Sunday, August 3, 2008
When Should You Take a Deal?
When Should You Take a Deal? from 1timstreet on Vimeo.
She's been on TV's Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Monk and also writes, producers and stars in her own online video series The Guild but Felicia Day recently told me at NATPE's LATV Fest that she's not just going to take the money for her online video series. Right now Felicia's going the Independent route getting donations, winning awards, and selling DVD's. She's also looking for "smart money" to help her grow the number of webisodes she has and more importantly grow her brand.
I think we are going to see more smart actresses like Felicia Day realize the power of the Internet in creating their own careers and launching their own brands.
Look out, Q4 and 09 are going to be fun times.
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4 comments:
It breaks down to control. If producers like FD can makes deals to profit from properties like "The Guild", without selling the intellectual property in exchange for development money - then she is in a winning position long-term.
Step 1 - privately finance and produce, trading percentages for money, but retaining the rights
Step 2 - use the social media (nothing too strange really, just blogging and embeds do most of this) to build up your viewership
Step 3 - Near-term money comes from ancillary merchandise; your DVD, your soundtrack, the tshirt. Allow your uber-fans to embed jpeg links to your sales pages - allowing them to badge their site and support a show they like
Step 4 - If your show gets enough attention, you can strike up a deal for ad-placements, or if you're really lucky, a sponsorship. This allows you to monetize your casual viewership; the folk who will at most subscribe, but mostly just watch and forget.
Step 5 - The rest of the money comes from syndication. Dr. Horrible being licensed to Hulu and the like. If you've Kept The Rights, you get this money too.
Keep the rights, avoid exclusive distribution deals (or anything else that ties your success to someone else's without a strong revert clause and a bunch of money up front, and Keep The Rights.
Not really. I just always agree with you so I thought I would write that just to grab some attention with a little conflict.
I do wish we could sell on iTunes and I think some day we will be able to do that but for now it's a lot easier for Apple to work out the problems with the "high end" market first and then move to the masses.
I have a hunch though that with phone apps like mdialog we might soon be able to sell video to the iPhone.
OR - you think that all this hub-bub is an echo-chamber for a bunch of never-beens waxing on and on about how it's THEIR TURN and how EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT and blah, blah, blah.
I which case, sell that shit immediately! Let someone else take a bath in crap trying to make money on the "information wants to be free" superhighway and get yourself a real job, working for a billionaire who views this entire market as a side project to decompress from all that currency speculation shorting the dollar.
Of course, then all you've done is produce a business card. But you gotta eat, so ...
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