Prom Queen DVD Hits the Street

The Big Fantastic boys now have a DVD of their Internet Video Hit Prom Queen out and you can buy it at Amazon for as low as $7.85 as of this posting.

Can you guys tell us anything about how it got to DVD or was that all handled through Michael Eisner's Vuguru?

I Smell an Online Video Hit

Exective Producers Jason Sklar and Randy Sklar just may have a hit on their hands with Back on Topps the big question is, Will Vuguru make any money? Or is this just a marketing project to relaunch Topps cards now that Michael Eisner bought it?

Who cares?

I think this series could be a big hit.

Daisy Whitney has a great post about the business end of it at Ad Age.

SPECIAL NOTE: Watch Episode 2 First!

Who's Buying Online Video?

Even though consumers are watching online videos in record numbers online viewers are not yet buying the viral videos they love to watch. In order to sell online videos you have to have a buyer. A buyer who's looking to buy what you are selling at the right time and the right price.

Now this may all seem like common sense stuff but for the sake of conversation I'm going to blog about it anyway.

Video viewers are use to getting Internet videos for free so unless you are selling emotionally engaging videos consumers can't get anywhere else or you are selling videos in a format they want and can't get, consumers have no reason to buy your videos. But as we all know consumers will put up with advertising in order to watch those viral morsels.

So who is actually buying?

Michael Eisner's company Vuguru is buying, right? Well from what I can tell Vuguru isn't really buying, it's co-producing and selling. So is Brett Weinstein's 60 Frames Sony's Crackle and Disney's Stage 9.

These companies are financing the production of online videos created by independent producers and then pre-selling advertising against those online videos and super distributing them across the Internet with the ads baked in or just showing them on their own portals.

Now there are sites like Break.com who are paying for video. Break.com's site says, "For your first original video on the homepage, you will make $400 if you let Break have it exclusively. If you don't want to do that, or can't for any reason, no problem! Break will pay you $200 anyway as a reward for your first original making the homepage."

They go on to say, "$200 is very competitive for a first video. Except for an extremely small group of users on other sites, there is no higher paying structure online. Break has been, and continues to be, the easiest place to make money online." They also have higher paying amounts for your second and third videos.

Metacafe still features their Producer's Rewards Program on the bottom right hand side of their front page and their top earner Kipkay has earned $103,988 but they recently changed their policy and some producers are a little upset.

Revver shares a 50/50 on ad revenue but the payments have been a little irregular.

Blip.TV has a revshare program and is working hard to make sure run of network inventory doesn't go unsold.

YouTube's partnership program pays but according to Paidcontent.org's David Kaplin YouTube is not giving out the details.

Sites like Vuze.com allow you to "Monetize Your Content the Way You Want" and I expect to see more of these types of sites popping up soon.

So who is buying Online Video?

I don't think anyone is really buying online video and if you have some online video to sell I don't think you should sell it. I think you should sell ads against your online video and license it to people who will license it to someone else or sell ads against it and to do that you need to study that dirty word, "SALES."

If you don't want to do it yourself, use one of the above sites.

What do you think?

Navigating Episodic Internet Shows

With the exception of Apple's iTunes Podcast subscription I have yet to find an enjoyable way of watching Episodic Shows on the Internet.

When Prom Queen launched earlier this year it was a pain in the ass to watch the shows in order and catch up if you missed one. Eventually team Vuguru created a weekly recap show but it was hard to figure out where I left off and it still required some work. When the Big Fantastic launched their Summer season of Prom Queen called Summer Heat, Vuguru sent out a daily email and this made it much easier to catch up if I missed an episode. I could just go to my Apple mail and sort my messages from Prom and click on the shows in order.

If you go to Youtube or Revver or Veoh or Metacafe or any other video site and search for your favorite Episodic Show you will find it and it's trailers/promos in some crazy order. If you are at work trying to find that episode that you missed before your boss walks by and busts you for goofing off at work you are going to bail and wait till later to find that episode if you ever get around to it.

So far there are no Episodic shows on the front page of Youtube's Most Viewed (All Time) All: page. This says a lot about how we are still in a time of "spectacle" and have not yet moved into "Story" as far as Internet video goes. Even the Internet's biggest "Hit" story Lonely Girl 15's most popular episode only has had 1,708,683 views and if you want to start from never having seen an episode of LG15 and get all caught up, good luck. There are over 21 pages of search results for "Lonely Girl 15" on Revver and I couldn't find Episode number one so I went to LG15.com. There I found a place to start and a recap video of season one that brought me up to speed but that was work.

We need to speak with our contacts at the video sites and ask them what they can do to help. One viral video could bring a ton of viewers to your show but if that viewer can't find the next episode or the previous ones in a nice neat way that is easy to navigate it will take us all a lot longer to build audiences. The big boys in Hollywood already know how to make a programming dial work. It won't be long before they figure this out too and make it even harder for us little guys to break through the clutter.

Sure there are work-arounds but that involves "work".