Return Of The Online Video Of The Living Dead

Over on his blog today, Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja asks the all important question- "Is Online Video Dead?"

It's true that the real successes of web video series can be counted on one hand. But then we're still very early on in the game. The things people are trying now are different from what they were trying a year ago, or two years ago. It's a field that's still evolving, month by month. Different models come and go. Just because most of what's been tried hasn't worked doesn't mean that nothing can work.

In my opinion, the major problem is that most models aren't bold enough. No one is trying the full-on assault yet, everything is either aimed at being under the radar weird or boring mainstream. The same categories we've been with for years. Until we get new models that break out of those paradigms, we can't even proclaim the birth of online video, much less its death.

For me, the key thing to realize is that it's more than just production and distribution that have been democratized, it's the whole shebang. And the big success will come from a model that incorporates all aspects of the filmmaking business process, not just one or two.

Of course, that's really, really hard to do. Therein lies the adventure.

Fun And Games At BarCampLA

I spent last weekend at BarCampLA, an "un-conference" for technophiles. The BarCamp concept is that people from various computer related communities come together to talk about whatever interesting ideas they're exploring at the time. There's a number of sessions each day, and the sessions are presented by the attendees. No featured guests, the whole activity soup to nuts is organized and created by the community. It's a great idea, and in Los Angeles it's been working beautifully.

I don't know about other BarCamps, but in LA the community core seems to be very hacker-based, in most senses of the word hacker. You know the Gibson quote "The street finds its own uses for things"? Well, BarCampLA is mostly made up of that street. People using technologies in ways that weren't quite what they were designed for.

From Jay Bushman of the Loose-Fish Project telling stories via Twitter and Wikis to Dan Kaminsky breaking languages with language, from hi-rez cameras revealing the secret lives of automobile dashboards to genetic algorithms preparing to take over the world, BarCampers are finding new uses for lots of things.

Not to mention things like FlickrWall. Take a spare cell phone, combine with a prepaid sms card, a laptop, and a projector. Project the phone number on the wall and allow barcampers to text message Flickr tags to the system that then retrieves and projects images with those tags. Watch as people quickly try to wash out someone's "goatse" tag with "puppies" or "unicorns". It's a lot more social than you'd think, with a fun ebb and flow.

This was my second BarCamp, and both times I've come out refreshed and inspired. Making new connections between various technologies and thinking up new possibilites. Sign me up for the next one, and I might even head down to San Diego for their BarCamp in May!

Case Study of a Hit Viral Video

One offshoot of SoCal Film Group is Monkey With A Shotgun, a group formed for the purpose of making sketch comedy shorts for internet distribution. The name isn't just a moniker for the group, it's also a sort of operating philosophy. Make a lot of different stuff fast and hope to hit some target somewhere.

Over the last 6 weeks or so, Monkey's 20th video, Spanish For Your Nanny, has succeeded in hitting a target, and is approaching half a million views on the sites we track (and likely many more on sites we don't!). There's several reasons for the success of the video, but those are for a later post.

Instead, I'm going to look at how the video has spread and what that might indicate about the nature of a viral video.

All of Monkey's videos are posted to a variety of sites, about a dozen in all. We've found that there's no real way to predict which video will succeed on which site, so we post all our videos on all our sites. We've been featured on a number of them, but that always occurs at the whim of the site's editors, and isn't anything we rely on. While a featured spot on the front page of Yahoo or Myspace can certainly bring in a number of hits, it's usually a brief burst and doesn't seem to carry over to other sites very often (though it can provide an ancillary boost to our other videos on the same site).

In this case, we'd posted Nanny to the usual sites, and we were getting a bit more than the usual number of views, and the video had been "stolen" and posted on other sites a fair amount, but nothing really spectacular, outside of one site where we had been featured (JoeCartoon).

A couple of weeks after I had posted, a friend sent me an IM "Hey, you never stumbled Nanny". He meant that I'd never given the video a thumbs up via the StumbleUpon browser plugin. StumbleUpon is a social network / link sharing site, in which your friends in your network see sites you've given a thumbs up, and vice versa. We've had some success using this and other similar sites, and I usually Stumble a new video post on YouTube as a matter of course. I use YouTube as the preferred Stumble site because it's the most popular video site, and a video there benefits more from a greater view total than on any other site.

In any case, my friend Stumbled the site, and I immediately seconded it. The seconding serves two purposes, one it's a vote of confidence in the first Stumble, which makes it more likely to be seen by others, and two it combines my stumble network with my friend's, increasing the number of people the video can be exposed to.

Nanny caught on with the Stumble crowd, and racked up a number of views from people Stumbling on the page over the next couple of days.

But then the big step happened- the video got added to the FunWall application on Facebook. Someone, likely one of the Stumblers, started "forwarding" the video via FunWall, and the view count really took off.

To understand why, it's important to understand the nature of FunWall, and of Facebook in general.

Among other things, Facebook is very good at reducing what I call "link friction" to almost nothing. The key element of a viral video is getting the link to the video into new hands. Thus the ease of passing the link is crucial. The effort involved in passing the link can be seen as "friction" working against the momentum a link builds as it's passed from person to person. Having to cut-and-paste a link, for example, is a relatively high level of friction, as each stage of passing the link on requires that each person actively take several steps to do so. Something like StumbleUpon has somewhat lower friction. All you have to do is click the Thumbs Up icon in the plugin. Then others are more likely to see what you've approved.

But this is a sort of passive forwarding, low friction as it may be. Facebook encourages a more active level of participation. Since the advent of the application platform on Facebook, the culture of the FB community has become such that sending invites, links, and applications to your friends is a natural part of your Facebook usage. One of the most popular applications on Facebook is called FunWall. FunWall extends the functionality of your "wall", which is the part of your Facebook profile page where friends can write messages for you. FunWall adds two features relevant to viral videos- one, it embeds video from sites like YouTube. Two, and perhaps more importantly, it includes a "Forward!" button on each FunWall post. Clicking this button allows you to forward the posts to any number of friends.

So FunWall both encourages active participation and does so with almost no Link Friction at all. It's like magic pixie dust for viral videos.

Soon after the FunWall wave started, I started getting reports of Spanish For Your Nanny being emailed around as a file attachment. People I don't know were sending it to other people I don't know and it was eventually making its way back to me. This was Old Skool virality! Spirit Of Christmas stuff! It's interesting to note this came later than the social network spread. It's a good example of a higher friction process, but one that a viral video may grow into if the circumstances are right.

In recent days the video has gotten boosts from being featured on high profile sites such as those of talk radio hosts and so on. In some ways, this is sort of last stage virality, when the video bubbles up high enough for at least minor attention from mainstream media.

The important thing to note in this whole process is that the big gatekeepers have come at the end. Prior to that, the spread of the video has been accomplished by thousands of nano-gatekeepers, individuals deciding to either pass the video on to their friends or not. No one of these individuals has a lot of push in making the video spread, but collectively they can make a video spread much further and much faster than any one give large gatekeeper.

The ultimate lesson is rather straightforward- get your video in front of as many people as possible, using as many tools as you can to do so. You don't know which of them will work best, so use them all. Take special care to use those tools that put your video in front of people in a way that makes it easy for them to spread it.

I hope this has all made at least some sense, and I look forward to adding to it as Monkey With A Shotgun has more videos on the loose!

STRIKETV.com : More info, site still placeholder

Looking at their domain name's site, it's hard to tell if this project is going to launch with this name or not.

But the blog Divided Hollywood has some more information on the workings of the project. It's apparently intended to be a clearinghouse for WGA member web video projects, presumably including some intended more for entertainment than agitprop purposes.

Reading the comments, there's a fair amount of concern about the idea that members of other unions would be asked to donate their time and work for what could turn out to be for-profit projects. STRIKETV.com says they will be donating all profit from the site to support striking writers. But the creators (ie producers) will retain ownership, and could potentially profit from the show later or through different venues.

The irony of asking union members to work for producers for free since it's an experimental internet project has not been lost on many people.

In later comments, it looks as if STRIKETV.com is willing to work out these issues in a manner favorable to the crew, but details are scarce. Details on the whole project seem to be scarce at this point. Hopefully it works out, it really could be a watershed moment. But producers are producers, regardless of their status as writers, and there's still a lot of questions to be answered.

STRIKETV.com

I'm hoping that either a) the name is misreported or b) they have
secured the name from the person that's had it since 2005.


"Starting in January, the WGA will commence STRIKETV.com, where clips
of video material will be put up and advertiser support sought."

And yeah, I was checking because well...I always check.

Some people don't, ;-)

Quarterlife- the jig is up?

Looks like NewTeeVee is also asking questions about Quarterlife's performance.

It's worth nothing the reported total of 2,000,000 views is still considerably more than you can track on the main video sites, at least for the episodes. Unless QL is counting total views for all the videos, including the little interstitial-like things and then dividing that by 8. Hopefully not, hopefully they really do have about 500,000 total views at the main QL website.

In any case, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think the web audience was ever more than the cherry on top of the network pickup for this show.

Quarterlife has a short half-life

So, Quarterlife.

Not doing as well as it was hyped to do, but hard to call it a failure since web success may never have been the true plan.

Looking over the history of how the got to where it is, it seems reasonable to assume that the net launch of the episodes was never intended as much more than a PR push for the TV version.

A while back, the producers put together a pilot for a show called 1/4life. That pilot was rejected by ABC, so the producers decided to put together a different pilot called Quarterlife, and promote it as a web series in partnership with MySpaceTV.

Quarterlife the web series was then picked up by NBC amid all sorts of commotion about the WGA strike.

The webseries continues to "air" on MySpaceTV and YouTube, but hasn't been logging numbers in line with the hoopla surrounding the show. The hoopla has been huge indeed, with front page placement for epsiodes on MySpace.com along with banner ads throughout the site. In addition, the first episode was featured on the front page of YouTube for several days, and a director's channel complete with banner ads etc was set up for the show itself.

Add to this the production costs, reported to be over $500,000 per hour (or over $80,000 per webisode), and you can see the standards for success have to be set fairly high.

As of this writing, 24 days after launch, the first webisode is sitting at a total of 822,798 views total between MySpace and YouTube. Interestingly, given the show's partnership with MySpaceTV, about 3/4 of those views come from YouTube, which featured the webisode on its front page for a few days. Damningly, the first webisode has a grand total of 8 comments on MySpaceTV, orders of magnitude less than what a successful video with that many views should have.

After the first episode, the dropoff in views is quite steep. Episode 2 has 104,000 views, Ep. 3 has 164,000, and Ep 4 has 84,000, or less approximately 10% the total views of the first episode. Later episodes have not been on YouTube long enough for a meaningful comparison.

Altogether, the show has garnered 1.4 million views in the month since launch. That doesn't sound too bad, and indeed would be amazing for a cheap show with no hype. But it can't come close to paying back the money invested in the show, no matter what sort of CPM and revenue sharing plan the show has with the two sites.

So why isn't the show doing better? Here are a few thoughts on what's wrong and how a show of similar talent magnitude could be done right.

1. The concept isn't that interesting or original. Real life vloggers are more captivating and less stilted and besides, the whole vlogger show thing has been done. If you're going to move into this arena, find a new approach and more compelling characters.

2. The episodes are too long. The shortest is just under 7 minutes, but the longest pushes 15. Fifteen minutes is far too long for the current net audience. The optimal length at present seems to be around 6 minutes, but the average here is closer to 10. It makes a difference. People get bored easily on the net, so if you aren't keeping things moving, you've got to keep things short.

3. Bringing us to the next point- things don't move. The webisodes written and cut like a TV show. This ain't TV, it's a different medium, and requires different pacing. Quicker, more efficient, and denser, please.

4. The inter-epsiode pacing is non-existant. Where's the compelling reason to come back to see the next one? Where's the need for more? The mystery? The drive? The internet is not based on habit and appointment based viewing, it's based on doing what comes to mind. Shows have to remain near the center of the viewers thoughts between episodes so they don't forget to return.

5. It's the same sort of story I'd see on TV. If I wanted to see this, why wouldn't I watch it on TV? At present, a net show needs to serve audiences that are not being served on TV. Upwardly mobile young 20s white actors, filmmakers, and magazine writers are not that demo. There are countless shows about and for this audience on traditional TV

6. Where's the money? I don't see anything near $80,000 per websiode on the screen. Sure, it's slick and professionals made it, but you could get professionals to make it just as slick for 1/10th that cost, and then it might have a shot at being profitable.

Basically, Quarterlife is a TV show sliced up and placed on the net. In a way, it's good to have, because now there's an example to point to in order to explain why that doesn't work. Webisodes are their own medium, and demand new approaches.

Again, though, I can't call the show a failure. It accomplished what was its likely goal of a network pickup, and when the show starts it will have a lot of PR surrounding it. It's likely the creators were able to get a better deal than they would have otherwise. It just isn't headed for success as a web-based show.

But there are lessons here for the next show, and all the shows to follow!