Brian Flemming's Weblog
W H A T ' S G O I N G O N
My most recent film, The God Who Wasn't There, is available on DVD at the official site and elsewhere.
Bat Boy: The Musical is currently being staged in productions of various sizes around the world. A movie adaptation directed by John Landis is in development, with no casting announced or shooting date set.
My next feature film, Danielle, remains in development.
Bill Gates is still dead.
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Everyone is talking about how it might actually be possible this time around. I do know people are watching web video. (Three hundred thousand views* is about 25% of the audience for the actual Colbert Report show on cable, although...
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October 20, 2006 Making money with web videoEveryone is talking about how it might actually be possible this time around. I do know people are watching web video. (Three hundred thousand views* is about 25% of the audience for the actual Colbert Report show on cable, although some people are skeptical that a YouTube "view" is a meaningful stat.) But the financial success stories strike me as lottery winners. When the biggest haul is $15,000 earned for a huge hit like the Diet-Coke/Mentos experiment, it doesn't exactly point the way to a sustainable income for the average filmmaker. For how long would a filmmaker have to experiment and produce and market web videos before hitting gold like that? Months? Years? Divide whatever amount of time makes sense by $15,000, subtract all expenses, divide by your number of collaborators, and there you have your wage for successfully engineering a hit at the highest level of web-video success. If your single slapped-together home video happens to become a hit, it's a great return. But if you and your buddies worked for a year... This is an admittedly pessimistic view. It doesn't take into account all of the other benefits of gaining an audience. But it seems to me that those benefits are still the most sensible main goal when it comes to web video, especially when going for the bucks would limit your audience (i.e., posting your video exclusively to revenue-generating sites instead of the more popular ones like YouTube). As a wise man said, battling obscurity is the goal. It may not be wise to try to battle poverty with the same weapon. UPDATE: That link is now dead. It used to contain a YouTube-hosted mash-up of Stephen Colbert and the Star Wars Kid video. (Still available here.) On his Viacom-owned show, The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert asked his viewers to create mashups using footage of Colbert prancing in front of a green screen. He even provided the footage for download on his Viacom-owned site. Still, when Viacom confronted YouTube with DMCA takedown notices, it included these "Green Screen Challenge" clips. Assholes. |