Nothing epitomizes big budget television to me like craft service. It’s a separate part of production that makes sure the actors and crew are fed. In many places, it’s even a union job. And if you’re considering it for your web video production, you’ve already lost.
I don’t mean to belittle the profession – it can be indispensable on large productions with mega budgets. And someday videos made for YouTube might actually be big and profitable enough to afford it. But in the immortal words of Buzz Lightyear: “Not Today Zurg”.
And that leads me to my sixth and final way to fail on YouTube – pretending you are TV.
Early on in my Revision3 days I met with a lot of companies that considered web video a gateway drug. Success on YouTube, they posited, was just a stepping stone to success on cable or broadcast TV. From National Banana to Ripe TV, their focus, storytelling and budgeting was all focused on finding the next big breakout TV format.
And while they were burning cash, folks like Shay Carl, Phil DeFranco and iJustine were making videos in their basements, and building huge passionate audiences that would ultimately lead to fame and at least a little fortune. But apart from moving pictures and audio, what these subterranean video dwellers were making had very little resemblance to typical TV.
It’s still true today. Even though some YouTube stars are pulling in millions of dollars a year, there just isn’t enough money going around to support even a fraction of the production expenses you see on the smallest TV shows.
Shortly after Discovery bought us, I was lucky enough to visit the set of a new show for one of our smaller networks. The production company was making 10 episodes, and the rough cost per episode was about $400,000. I later learned that even a mid-level reality TV show had a team of 20-30 folks that would descend on whatever slice of life was being exposed – and stay there for weeks!
Do the math. If you average about $5 in ad revenue for every thousand views, you’d need 80 MILLION views just to break even on that $400,000 production cost. That’s like scoring a “What the Fox Say” every time you post something. And that just isn’t going to happen.
Even what I consider the most successful “expensive” YouTube series – Video Game High School – barely broke even. They spent $22,979.32 on craft services, and nearly $700,000 overall – even with free labor and other creative financing techniques. You can check out the cost breakdown yourself in this great article show creator Freddie Wong wrote last year. So yes, you can spend TV-style money and maybe make a little money. But you’ll need to corral the most talented creators in the web-original video world and call in a LOT of favors. And even then you’ll probably still lose a lot. (as an aside, I’m looking forward to a similar analysis of Season 2 of VGHS).
So before you start shooting your super-amazing new YouTube series, take a close look at that budget. If you see the words “Director of Photography”, or “Grip” or you’re paying for a lot of special effects and sound design you should be afraid. Very afraid. Unless you’re the second coming of YLVIS – and you can do it every time – you’re probably throwing money away.
And if there’s a craft services line you better just throw in the towel. Because unfortunately, web video just isn’t big enough to support TV food.
What Calvin and Hobbes Taught Me About Big Data!
I’ve found myself thinking more and more about that phrase as I ponder this year of “Big Data”. Now Big Data certainly has a lot of promise, and it certainly has been hyped to death. But it’s also – to many of us – pretty scary. Big Data requires lots of other big things, including big computer hardware, big staff, big project timelines and big budgets. The promise of Big Data is certainly strong – but for many of us it’s proving daunting and confusing as well.
We’ve been working on our own “Big Data” project here at Discovery Digital Networks for the past year. It’s not been without challenges. We discovered that one of our trusted data sources has numerous inconsistencies, another supposedly “real-time” source really couldn’t be trusted until about 15 days after each month closes, and we’ve also had to revamp our staffing assumptions and timelines. We’re starting to get some killer stuff out of that big data project, but it’s taken longer, cost more and exposed more warts than we ever expected.
You’re probably in the same boat. The promise of big data is huge – but the reality often requires a priesthood of data scientists to implement, and more mumbo jumbo than you’ll find at the New York Witch Festival.
But a funny thing happened on our way to Big Data heaven. The more we thought about it, the more we realized we didn’t need to wait to get real actionable audience and other insights. There really is data everywhere that you can tap into right now that will help you understand how customers, suppliers and others view you, your company and your products.
For us, it started with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. We started spending more time first monitoring discussions (or lack thereof) with our shows and hosts, and then began reaching out and joining the communities of our fans. We discovered an important (but obvious in retrospect) fact: if you ask people a question politely, they will usually answer.
From there we started using simple tools like Survey Monkey to create basic questionnaires to put in front of our viewers, using YouTube annotations and other means to drive response. We got all sorts of insights that way. And although we haven’t done this yet, others have told me that just asking a single simple question can be even more effective – and will drive much a better response.
All of that really started helping the business. We learned, for example, that our DNews audience liked certain sorts of stories on certain days. So we launched “Space Fridays” to capitalize on one of those insights. We started seeing real patterns that let us increase the shareability of our content dramatically. And we started using those insights to deliver dramatic growth among some of our newer and older properties, including Animalist, Rev3Games and Scam School.
And then, towards the end of the year, I started talking with a fascinating new company that promises to deliver much of the insight of big data, but through a cloud-based and rapid data ingest and analysis service called DBMiner. We’re still working on a trial with them, but I’m optimistic that this will be a great middle ground between adopting a priesthood of big data and digging around for insights on your own.
Oh, and don’t expect “Big Data” – even when you do get it all really working — to be the Holy Grail either. According to my friend Mark Anderson – CEO of Strategic News Service and one of the smartest analysts and futurist in the business – next year we’ll be worrying more about Big Visualization. Or in other words just because you’ve got all that data warehoused, you still need great systems to help you really “see” inside, and extract real actionable knowledge.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Big Data. We’ll see lots of value going forward from our initiatives there. But just because you’re working on a big project, don’t forget that all sorts of insights are there for the taking – or the asking – just by poking around. To your data scientists they might be rocks, grubs and weird roots. But for the rest of us those insights are great treasure.