The Secret of Successful Internet Video

You can't sell a feature film on the internet. It's both too much and not enough. It costs too much to produce a feature in relation to what you'll get back from internet-only sales. But a single feature isn't not enough to build a regular audience- people will visit and watch once, and then what? Word of mouth is possible, but it’s a lot more difficult with a one-shot, however impressive that may be.

Your movie has to be relatively cheap, and it can’t exist in isolation.

One likely solution is to sell a serial on the internet, via an aggregator, such as an iTunes like store.

Make something like one of the old serials, with a plotline that moves forward via a series of cliffhangers. You start off free, hook people into your storyworld, then charge a small amount per episode following.

Probably not going to make millions, but probably enough to be self-sustaining under certain sets of business circumstances.

Assuming, of course, that your content is fantastic (more on this later).

That's one model.

A model that's more likely to be self-sustaining is the full-service model. Make the serial. Build a website around it. Sell swag. Sell (HD)DVDs. Sell a fanclub. Sell behind the scenes looks. Sell advertising on the website. Sell all the ancillary aspects of the show you can think of.

“That’s not filmmaking”, you might say, “I don’t want to do it”. No, maybe not, but it is part of the gig. This still all happens when you go the studio route, you’re just farming it all out to the various arms of the studio and losing most of the money along the way.

The goal is to be a self-sustaining filmmaker first. After that you worry about growth and the wider audience. If you have to sell all the geegaws to get there, so be it.

Can you compete with the studios? Not on their battlefield, certainly not. You aren’t going to make Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 and sell it on the internet. You don’t have the resources and you couldn’t fight the studios for audience if you did. But is that really the goal?

Or is the goal to be a filmmaker on a self-sustaining basis?

Which brings us to branding. Which brings us, indirectly, back to having fantastic content.

For any of this to work, you’ve got to have a stream of content. You can’t cut it with one or two pieces of content. A short, a feature, whatever, not enough (see above). But with regular content, you’re building a following, a brand, an audience. People start to know who you are and what you do. What you do isn’t defined by one or two works, it’s defined by a series of works. And in order for people to care about what you do, it’s got to be fantastic. All of it.

There’s a huge machine out there, the hype/media/news/entertainment machine, and it wants you to make fantastic stuff. It NEEDS you to make fantastic stuff. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day, and the media needs a new story tomorrow (and “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, as someone else once said). They need to make you a star, they just want you to give them a reason to do it. There’s always a Pretty Young Thing, in the broadest sense of the term, and a Pretty Young Thing producing fantastic content and distributing it in a sexy way (ie “outside the system”) is a story they love to tell, they’ve been doing that story over and over for at least 40 years now.

There’s a way to leverage their machine to your benefit. It can be done. Someone will.

Look, I’m the first to admit I’m not really talking about something the Average Joe can do. But I am talking about something the Smart, Hard-Working, Lucky Joe might pull off. Maybe. If it all falls into place, just right.