Yuri writes:
Mostly because our biggest views and biggest audience comes from YouTube, our dedicated fans go to the Break a Leg site, sure, but as the article states, we have nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube and around 500,000 on Blip.tv, which is the main host on our website. As someone from YouTube once told me, “People don’t need websites anymore, not when they have YouTube.”
Here’s the article where he’s frustrated by not making a lot of money.
Look, dude. Read this blog more. Seriously. I’m giving away all the secrets. 2.5 million views over two years is great, but it’s what we get in a month.
YouTube is not the answer. It’s a great way to get a little attention, but not a great way to be the only source of income or a place to build a career. Don’t buy the hype. You need a website, you need to be truly independent to make a real go of it.
Figure out what your goals are — is your goal to make your show at a financial loss for the rest of your life? If so, I commend you for leading the artist’s life. It’s a brave choice.
Do you want to make Break A Leg a profitable business? The ship might have sailed on this one. Showbiz is fickle. Just ask the dozens of failed projects that never got off the ground in my life. Or go watch the worst movie by your favorite director.
Do you want this show to get you other work? You need to start thinking about what your next idea is. I know you’re still in the midst of this idea, but if you don’t have a good answer for what’s next no ne else will hire you.
Whatever your goal is, the only limiting factor is your imagination.
I love that you’re starting to do minisodes. For me it’s not about longform vs. shortform. It’s about only being able to produce a small amount as an indie and if you have 30 minutes of something, it looks like you have a whole lot more when you cut it up into 6 or more episodes.
Keep the faith, it took me almost 6 years of dedicated work to come up with Ask A Ninja and have the filmmaking and business chops to pull it off. This shit will never be easy. Filmmaking is difficult enough, and then you add the business stuff on top of it.
15 Comments
April 1, 2008 at 10:09 am
You rock.
Chuck
April 1, 2008 at 10:14 am
No matter how you slice it, you have to work at it, day in and day out.
April 1, 2008 at 10:15 am
A couple of thoughts…
1) Its become crystal clear that no content creator should rely on YouTube for any sort of payout, beyond publicity.
2) It seems to me that a major flaw of Break A Leg is that they branded themselves as a show that should be on TV. This causes all sorts of problems when you’re distributing on the Web. Why not just release the shows on radio? Seriously. Ask a Ninja used the medium–its about time more people tried doing the same.
Nothing against Yuri-we’re all still trying to crack this nut and we’ve certainly made our fair share of mistakes as well–just my 2 cents.
April 1, 2008 at 10:32 am
Nicely put, Kent.
Don’t you think it is about longform vs. shortform to an extent? Ask a Ninja is short, and easy to digest. That makes it much more sendable, and gives it a much greater ability to become viral (which I don’t mean as a knock, in any way). Break a Leg, by contrast, is designed to be dense, and long. This, from my perspective, seriously limits its ability to become widely spread, and become viral, by virtue of the attention span of the audience.
I don’t think either approach is more artistically valid, of course, and neither has more intrinsic value, although your route is much more likely to succeed, because Ask a Ninja sits nicely in what an audience will like, whereas Break a Leg is doing its own thing, off in the corner, hoping to attract people (as I do).
It is arguably a more artistically true and proper route to take, but I agree that it doesn’t make as much business sense. I agree with what you say about a need for focus (which is something I’m struggling with, myself).
I don’t want to speak for Yuri, and I don’t know what his current plans are, but his plan once was to get Break a Leg onto TV proper. That’s probably not terribly feasible — I have recently had discussions with TV folks about dotBoom, and they passed on it because it was already developed, and a network wouldn’t have the ability to influence the structure of the thing from the ground up — but I think it would serve as a great calling card, and an in to get more work.
Also, I think that it’s great that a conversation like this can happen between folks of all different levels of success, completely out in the open.
April 1, 2008 at 10:42 am
@Brian
Right, but look at the title of this post. He’s already breaking up the larger episodes into acts and now is also releasing minisodes.
But you’re also ignoring the larger truth that millions of people are downloading long form shows and movies right now, all be it illegally on BitTorrent.
Part of your strategy as an indie needs to be how can I get people to watch. You can’t compete with the marketing budgets of the studios, so you need to beat them where they can’t fight. In the stories you tell, the methods you tell them, and the way you distribute.
Getting a million views a year is amazing, and it probably took Sex, Lies, and Videotape a decade to achieve that sort of viewership. But Soderbergh went on and built a career.
That’s the two-step. Get seen, then get paid.
Only the lucky and smart will be able to get paid while they are getting seen.
April 1, 2008 at 10:51 am
Riddle me this Batman,
What’s the best Open Source FLASH player that you would used if you were not using Castfire? And what would you use for inserting ads on your video podcast if you didn’t have Castfire?
April 1, 2008 at 10:55 am
@Tim ugh. No clue.
April 1, 2008 at 11:05 am
@kent
True, he’s breaking things up, but much of that is window-dressing. He’s breaking a large episode up, somewhat unnaturally (at least in the first episodes), into chunks. This leads to confusion among new viewers — certainly to a lot of the people who view the stuff on Youtube because it’s the featured video, and who don’t know what’s going on. I like requiring an attention-span, but I realize that’s not the best thing in the world to require, if you’re doing online stuff. Maybe it’s not so much the length of the content, but the serialized nature of it. If you’re down with a show, you love the serialization, but if you’re new to it, it’s pretty daunting.
I absolutely agree with the get seen/get paid line of thinking.
As far as people downloading full-length movies and TV shows online, some are piping ‘em straight to their TV, but the rest are watching things they already know about. That’s a distinction worth pointing out, I think. If you like a show, and they toss out a double-length episode, you’re elated, because they are making more of what you love. But if you’re new to a show, a longer episode seems to be off-putting to your transient viewers who are click-click-clicking away. The budgets also come into play with this, as people are willing to sit through an hour of expensive and well-produced content at their desks, but not on lesser-produced content, even if the stories are good.
One of the most frequent criticisms I ever got about dotBoom was the length: I had people say that no online content should be more than ten minutes, and I’ve had a number of teenagers tell me flat out that they’d tell their friends about the show, but that they don’t have the attention-span to sit through that long of a piece of video.
One of my schemes to straddle that particular fence with the eventual second season of dotBoom is to have the shortened version of each episode for casual viewers, and put a longer version behind a registration-wall for fans. That way people can discover and spread the show around, and when they’re liking the show, they can get it in the larger chunks. So goes the theory, in any case.
For myself, though, before I get around to the second season, I’m going to use my produced video as a track record to get work. My plan is to get work building puppets, shows, and puppet shows for clients, to go firmly into the ad world with something unique, something that I’ve shown I can do well online, and get the reputation enough to be able to come back into the online space with much more recognition, and hopefully more money.
April 1, 2008 at 11:58 am
chris.pirillo.com/ is working on an open source project that should bring together all the tools that online video content creators will need but he’s just getting started. You can check the project out at
http://Gnomepal.org/
April 1, 2008 at 12:31 pm
@Tim
Curious to know your thoughts on this?
http://www.longtailvideo.com/
April 1, 2008 at 3:45 pm
[...] Kent Nichols, co-creator of Ask a Ninja, wrote a nice blog in response to my Gawker article and I wanted to respond here, in our blog — mostly because Kent and I are afraid of creating too strong of an emotional bond [...]
April 2, 2008 at 12:17 am
Could it be that the perceived value of content on the Internet is trending towards zero?
April 2, 2008 at 6:52 am
@T. Barnes
Who’s perceiving it as value-less? The people watching or the people who might have some money?
April 9, 2008 at 10:40 am
No one is percieving it’s value-less. The Internet, like information, wants to be free.
I think the folks @ South Park nailed it.
November 20, 2008 at 2:36 am
hmm, dunno dood, I suspect that like printed money changed the world, and the printed word changed everything for society, the longer term implications of the web are that money ceases to be relevant. I agree with yahoo, it’s all about the paid-for services, the business is done if you use them. Flickr is great, youtube is great. They’re great because you can use their deep CMS without writing a line of code, and you can rip it off and stick it on your page, and their monster data center can TAKE the LOAD. Doesn’t cost anything, won’t pay anything. It’s a net resource. Great, you don’t have to worry. As services become available, you can mash them up as an individual. These resources take traffic both ways, so you’re winning as much as your losing, both users and hence dollars.
If you think about software, originally, a user had to write the operation they want, a sequence of Command operations, on lines. Command Line. Now, everybody benefits from tinned software, cleverly designed to let you do whatever you want. You edit video with Premiere, FCP, etc. Same with web services, really, except that they’re not a single purchase, they’re a running, dynamic, hardware and software combines service, fine grained in business structure down to the interaction.
Nah nah nah, web services are great. Because you don’t have to think about the business aspects. You can just rip that embed code, and slap it wherever you want.
Just like imeem and last.fm, the ability to pool data really does give it a deeper index. It’ll do work for you, just call the API. It’s better to have the media all in once place, everybody benefits, the system can be optimised by a core team of crack engineers, you can’t beat the services for efficiency and features.
Sure, edit your own pages, use your own DNS, so that you have a catchy URL and you’re in control. But the content is much better placed provided by the services as by your server.
Taxi or car? I say taxi is classier.