Thanks,
@Nate North. I know of the Dust channel, and I'm leaning towards Youtube. I think that it can also be a good way to build an audience and then pitch for funding to do a film or TV series. You mentioned custom budgets - what would a range be? I know the estimates would be all over, from $100 to $10 million, but can you please give me some ideas as to what I should be aiming for?
I'm not ignoring your question, I've just been extra busy for a few days, and I'm trying to think of a way to simplify the answer. The real answer to your question would be one that took a lot of time and effort. I'd need a clear picture of a result you'd be satisfied with, and then I'd need to basically create a spreadsheet backed by research.
The short version is, it's complicated. YouTube allows for a lot of different approaches. A big advantage is that there is a degree of scalability here. Free to create content has an obvious advantage, but I doubt from your descriptions that you would get much satisfaction from creating a bunch of disposable content. Making a narrative Sci Fi show at a quality level people would tune in to watch would not be feasible with conventional budgeting, and to circle back to what I was saying in a previous thread, it would really center around building an extremely cost effective production system.
I haven't got a lot of data to work with, so I'll create some parameters here to make this easier. Let's say you want to put out a sci fi series, live action with digital backdrop, as seen in many DUST videos. It's 10 minutes per episode, corresponding to the YouTube advertising revenue statistics timeframe. In a very well engineered set of circumstances, after extensive setup and optimization, you could probably start rolling these out for around a grand or two a minute ballpark, maybe less. It would take a while to get things running smoothly, and it would be more expensive at the outset. Marketing is a separate issue, and basically you need to bring your market to a boil, and then find the cheapest way to maintain that temperature.
So lets say 30 grand for a half hour episode. Getting that kind of budget to work reliably would be the result of a dialed in setup. If you wanted to jump in and pay as you go, I'm not sure there is a way to be profitable with that type of content in that market. So to clarify via fabricated example, you don't pay 30 grand an episode. You buy a plot of jungle, put 10 actors on contract, set up a remote power grid and a forward base camp, and that costs a million dollars. Then you film 50 episodes of Tarzan in 2 years, which cost relatively little in comparison to the setup cost, spend another 800k on ads for the shows, social media management, etc. At the end you make back 4 million or so on a 2.4 million dollar investment.
You don't build a new law office every time you have a new case. That cost gets amortized over time. This is what I was referring to earlier when I discussed building up infrastructure, reusable assets, human resources, etc. Some of the most cost effective shows of all time had a limited number of prebuilt sets, and all the episodes took place there. Gilligan's Island, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, all these shows had several main prebuilt sets, and a majority of screen time occurred in one configuration or another of these sets.
ballpark math here, of a test set
500-750k setup
15k per episode
2 seasons at 24 half episodes plus commercials for the show, 50 videos over 2 years
so with the advertising, that's 2.5 mil for 50 episodes.
This is still pretty expensive, because you'd need about 8 million viewers per episode average to be in the black.
That's my ballpark for producing one of the better narrative shows on YouTube, there's not a lot of sfx heavy narrative competition there yet because of the low revenues. I'd also point out that in this math I'm using the average quality of the DUST videos as a reference. Mostly just a few main actors per show. If you wanted 200 people dancing to a licensed song, all that math goes out the window. I think when YouTube produced their own shows, they were overly optimistic, and produced shows that were top heavy on the budget side. Ultimately, this would be a game of maximizing a very small budget. There are a lot of other variables not being discussed here as well. Despite it's length, I don't think this is a very good answer, but as I was saying, the real answer is the one you would arrive at after years of testing, tuning, and optimizing.
I agree with most of what IT said, except about making a show for free. It certainly makes sense from a lot of perspectives, I just don't think that you can accomplish your goal of creating viable sci fi programming that way.
To shed further light on the issue of YouTube's own narrative shows having problems, be aware that those are union shows, and these guys are spending 70 grand on lunch every day of production. 110 an hour for certified union electricians to tape down extension cords.
If it all went very well, it's quite possible that you would get picked up by a cable network eventually. By the time you had an audience of 10 million, 20 episodes, etc, you might actually get noticed by the right person at Netflix or CBS. At the end of that 2 year period in the example, your work would have been in front of more eyes than every film shown at every film festival in the world combined. I think that could be achieved with a lot less money than a standard pilot would cost. On the optimistic side, I've seen individual videos with as many views as all the crowds from every festival since the beginning of the artform combined.
Here's one. That's not 3 million views, look at the view count again, it's 3 billion views. I ran it through the calculator, and this one video has made approximately 13 million USD from ad revenue. That's far from typical, I'm just showing you the top end of the YT revenue spectrum.
Bottom line, I think you could have a real shot at achieving your goal with a few million in starting capitol, as long as you were unusually smart about it, and worked very hard at staying on top of the numbers over a substantial development period.