The perks and pitfalls of creating an online web series.

[Muppet Master]

It's not luck, I think it's only sometimes timing. What it is is a lot of work, discipline and a lot of patience.

Years ago at a panel discussion in New York someone asked Jane Henson when there was going to be another Muppet Show (this was before the acquisition by Disney I believe). I don't remember her exact reply, but it was something to the effect of "people don't realize that it took twenty years to make the first one!"

I've always loved that interaction.

Pancake Manor started in 2011. They have accrued 45 millions views, but it's taken almost four years.

Glove and Boots started in 2004. They didn't really hit it big in terms of audience size until about 2011 or so. That's seven years.

Jim Henson started the Muppets in 1955. We all know about Sam and Friends now, but in 1959 if you asked most people outside of Washington, D.C. about it they would probably say they'd never heard of it. Although Jim Henson was on TV and had some early success, he also spent years of his career very frustrated until Sesame Street and that was fourteen years later.

Even after the success of Sesame Street - which was huge - he still had to wait six more years, until 1975, to do the Muppet Show. That's twenty years.

There's a direct correlation between the amount of time these people have had to spend slowly learning their craft and building an audience and the size of the audience and their eventual success.

Sometimes people get lucky and make a viral hit and get a lot of attention quickly, but those people usually fall in to two categories...they're either lucky or they've been honing their craft for a long time in obscurity. The lucky ones never last. The ones that spend years honing their craft, constantly trying to innovate and improve? They're ready and prepared when they finally get a big break.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, relax. You've been at this for ten months and put out one episode. In web series terms, you're a week old baby. Keep going, try some new things, make a new episode and repeat constantly for a few years. That's how almost everybody does it.

Realistically, it takes most people 2-3 years of consistent, sustained effort to build a large audience. Many of those people just started making videos for fun, they weren't trying to be successful or get millions of views. That comes later.

I like what you are saying, the moment I put an episode of my webseries I am dissapointed when it will not get that many views, so is 14 months and 10 episodes considered a baby, web series wise? Also do you think the low budget of my series, Late Night with Sam the Snowman, will affect it from ever getting a fanbase.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I like what you are saying, the moment I put an episode of my webseries I am disappointed when it will not get that many views, so is 14 months and 10 episodes considered a baby, web series wise? Also do you think the low budget of my series, Late Night with Sam the Snowman, will affect it from ever getting a fanbase.

I haven't been involved much in the YouTube community, so I'm really not an expert. Have you read the YouTube Creator Playbook? Because everyone who wants to make YouTube videos should read that and follow its advice.

Also, try reading blogs like New Media Rockstars and Tubefilter that cover the YouTube scene. They have lots of interviews with people who have been very successful and you can probably learn a lot from them.

A great book that I really recommend for you guys (or anyone trying to do this) is The Dip, a great little book (it's very short) that explains how to decide whether or not you should give up when confronted by obstacles; when you should quit and when you should persevere in order to succeed.

Also really good is Hugh MacLeod's manifesto How to be Creative (it's free to download as a PDF) and How to be remarkable, a somewhat famous blog post by Seth Godin, the author of The Dip. These both contain lots of very practical and inspiring advice.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Case in point... our theaters fb page has 1300 followers... however our posts receive 30 or 40 views... Ive paid and paid for "boosts" and the content still seems to stay hidden... IT'S CRIMINAL!

Lol, it's not criminal. Facebook is a business, they just successfully tricked people in to thinking they weren't for a long time. They exist to make money. No one expects to get an ad on TV for free. It's the same thing.

Build email lists, that way you can reach your audience directly (Twitter and likely Pinterest will be going the way of Facebook soon).

...what im saying is... that a show can have its faults and still find a loving and respecting audience if that serendipity or "LUCK" steps in....in some form or manner. I think of channels like "puppets and sh*t" which are absolutely genius and hilarious and have been pumping out content for a long time and still remain dormant with minimal views.

...So theres got to be some magical force that helps things along at times... we simply cannot deny that... it's not to discount anyone's work ethic...or talent... but it is simply the way life works sometimes....

I can deny it because it's completely untrue!

It's not serendipity and it's almost never luck. There is no magic, just a lot of hard work. We say there's luck, because it makes people feel better. It's a myth.

Someone can get lucky in the sense that if a huge blog or web site picks up their video it can get a lot of videos, but then what? If they don't have more content, if they don't have talent, or something to offer that an audience wants they won't get anywhere.

Take, for example, Gangnam Style. Now everybody thinks that became a viral hit out of nowhere and suddenly Psy was huge. Except Psy was already huge, just not here in North America. He's a very smart, very talented guy who's been in the music industry in both America and Korea for over a decade. While no one could have predicted just how big of a hit Gangnam Style would be, I'm pretty sure much of Gangnam Style's success was deliberately orchestrated and designed to help Psy cross over to the English speaking world.

Cultural phenomenons like Twilight, Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey are similar. These things don't become huge overnight or completely by accident. It only seems that way. You show me someone who has achieved real success because of "luck" and I'll show you someone who's worked hard for years to make that luck happen.

Re: Puppets N Sh*t, I love a lot of Victor's videos too, but he hasn't actually been doing those for very long. Just about a year or so.

As for Glove and Boots, what I think changed between "Where's Our Gold" and "Evolution of the Hipster" was that they worked out what the internet wanted from them. They're smart guys and their videos are designed from top to bottom to be relevant, topical and go viral.

We actually have 10 different "short form" sub series in the planning that will be EXACTLY what you pointed out.... these include Dr T doing little science experiments... a costumed robot dancing with kids segment... a short story from the ship called "Kelvins Log" in which kelvin tells about something that funny that happened that particular day on the ship and we see it played out as he narrates. Music videos... odd cooking segments... letters from gabby......etc etc etc... LOTS OF FUN STUFF!

Forgive me for saying this, but this reminds me of our discussion about film equipment in another thread. It's great that you're eager to embrace all these fancy, complicated things (which really is fantastic), but it sounds like you're trying to skip over the basics and get straight to the all the big fun stuff. That almost never works.

You guys are doing great stuff, but I just really think that you would benefit from focusing on doing one thing incredibly well and become known for that. Once you've built an audience, then you can introduce new things and go in new directions. You have to find your voice and people have to understand who you are and what to expect from you.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Just to follow up, I'll share some things I've been doing with my documentary to illustrate some of the things I'm talking about. It's not a Youtube series, but in many ways it's very similar.

Now I am not suggesting that what I am doing is the be-all, end-all (it isn't). But I probably have numbers that are much closer to what you guys are hoping for, so here's what I do...

The documentary is really an extension of the blog (when it's out you may be surprised by how literally it's an extension of the blog) and the blog has always been very simple. My unspoken deal with its audience is that if they check the site everyday or so I'll do my very best to show them something cool, fun or interesting in puppetry that they have probably never seen before. Post are usually (but not always) short because people don't like to read a lot on the internet. Whenever possible, I don't just share a video, I also share information about the process behind a video as well as links where people who are really interested can discover even more.

When I stick to that basic formula it seems to do very well. When I deviate from that, well, not so much. The reason why I think deviating doesn't work is because the audience knows what to expect and then all of sudden if I make a drastic change there is sort of a collective "huh? What's this?".

When I do make changes, I try to make them slow and gradual over time so people get used to them. That also allows me to test and refine things a lot.

Very little with PuppetVision is random. Tweets, Facebook posts, even the time the blog posts go up has been researched and tested. For example, lately I've been posting at around 4:30 am EST, which is insanely early in Canada, but also when people in the UK tend to start checking the site (4:30am EST = 10:30am UK time).

And although the blog post might go up at 4:30 am EST, it isn't usually shared on Facebook until 2 p.m. EST. This is because - for reasons that I do not entirely understand - if I share anything on Facebook around 2-3 pm it often reaches 1,000-2,000 people organically (no paid promotion). Yet if I post an hour earlier fewer than one hundred people will see it.

Weird, huh?

Although the blog's readership comes from 100 countries, roughly 60-70% of it is in just five places - The United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa. That's where most of my focus is. While the blog covers puppetry from all over the world, it's probably disproportionately focused on those countries, because that's where its readers are.

(Next on the list is to build up the audience in Singapore, New Zealand and Ireland, which are the major English speaking countries where the blog isn't widely read...yet).

Last year I almost launched an Asia-focused version of PuppetVision. The plan was to launch the site in English and Chinese and expand to Japanese and Korean within 6-12 months. I had a couple people lined up to help with translation and we were planning to launch with about 100 of the most popular/relevant posts from PuppetVision ready to go. At the last minute I begged off, not because it was a bad idea (I still think it's a very good idea), but because I realized it was too much, too soon and would distract me from finishing the documentary and everything else I was already doing.

When the documentary comes out, we're focused on festivals and screenings in the countries where the blog is already read because we already have an audience there. For the same reason, the film itself has a lot content tailored to those audiences...as well as a few others where I hope to go next.

It's been a lot of trial and error (and still is), but one thing I've learned is that if you build it they will come...but they only stick around if you give them what they want.

 

[Brooksy]

This is a great thread! Learning lots so far. I'll put my two cents in here for what it's worth.

I like to believe that any success I achieve will be because of hard work that I and my team put in. As short of a time that I've been working in the puppet world, I've been working in the video production world for the past 8 years. I'm continuously learning and honing my craft to make my web series the best that it can be.

This first season's main goal was to introduce what we were trying to do and get feedback on how to make the series better. I'm going to be doing that until the series comes to an end. Hopefully I'll get to keep creating the series for years to come. But I'll always be learning and making it better through the process. I've prepped myself for years of work before success. Luckily (Heh) I'm very much enjoying making the series and working with the crew.

Personally I'm a big believer that if you have an awesome product, then people will discover and appreciate it. But to get an awesome product takes a lot of time and work. And to get it to people takes even more time and work. So get ready for tons and tons of time and work.

Great thread. Really learning a bunch here.

 

[crazy chris]

Thanks again for all the info and your views on things...

couple quick things...

1. Facebook IS criminal ...because I HAVE paid... and paid...and paid... and i get "bots" from India liking posts INSTEAD of what the facebook booster promises (that it will be sent out to people who've liked the page and their friends). I realize its a business... and would gladly PAY more if the results were what was promised...

2. Ive had the Sony FS100 for about 3 weeks now and LOVE IT!! bahahahha

3. I hope we are all lucky with our respective projects...LOL

cc

 

[Buck-Beaver]

1. Facebook IS criminal ...because I HAVE paid... and paid...and paid... and i get "bots" from India liking posts INSTEAD of what the facebook booster promises (that it will be sent out to people who've liked the page and their friends). I realize its a business... and would gladly PAY more if the results were what was promised..

That's too bad and has not been my experience when I've used it.

Are you hosting your videos on Facebook? Because if you're after awareness (as opposed to YouTube subscribers) I've been told that a video hosted on Facebook is much more likely to be seen than a video hosted elsewhere. I don't know that is actually true, but if it is it makes a lot of sense.

Another trick with Facebook ads is to only boost them after they are been liked and shared. That seems to be an effective strategy.

 

[crazy chris]

That's too bad and has not been my experience when I've used it.

Are you hosting your videos on Facebook? Because if you're after awareness (as opposed to YouTube subscribers) I've been told that a video hosted on Facebook is much more likely to be seen than a video hosted elsewhere. I don't know that is actually true, but if it is it makes a lot of sense.

Another trick with Facebook ads is to only boost them after they are been liked and shared. That seems to be an effective strategy.

ive found that something in their video upload method takes away alot of the quality in the video. I used to post alot of my personal videos on there and they always looked dingy and blurry...

I willl have to try your method and wait for the posts to see a little action before i boost next time...see what happens...

I recently boosted a post under our Gabby character's account ... he has close to a thousand friends... and then polled everyone i knew to see if they noticed the post... no one saw the post at all... lolol...

cc

 

[D'Snowth]

I'll just go ahead and tell you now from experience, really the biggest con when it comes to producing web original content is that there really is no room for originality.

Let's face it: people who get on the internet aren't looking for what creators are putting out there to showcase their work, they only want to see long-lost movies that aren't on DVD, or banned episodes of shows they'll never see in an official capacity... that's actually part fo the reason why YouTube in its original and purist sense failed, because people weren't using it for the purpose it was created for: to showcase original content from people. And ever since Google bought YT, things have gotten steadily and steadily worse in recent years: unless you're willing to put money into Google's pockets, you're going to virtually be ignored on YT, because YT doesn't cater to the "You" that makes it YouTube, they cater to the partner channels, the people who put money in their pockets, and in turn, GoogleTube turns around and promotes the heck out of these partner channels, while continuously sweeping the smaller channels under the rug. Again, speaking from experience, the more and more Google has screwed up YT, my viewership and audience kept taking a serious dive because I was going unnoticed; in the older days, I'd get anywhere from upwards of 100 views and maybe 10 or so comments within the first 24 hours of uploading a new entry of Steve D'Monster's series... but with the last two seasons, I was lucky to even get close to 20 views and maybe three generic comments within the first week of uploading a new entry... and that really hurts, because they improved greatly within the last two years, what with better editing equipment and such... and now that I've made the switch to Adobe Premiere and learned all the ins and outs of it, stuff would probably turn out even better, but there's really no one out there even watching.

The biggest pro is creative freedom, that's for sure, but other than that...

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I think YouTube is certainly not without its problems and Google has made changes in recent years that are not for the better, but I also think you're making a lot of broad generalizations that just aren't supported by the evidence.

It's simply not true that there is no room for originality on YouTube. Lots of original things thrive on YouTube and not all of them are YouTube Partners (anyone can be a YouTube partner, it's almost meaningless to be a partner these days) or part of a MCN (multichannel network).

Big large celebrities with mainstream media exposure have tried to do things on YouTube (and elsewhere on the web) and failed. So it's not about being famous either. In fact, it's average, unfamous people that tend to thrive on YouTube.

One mistake that I see a lot of puppet shows on YouTube making (I am not directing this at you D'Snowth, just making more of a general comment) is that they're using YouTube as a one way medium like TV, when it's actually a two way, interactive medium. YouTube has a great guide called The YouTube Creator's playbook that I mentioned earlier in the thread and I strongly suspect that most puppet series creators have either not read it, or don't bother to follow much of its advice.

YouTube actually really wants creators to succeed. It's in their financial interest for you to get a lot of viewers and keep people on the site because that's how they make money. For example, if you have 10,000 subscribers, they'll even give you free access to the professional YouTube production studios in New York and L.A. Free studio space? That's crazy. If I was in L.A. I'd work my butt off for a year or so to get to 10,000 subs just to be able to take advantage of that.

YouTube is a business and just like if you were on TV or making movies in Hollywood, you have to learn how the system works and use it to your advantage. YouTube is a major media outlet as powerful as television. It's very crowded and there is a lot of competition for viewers. One reason videos have a harder time finding an audience is because there is more content uploaded than ever before. You have to be insanely great, you have to stand out and you have to work extremely hard.

The sad truth is that not everything good on YouTube succeeds, just like lots of good TV shows don't find a large enough audience despite lots of time, money and promotion. If a TV series that's the work of dozens of people and the beneficiary of millions of dollars in production money can fail, it shouldn't be surprising that something low budget, independent and made by a small team can fail too.

For anyone who is having a hard time attracting viewers, how many hours per week do you invest in promoting your channel? How many blogs and podcasts do you reach out to per week? How many other YouTubers do you collaborate with to cross-promote?

Study Glove and Boots, who have been very successful at this. Their videos are often picked up by really popular sites like Reddit, Laughing Squid, etc. They produce content tailored to those audiences and they are a big part of why they have millions and millions of views. With their videos, or something like Potter Puppet Pals there is a very specific target audience. With most puppet shows - even ones I watch and like - I don't understand who the audience is and I'm not entirely sure the creators do either.