Business Plans Slowly Emerge for the Webseries
Despite the fact that the webseries medium is still relatively young, it is indeed slowly emerging as not only a growing creative outlet for both independent and professional producers but a legitimate business vehicle as well. Although most webseries fail to make a profit and even struggle to earn any returns, a small handful have experimented with a wide variety of methods that in turn have generated money. While the figures are no doubt miniscule when compared to more mainstream mediums like television, the fact remains that webseries can be profitable as well as entertaining.
The first webseries to find any level of financial success was also one of the first to achieve any sort of notoriety on both the Internet and within mainstream media, LonelyGirl15. The brainchild of Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried, LG15 was an interactive dramatic series that followed a group of teenagers fighting against a mysterious secret society called “The Order.” The series featured a scripted style that blended comedy, romance, teen angst and sci-fi drama and utilized forums and chat rooms that allowed fans to directly communicate with the characters.
LG15 became such a pop culture phenomenon that its creators were able to find financial success through the use of brand integration. Beginning with the incorporation of Hershey’s Ice Breakers Sours gum into an episode of the original series, both LonelyGirl15 and British spin-off KateModern blended products from the likes of Neutrogena, Toyota and Cadbury into their narratives. The producers were initially afraid of viewer backlash over the use of such seemingly blatant monetization efforts but were put at ease when they asked for fan feedback on a LG15 forum. “Ninety-two percent of the people said, ‘Yeah, go ahead. Do it. If I get to see another LonelyGirl video it’s fine if someone’s chewing a piece of gum,’” Miles Beckett told the audience at the 2007 NewTeeVee Pier Screenings in San Francisco.
Actress Felicia Day, meanwhile, found her own notoriety on the World Wide Web when she released her webseries creation, The Guild, in 2007. The story of an online group of World of Warcraft-style gamers was originally a pilot that Day intended to develop for television but restructured for the online video medium instead. The webseries quickly became a success, due in part to the actress’ involvement in the final season of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer—the television producer has a large Internet following—as well as the online appeal of the subject matter.
When the initial production funds for season one started to run dry, Day turned to the fanbase that The Guild had assembled and asked for financial support. Donations subsequently poured in via PayPal, allowing the webseries to complete its initial episode run. Having thus achieved a bit on online fame, which then increased when she appeared in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Felicia Day was suddenly in the enviable position of being able to work out a deal with Microsoft that not only paid for season two but gave the show greater visibility on Xbox Live Marketplace, added Sprint as a sponsor and allowed Day to retain creative control as well as the rights to the series.
“We had a different model (for season two) because we got so many offers,” she explained to Paste in April, 2009. “Dozens of networking producers and venture capitalists (offered) to produce the show, but the rebellious inner spirit I have made me not want to sell the rights to my show. Then, Xbox and Microsoft came in and were like, ‘We love the show, we want you to do what you do with it, we just want to help you produce it and make it and roll it out really fast.’ They created a revolutionary business model.” An apparently successful one as well, because The Guild was able to produce multiple seasons in the years that followed using the same strategy.
While Felicia Day was able to rely on The Guild’s fanbase for financial support, Joss Whedon used his fanbase to generate buzz for his webseries production, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. By the time the first “act” premiered in July 2008, the hype had reached the point where the servers carrying the webseries crashed during the first hour. Whedon also turned the release of the webseries—which told the story of a wannabe supervillain, his arch-nemesis and the cute girl he can’t muster the courage to talk to—into a online “event” by only streaming the series on the official website for a one-week span. From there, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was only available on the likes of iTunes and Hulu, thus ensuring at least a minimal revenue stream for the production. It was eventually released on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and had amassed such a large following by then that significant sales and financial success were pretty much assured.
Sony, meanwhile, has experimented with it own unique business model with such high-profile (and expensive) webseries like Angel of Death and The Bannen Way. The media giant had already made a significant investment in online video with its digital network Crackle when it decided to take webseries production to the next level. “If you can figure out some ways to plug (web programming) into traditional business models, maybe you can make high-quality work for the Internet,” Sony President Steve Mosko told the Wall Street Journal in June of 2008. In this instance, the “traditional business model” was using established stars and big-budgets to create a high quality webseries that could then be turned into Direct-to-DVD offerings and television “movies of the week” in foreign countries.
The Bannen Way is a perfect example of this strategy. Costing upwards of seven-figures to film, the webseries featured such recognizable actors as Robert Foster and Michael Lerner and initially appeared on Crackle in the form of sixteen short episodes. Sony was able to create hype for the project, and that initial online run racked up an impressive 8.4 million views in February 2010 and an additional 13 million the following month, making it one of the most watched webseries in the medium’s short history. The Bannen Way was eventually removed from Crackle and the sixteen episodes were strung together into a more traditional motion picture format. The webseries was then released on DVD and even aired on HBO Canada for a three-week run during July 2010.
Actress Illeana Douglas did not have the benefit of Crackle when she created the webseries Illeanarama—Supermarket of the Stars and put it on YouTube in 2006. Two years later, however, Douglas approached home products supplier IKEA about rewriting the series so that it took place at one of their real-world stores instead of a fictional supermarket. Renamed Easy to Assemble, IKEA approved a first season as more of a marketing experiment than anything else but went all-in during season two, even showcasing episodes on IKEA websites. Although the company does approve the plots and storylines in much the same way that television networks do with their shows, the webseries is not a promotional advertisement for IKEA but a genuinely independent endeavor instead. And while IKEA picks up the production tab for Easy to Assemble, Illeana Douglas retains both creative control and ownership of the finished product.
A small number of corporate backed webseries have hit the Internet since Easy to Assemble premiered, including the Trident Layers-sponsored The Webventures of Justin and Alden. “Justin and Alden had made a hilarious video for Trident a few months back in which they played themselves as two actors who decide they can become famous by getting their favorite gum into the hands of celebrities,” producer Wilson Cleveland told Pink Raygun in June 2010 regarding the origination of the webseries. “In December of last year we were asked to start proposing ideas around Justin and Alden’s original concept. Then in mid-March, Trident gave it the green light and two weeks later we were on set.”
While all of the above strategies have indeed generated revenue, the fact remains that each of the webseries mentioned benefited from their high-profile Internet presence. LonelyGirl15, for instance, would not have been of any interest to Hershey’s if the creators of the series hadn’t been able to create such a large community around their project. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, meanwhile, was able to tap into the large online following of producer Joss Whedon, a fanbase that The Guild was also able to utilize due to Felicia Day’s appearance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As for The Bannen Way, Crackle obviously has a greater audience reach than your average new webseries, while Easy to Assemble has the corporate strength of IKEA behind it as a marketing tool.
That does not mean that independently produced webseries by relative unknowns cannot find potential profits on the Internet. The medium continually raises the level on quality, not only from a production standpoint but writing, acting and directing as well, and the World Wide Web has begun to witness independent efforts on par with those of traditional Hollywood. By incorporating the strategies utilized above and developing new techniques as well, a start up webseries can indeed find financial success. And although no one has found a way to make any significant amount of money off of online video as of yet, that does not mean that somebody won’t figure out a way to do so in the future. The medium is making too much headway, and the potential for success is just too great, for that not to happen.
Anthony Letizia (September 17, 2010)
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