Post Production - Week 15

Post Production - Week 15 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

online video *isn't* dead

Kent, from Ask a Ninja, wrote an interesting post about a conversation he had with a friend, the friend was making the case that "online video is dead". At least to the extent that no one will ever be able to do what he and Doug did with their show (Ask a Ninja pulls in about $100,000 a month in revenue).

Here are some pieces from the post, the entire post is here...

But there does need to be an adjustment of expectations. This isn’t Silicon Valley. Online video will never make a single show a billion dollars, or even $100 million. If you’re lucky it make enough to pay back your investors and make you a modest middle class income while getting you known as a creator.

All of the companies out there offering to put money up for production are essentially offering horrible deals. If someone is paying you $10k/episode or less (including your creative fees), and they are taking ownership of any part of the copyright or underlying IP, that is a horrible deal.

When we created our business plan in 2005 for our online video venture, we sold 1% stakes in the company for $12,500. We hoped to sell 10% of the company, but we ended up about half of that.

We need more people doing what we did. Raise a small amount of capital, create a show that you’ll be able to build an audience for over a long time frame, raise enough money to live on during this (or have a day job), then use the leverage you’ve acquired to make better deals.

When I first read just the post, I didn't see the friend's point. Monetizing online video is simply about views & traffic - it's like saying that online news is dead. People are watching *more* online content, and reading *more* news online. TV is dying, and print is dying. For better or worse.

But then I went through and read some of the great comments, Steve Woolf, from Epic FU, had this to say:

In my opinion the clock is ticking on one thing with great certainty: the-independent-content-creator with-goals-to-reach-a-broad-audience. That gal/guy is endangered and defensive.

Before we all turn around, an entirely new hierarchy of online video content businesses will emerge in an entirely old model of doing business: the studio. With their collective arrivals the opportunity to make your impact as an individual will be the SAME as it is in movies and tv now. You will have your occasional indie breakout star, but they will be few and far between. And next to none of them will own what they create.

Why, you ask? Because of promotion. It’s one thing to make a great show, but as Rick points out above, without consistent promotion it’s very difficult to maintain viewership levels with new shows these days. And without viewership levels you have only your brilliant ideas, not anything tangible. And brilliant ideas are bought and sold every day in mainstream media. The same will happen online.

And I agree that what Steve describes *is* on it's way - But I wonder sometimes how successful they’ll be - short of telecom companies changing the way the web works, we’ll always have one advantage: we will never *have* to go through them to put our stuff out there.

And also, no matter how hard they try, they’ll never have the same level of interaction and community that indie produced shows have (ie; a 1,000 true fans). They’ll come in with their top-down mindset, they'll blast the hell out of MySpace and Ain't It Cool News, and sure; they’ll make a lot of money. But shows like the ones people are making now, I think, will always have a place online, and always have the opportunity to pull in a reasonable income without selling out.

Our main fear, as content creators, shouldn't be that big media wants to play in the sandbox too, but that they will change the rules of the net to tip the scales in their favor.

Quality vs Quantity

Yesterday Episode 6 was featured on the homepage of Viddler, I had only created a Viddler account just before I left for SXSW, so I was surprised and excited to see Pedal get attention so quickly on the site. From their blog:

Today’s featured video is Episode Six: 64 days - Part 1 from Project Pedal and the visuals are amazing, the production quality is excellent, and I can now say I’m addicted. Video podcasts aren’t generally known for their high-quality, high-production values but more and more we’re starting to see better examples.

If Project Pedal does this nice a job for their video podcast, I’m really excited to see what they are able to produce for their upcoming documentary. It is obvious the making films is a very trying experience, and we here at Viddler wish them well in their obvious effort to make a great, lasting film.

In the day that it was featured, we got a good amount of views, around 4,000 - but I've been noticing something... the number of video hosting and community sites I try out is always growing, I'm always trying to see how they compare.

I (begrudgingly) have a YouTube account, despite the terrible video quality and lazy user-interface... also lately I haven't been able to upload episodes to YouTube because they are too long time-wise, and I'm having trouble getting that limit lifted. My main hosting service is Blip, cause they are just amazing.

Although, I have to say, my favorite video-related site that I love to spend time on is Vimeo. I also use TubeMogul to bounce videos to Veoh, Revver, MySpace and Metacafe.


It's been interesting though seeing which sites generate the most feedback, interaction, conversations, etc. YouTube gets no traffic at all, with the exception of one short raw-footage clip, which hit 29,753 views for some reason. Everything else hangs around 100 views... yea. More importantly YouTube attracts almost no comments and even fewer followers back to the site. MySpace, Metacafe, and Revver fall into the same situations.

Blip gets a decent amount of hits, but it's not really a community site, it's mostly a tool for video creators, and it does that job very, very well. So I can't hold the lack of comments against it, it's not it's real purpose.

Vimeo on the other hand, is a whole other story. It's the one site where I get a flood of comments, a flood of feedback, a flood of viewers who follow the video back to this site and read deeper into the project. The videos I upload to Vimeo get re-posted the most to other people's Tumblr accounts and personal blogs. A fair percentage of people seem to find one episode interesting and they actually go looking for the other episodes to watch. Somehow the team at Vimeo have done an amazing job of creating an actual community of supportive and creative people... I hope that never changes.

The reason I thought about this post was because of the feature on Viddler, compared to the number of views the episode received, we received very few comments (most of the 18 or so comments came from 3 people). From the looks of my FeedBurner stats, Google Analytics and Cpanel, we got about 3 hits from Viddler to the site. All the other episodes on Viddler have had no increase in views. I'm going to continue using Viddler though, because I like a lot of the video-player's features, and like I said, I just created the account two weeks ago.

I'm not bashing on these sites - I know Pedal isn't a good fit for the YouTube crowd, and that's fine with me. I'm just curious what people's thoughts are on what makes a good video hosting and community site? In all my searching the last few years, Vimeo seems to be the best by a huge long shot when it comes to video-quality, user-interface, community and support. What sites do you use that seem to have a base of users who are active and supportive?

Post Production - Week 13

Amanda and I have been running around on no-sleep the last week - I drove up with Mike Hedge, took us 35 hours and I still don't feel like I've totally recovered... my right is still twitchy, is that a bad thing?

March 4th

It's late - and I'm in the mood to be sitting at my typewriter, but I thought I'd better take a minute to update the blog first. Amanda and I are still going to SXSW, despite the fact that we never ordered the t-shirts and hoodies we wanted to order, or the stickers we wanted to leave everywhere (like *everyone* else at SXSW), we did, however, manage to order new business cards. So that's something.

We'll be doing our best to meet up together at events to awkwardly talk about the project, but my own main personal plan of attack is to show up in Austin, sleep my friend's floor, and try not spend a lot of money I don't have on overly processed food.

Moving on. A part of me, way in the back of my head, has been panicking because it's been weeks since I've imported *new* footage from Pedal. I've been falling behind on logging footage due to both a lack of HD space, and a lack of time between writing and... writing. Also a lot of it can be attributed to poor multi-tasking habits. I really need to come up with a more balanced system, before I run into serious problems. Not to say I'm not having a lot of fun writing, I enjoy it a lot, but too much of a good thing isn't always the best.

Alright, I have a stack of papers here that I should get to. Till then.