes on MySpace.com along with banner ads throughout the site. In addition, the first episode was featured on the front page of YouTube for several days, and a director’s channel complete with banner ads etc was set up for the show itself.

Add to this the production costs, reported to be over $500,000 per hour (or over $80,000 per webisode), and you can see the standards for success have to be set fairly high.

As of this writing, 24 days after launch, the first webisode is sitting at a total of 822,798 views total between MySpace and YouTube. Interestingly, given the show’s partnership with MySpaceTV, about 3/4 of those views come from YouTube, which featured the webisode on its front page for a few days. Damningly, the first webisode has a grand total of 8 comments on MySpaceTV, orders of magnitude less than what a successful video with that many views should have.

After the first episode, the dropoff in views is quite steep. Episode 2 has 104,000 views, Ep. 3 has 164,000, and Ep 4 has 84,000, or less approximately 10% the total views of the first episode. Later episodes have not been on YouTube long enough for a meaningful comparison.

Altogether, the show has garnered 1.4 million views in the month since launch. That doesn’t sound too bad, and indeed would be amazing for a cheap show with no hype. But it can’t come close to paying back the money invested in the show, no matter what sort of CPM and revenue sharing plan the show has with the two sites.

So why isn’t the show doing better? Here are a few thoughts on what’s wrong and how a show of similar talent magnitude could be done right.

1. The concept isn’t that interesting or original. Real life vloggers are more captivating and less stilted and besides, the whole vlogger show thing has been done. If you’re going to move into this arena, find a new approach and more compelling characters.

2. The episodes are too long. The shortest is just under 7 minutes, but the longest pushes 15. Fifteen minutes is far too long for the current net audience. The optimal length at present seems to be around 6 minutes, but the average here is closer to 10. It makes a difference. People get bored easily on the net, so if you aren’t keeping things moving, you’ve got to keep things short.

3. Bringing us to the next point- things don’t move. The webisodes written and cut like a TV show. This ain’t TV, it’s a different medium, and requires different pacing. Quicker, more efficient, and denser, please.

4. The inter-epsiode pacing is non-existant. Where’s the compelling reason to come back to see the next one? Where’s the need for more? The mystery? The drive? The internet is not based on habit and appointment based viewing, it’s based on doing what comes to mind. Shows have to remain near the center of the viewers thoughts between episodes so they don’t forget to return.

5. It’s the same sort of story I’d see on TV. If I wanted to see this, why wouldn’t I watch it on TV? At present, a net show needs to serve audiences that are not being served on TV. Upwardly mobile young 20s white actors, filmmakers, and magazine writers are not that demo. There are countless shows about and for this audience on traditional TV

6. Where’s the money? I don’t see anything near $80,000 per websiode on the screen. Sure, it’s slick and professionals made it, but you could get professionals to make it just as slick for 1/10th that cost, and then it might have a shot at being profitable.

Basically, Quarterlife is a TV show sliced up and placed on the net. In a way, it’s good to have, because now there’s an example to point to in order to explain why that doesn’t work. Webisodes are their own medium, and demand new approaches.

Again, though, I can’t call the show a failure. It accomplished what was its likely goal of a network pickup, and when the show starts it will have a lot of PR surrounding it. It’s likely the creators were able to get a better deal than they would have otherwise. It just isn’t headed for success as a web-based show.

But there are lessons here for the next show, and all the shows to follow!

Your movie has to be relatively cheap, and it can’t exist in isolation.

One likely solution is to sell a serial on the internet, via an aggregator, such as an iTunes like store.

Make something like one of the old serials, with a plotline that moves forward via a series of cliffhangers. You start off free, hook people into your storyworld, then charge a small amount per episode following.

Probably not going to make millions, but probably enough to be self-sustaining under certain sets of business circumstances.

Assuming, of course, that your content is fantastic (more on this later).

That’s one model.

A model that’s more likely to be self-sustaining is the full-service model. Make the serial. Build a website around it. Sell swag. Sell (HD)DVDs. Sell a fanclub. Sell behind the scenes looks. Sell advertising on the website. Sell all the ancillary aspects of the show you can think of.

“That’s not filmmaking”, you might say, “I don’t want to do it”. No, maybe not, but it is part of the gig. This still all happens when you go the studio route, you’re just farming it all out to the various arms of the studio and losing most of the money along the way.

The goal is to be a self-sustaining filmmaker first. After that you worry about growth and the wider audience. If you have to sell all the geegaws to get there, so be it.

Can you compete with the studios? Not on their battlefield, certainly not. You aren’t going to make Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 and sell it on the internet. You don’t have the resources and you couldn’t fight the studios for audience if you did. But is that really the goal?

Or is the goal to be a filmmaker on a self-sustaining basis?

Which brings us to branding. Which brings us, indirectly, back to having fantastic content.

For any of this to work, you’ve got to have a stream of content. You can’t cut it with one or two pieces of content. A short, a feature, whatever, not enough (see above). But with regular content, you’re building a following, a brand, an audience. People start to know who you are and what you do. What you do isn’t defined by one or two works, it’s defined by a series of works. And in order for people to care about what you do, it’s got to be fantastic. All of it.

There’s a huge machine out there, the hype/media/news/entertainment machine, and it wants you to make fantastic stuff. It NEEDS you to make fantastic stuff. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day, and the media needs a new story tomorrow (and “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, as someone else once said). They need to make you a star, they just want you to give them a reason to do it. There’s always a Pretty Young Thing, in the broadest sense of the term, and a Pretty Young Thing producing fantastic content and distributing it in a sexy way (ie “outside the system”) is a story they love to tell, they’ve been doing that story over and over for at least 40 years now.

There’s a way to leverage their machine to your benefit. It can be done. Someone will.

Look, I’m the first to admit I’m not really talking about something the Average Joe can do. But I am talking about something the Smart, Hard-Working, Lucky Joe might pull off. Maybe. If it all falls into place, just right.