Late Sunday afternoon, April 11, 2010: Media elite, creative entrepreneurs and entertainment newbies alike gathered at the historic Orpheum Theater in Downtown Los Angeles, California to honor excellence in original online content creation. It promised to be a night celebrating the Internet as both the Great Equalizer and The Future of Entertainment. It promised to be a night to remember. It promised to be one small step for…
Well, actually, whatever Sunday night promised to be, it was one giant leap backward for everyone hoping to elevate the value of Internet content in the eyes of the mainstream and expose a broader viewing audience to the work produced online. It was certainly a night to remember, but one supporters of the medium hope they soon will be able to forget. To borrow the Internet’s word of the minute: Fail.
“When Lisa Kudrow’s producer is standing in line because her ticket can’t be located, you know it’s bad,” said one dismayed attendee. The self-described “plus-one of a star from one of the nominated series,” was appalled and empathetically embarrassed by the disorganization, technical blunders, shoddy production value, and self-deprecating, often grossly vulgar jokes that redefined “un-funny.”
Attempting to offer an upside, the Star Date of the Plus-One said that he was impressed – to a degree: “For an awards ceremony that no one knows about and no one cares about, the audience was full.” But then, “We left halfway through,” he said. “We were bored.”
For every critic of web television, Sunday night proved quite the metaphor for the majority of episodic videos abound on the Interwebs: They are just not working. Only a few years ago, the success of YouTube prompted big money media companies and venture capital-backed startups to create their own destination sites for the express purpose of developing web series. Today, a mere fraction of those is still operating. Very few web series have survived past season one and even fewer have produced enough revenue to let anyone involved bid au revoir to a more reliable Real Job. And that’s a problem, especially if “do what you love and make a living doing it” is the real goal.
As my mother always says, “If you can put a roof over your head, food on the table…and have health insurance, you’ve made it.” Currently, it’s doubtful that for most people, producing online videos will meet Mom’s bar for success.
So, the million-dollar question remains: Why do web series seem perpetually unable to retain an audience? Even if the first installment grabs an appreciable number of eyeballs, why is the overwhelming trend for webisodes to lose viewership in droves?
Whether it’s because of infinitesimal attention spans compared to which that of the MTV generation seem downright glacial; or bothersome technical glitches that often plague the web; or content that isn’t good enough or doesn’t come often enough to rope in a viewer – the jury’s still out. Any way it’s sliced, the end result is the same: There’s no money and therefore no long-term success. The prospects in the world of episodic web-video are indeed grim. Nevertheless, it’s that very, even perhaps minute, nugget of uncertainty, which continues compelling those with a will and a way to wander the Wild West of the webisode world. They are on the Quintessential Quest for a solution to the enigma.
Attention Span Fail: Click, click, clicking away.
Few people dispute that there simply aren’t enough advertising dollars to support the vast array of media platforms gunning for the dough. In the online space, the competition is even greater: Data aggregator eMarketer has reported that brands rarely devote more than 3% of advertising budgets to Internet pushes. Supply is simply overwhelmed by demand: Web video series number in the thousands. Internet content guide Clicker.com lists a hardly exhaustive four thousand six hundred ninety-one original online series to be exact. And of course web series account for a minute fraction of web content in total.
Despite the grim statistics, advertising continues to be the predominant revenue stream in most business models. Taking that as a given, the primary goal of content producers then is acquiring and maintaining an audience. But with so many distractions online – email, facebook, Twitter, Gchat – Internet users click through content at a rapid pace, the multi-taskers that we are. “The results are dramatic: most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video,” posted online analytics firm TubeMogul, following one study observing audience behavior on upwards of 22 million streams. Its findings show that less than 50 percent of viewers watch more than 60 seconds of video. Just under 10 percent stick around for anything longer than five minutes. Most webisodes are longer than three.
According to TubeMogul’s Marketing Director, David Burch, another study was equally damning: “Basically the research took the top 50 professionally-produced, episodic web series and compared total views across episodes from pilot to the eighth.” The conclusion? On average, a whopping 64.31 percent of a show’s premiere viewership never makes it to episode two.
And those are metrics any advertiser shudders to hear.
For Sony’s Crakle.com, it’s been a trial and error game that’s led to the company’s current approach to online video content development. While Crackle initially endeavored to produce web series that could stand on their own and turn a profit, according to Crackle’s Online Development Coordinator Michael Karch, the studio-owned site found it impossible to fully cover its production deficit through advertising revenue alone.
“Our strategy has changed,” says Karsh. Executives at Crackle had noted the success of the 2008’s instant cult classic musical web short, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog. The project, created by TV writer Joss Whedon during the Writer’s Guild strike, was released for free online in three acts, but later successfully distributed for sale on DVD. And that became the inspiration for Crackle’s current model: Producing feature-length projects that are divided into segments for an online “webisode window” and then repackaged for domestic home distribution.
Point well taken: Variable online viewer numbers do not profitable advertising revenue make.
Technical Fail: Still buffering…
Yet another capricious quality of the Internet, whittling away at watcher retention is buggy technology. This is entirely out of the content producer’s control, but nonetheless is a contributing factor to the perception that web television is proving less successful than its mainstream brethren. The Internet has not achieved technological perfection, a point punctuated by the pervasive and perturbing “Buffering” notification. Even more bothersome is “Still Buffering,” often accompanied by a turning wheel or “loading” icon, cajoling the viewer to hang in there, often to no avail.
Once again, TubeMogul offers compelling data: “Re-buffers are commonplace, occurring in 6.84 percent of all streams,” according to the site. “When encountering a re-buffer, viewers click away 81.1 percent of the time rather than wait for the video to re-load.”
Content Fail: Just not Good Enough.
Peripheral distractions and mechanical glitches aside, content creators are not entirely powerless: The crux of any series is theirs to muck up or perfect. No doubt the web is littered with examples of the former. But the latter? The problem here is that few people – even those whose job it is to be an expert in the space – have a firm grasp on which content will lead its creators down the golden path to millions of followers.
This pilot season, one of the most anticipated shows in mainstream television development sprung from an unknown writer, Justin Halpern Tweeting “Sh*t His Dad Says.” “I didn’t think anyone would think it was funny,” says Halpern. But over 1.2 million people have proven him wrong. After Halpern’s friend gave his 140-character blurbs a shout-out one Follow Friday, Halpern’s popularity skyrocketed – from zero followers to over 100,000 in three days. He maintained that traction won with near-daily “words of wisdom,” courtesy of Dad; and now his show is being produced by CBS, directed by the legendary James Burrows (Friends), with a cast led by William Shatner.
Needless to say, Halpern has a roof over his head, food on the table, and health insurance.
But prior to stumbling upon his dream job, Halpern worked for a company that produced viral videos for advertisers. He somewhat prided himself on having a pulse on what would become a runaway hit. But he had not a clue his Tweets would take off the way they did. He says, “It was a little kick in the nuts that I didn’t have any idea.”
TubeMogul’s Burch expresses his bewilderment over the YouTube mega-sensation, Fred Figglehorn. Barely post-pubescent actor Lucas Cruikshank’s webisodes feature himself as six-year-old Fred, mostly monologuing about life with his dysfunctional family. Cruikshank’s brand of humor can be downright morbid. The helium induced-sounding timbre of Fred’s voice borders on obnoxious. And according to Burch, the show is wildly popular among the tween set.
It’s true that the statistics on Fred’s destination site fail to impress: After peaking around 20,000 last year unique views have seen a steady downward trend. However, the series – now in its second season with a Nickolodeon-backed feature film on the way – has YouTube metrics that are off the charts. To date Fred’s Channel boasts 471,634,067 total upload views, nearly 1.7 million subscribers and millions upon millions of webisode streams.
No single celebrity stocked web series – from Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy to David Wain’s Wainy Days – funny though it may be, even comes close.
Who would have thought.
Gunning for Win
Along with Fred, although rarely eclipsing his cult-like status, there are a handful of other web television episodic series that do boast millions of views month after month. Eight months ago, the bloggers at Mashable.com teamed up with web analytics pros at the Visible Measures Corporation, to scour the Internet and produce a monthly list of the top ten most watched web shows. The stand-outs of scripted episodics, charting consistently, include the animated Happy Tree Friends; sketch comedy driven Smosh; live-action-meets-animation-meets-gaming hit The Guild; and Red vs. Blue, whose creators lay comic dialogue over images crafted and captured entirely using the game Halo. These are the few, shining examples of web TV that works.
Then again, one could argue that these shows prove that web TV works. Period.
Consider mainstream TV: Per network, hundreds – if not thousands – of shows are drafted, pitched, optioned, written and rewritten each year. Of those, the pilot season process whittles down the choices until a mere few appear on television line-ups in the fall. The whole machine operates behind close doors, out of the general public eye.
Conversely, web television lacks this filtering mechanism, exposing the Fails and Wins for the world to see. Would anyone say that mainstream television is Fail? Probably not. And it’s likely the casts and crews of even the least popular shows would agree. No doubt they have roofs and food and health insurance in abundance.
So the one thing the web permits that mainstream TV does not, is for anyone and everyone to publish their wares and gun for Win.
Doing just that is 25-year-old aspiring writer, director, and producer Matt Vascellaro currently creating his web series offering, Settling. Vascellaro, whose friends say is “obsessed with the equation of what makes TV work – what makes people want to keep watching,” believes quality content in quantity is the key to lasting success on the web.
All too often as the viewer, Vascellaro, has felt abandoned by shows producing less than a dozen five-minute-or-less clips before taking a hiatus. In the light speed-fast pace of the web world, those breaks seem interminable…if the show even comes back. “Why should I really commit myself to viewing anything,” says Vascellaro.
That’s why, when Settling begins “airing” later this spring, Vascellaro will have one hundred shot and edited episodes in his arsenal, laying in wait to be launched daily on the web.
It might work or it might be a big Fail, but at least the Internet gives Vascellaro a space to try. Despite the odds, Vascellaro’s confidence is high and his sheer will is admirable. “At the end of the day, maybe we’ll produce enough good content so that people can’t ignore us anymore.”
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