tv Jamal Edwards, founder of SBTV, is dead.
- Thread starter Aspiring Mogul
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Your looking at about 10 grand for every 2 million views on a video, so you're not getting paid anything close to broadcast rates, but the barrier for entry is vastly lower (obviously) and the built in audience is the largest in human history.
A lot of succeeding on YouTube boils down to an understanding how their promotional algorithm works. If people watch your videos to the end, and especially if people watch multiple videos from your channel in a chain, YouTube begins automatically recommending your channel to others. This is why we designed our project around videos that drive viewers to watch chains of interconnected videos, with cliffhangers that resolve in the next video.
A lot of youtubers are successful by simply slipstreaming on widely advertised IP. Just add a standard issue bait phrase to a property that's already spending hundreds of millions on name recognition, and you can effectively monetize doing nothing. "Why Avengers Endgame is a TRAGIC DISASTER"
A lot of succeeding on YouTube boils down to an understanding how their promotional algorithm works. If people watch your videos to the end, and especially if people watch multiple videos from your channel in a chain, YouTube begins automatically recommending your channel to others. This is why we designed our project around videos that drive viewers to watch chains of interconnected videos, with cliffhangers that resolve in the next video.
A lot of youtubers are successful by simply slipstreaming on widely advertised IP. Just add a standard issue bait phrase to a property that's already spending hundreds of millions on name recognition, and you can effectively monetize doing nothing. "Why Avengers Endgame is a TRAGIC DISASTER"
@Nate North, thanks for your input. I presume broadcast rates refer to TV and streaming. What are those rates?
it's not a particular number, but rather an ROI ratio. They don't exactly publish the numbers, but you can deduce pretty well from the following knowledge.
1. The Hollywood model is to place 10 bets and win big on one or two of them. Strong shows carry the weak shows, buying them the time to experiment and gauge audience response on each batch of untested properties.
2. This means that some shows need to make back several times their budget back, and some shows need to be "hits" a hit can be a big earner, or a reliable workhorse like Law and Order.
3. A flagship show costs about 8 million per episode to produce. These days, we've seen that go up to 20. I would imagine that a 15 million dollar gross on a 8 million dollar episode would be considered a good return. A very successful YouTube show might make 30-40k per episode. This is affected by length, but not consistently, with the best ROI at about 10 minutes for zero production cost fare. Obviously it's different if you have production value attached.
4. The general rule of thumb for TV is that you make about 1 dollar per viewer. On YouTube it's a few dollars per thousand on average. Numbers vary a bit.
5. Most shows loose money or break even. It's nearly unheard of for even the most experienced companies in the world to produce a large percentage of hits. Disney, Marvel, Pixar, had a long winning streak, but have on occasion gotten overconfident, and lost a quarter billion dollars here and there. Carlco, who had a huge hit with Terminator 2, went down like the Titanic when they made "Cutthroat Island".
So you can get rich on Youtube if you're smart or lucky, but if you get into the television system you can get paid somewhere around 10x as much for the same work with the same results. The big issue is that the cost for cold entry into the Hollywood system would bankrupt a single millionaire, whereas you can film and deploy a youtube episode on whatever budget that's right for your ROI formula to work. Make 25k episodes that generate 75k, that's fine. Make a 100k video that makes 185k back, great. Kurzegart makes several million a year and spends less than a million. The big issue most people have getting youtube shows off the ground is that they have no knowledge of marketing, and spend 100% of their budget on the show. The rule of thumb is that about 40-50% of the budget goes to marketing.
Bottom line, the best youtube shows are getting paid about 12% of what their television equals get paid.
1. The Hollywood model is to place 10 bets and win big on one or two of them. Strong shows carry the weak shows, buying them the time to experiment and gauge audience response on each batch of untested properties.
2. This means that some shows need to make back several times their budget back, and some shows need to be "hits" a hit can be a big earner, or a reliable workhorse like Law and Order.
3. A flagship show costs about 8 million per episode to produce. These days, we've seen that go up to 20. I would imagine that a 15 million dollar gross on a 8 million dollar episode would be considered a good return. A very successful YouTube show might make 30-40k per episode. This is affected by length, but not consistently, with the best ROI at about 10 minutes for zero production cost fare. Obviously it's different if you have production value attached.
4. The general rule of thumb for TV is that you make about 1 dollar per viewer. On YouTube it's a few dollars per thousand on average. Numbers vary a bit.
5. Most shows loose money or break even. It's nearly unheard of for even the most experienced companies in the world to produce a large percentage of hits. Disney, Marvel, Pixar, had a long winning streak, but have on occasion gotten overconfident, and lost a quarter billion dollars here and there. Carlco, who had a huge hit with Terminator 2, went down like the Titanic when they made "Cutthroat Island".
So you can get rich on Youtube if you're smart or lucky, but if you get into the television system you can get paid somewhere around 10x as much for the same work with the same results. The big issue is that the cost for cold entry into the Hollywood system would bankrupt a single millionaire, whereas you can film and deploy a youtube episode on whatever budget that's right for your ROI formula to work. Make 25k episodes that generate 75k, that's fine. Make a 100k video that makes 185k back, great. Kurzegart makes several million a year and spends less than a million. The big issue most people have getting youtube shows off the ground is that they have no knowledge of marketing, and spend 100% of their budget on the show. The rule of thumb is that about 40-50% of the budget goes to marketing.
Bottom line, the best youtube shows are getting paid about 12% of what their television equals get paid.
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@Nate North, thanks again.
So a Youtube series may be the way to start, for me. When I researched youtube, a few years ago, the average length of an episode that was not a documentary was about 5 - 7 minutes, though that may have changed.
I should also see if there are any conferences relating to web series - I have been to the AFM several times, but I may need to attend the equivalent for youtube festivals.
So a Youtube series may be the way to start, for me. When I researched youtube, a few years ago, the average length of an episode that was not a documentary was about 5 - 7 minutes, though that may have changed.
I should also see if there are any conferences relating to web series - I have been to the AFM several times, but I may need to attend the equivalent for youtube festivals.
I can't tell you whether or not that would be beneficial. You'd likely learn something about the nuts and bolts of the whole process. To encapsulate it in very short form though, YouTube is about impulse reactions to thumbnails, and then after that, it's about engagement. It's a gonzo market though, which makes the learning curve both very flat and very steep simultaneously, depending on which angle you perceive it from.
Take a simple video type like people with guitars playing covers. I've watched virtuoso players study theory, attend conventions, escalate technique, rebrand channels, and the like for a decade, until they are obsessively dialing in every metric to perfection. Then a very attractive girl picks up a guitar and plays "smoke on the water", posts a thumbnail that's just a picture of her face. That video gets 400x the hits that the guys entire channel. So it can be a very shallow and simple medium at times, and on some levels, quite unrewarding for people trying to engineer success.
Simple interest baiting is effective, but quickly backfires, though often not soon enough to counteract the market destabilization it creates. So National Geographic flies a team of top cinematographers to Zimbabwe and hacks through the jungle with expensive night vision camera equipment to make a well written documentary about a rare breed of tree snakes that jump from limb to limb in the middle of the night stalking prey. It costs 1 million dollars. It gets 3 million hits and looses money. Then a complete idiot makes a zero dollar video in their room. It has a stolen web photo of an albino rat, photoshopped so that it's eyes glow. The caption reads "Dead After one Bite: The new rat species that may kill every person in America by 2044" That video gets 22 million views. Once people watch the video, they realize (or in some cases they don't) that there are no such thing as killer rats with glowing eyes, and that the world is not about to end, but by that time, the video creator has already made more money than Nat Geo, and diluted the audience enough to have a financial impact on the real filmmakers. Maybe people don't watch a second video by that creator, but the damage is already done, with the unethical low grade filmmaker taking home 7x the revenue of their legitimate counterpart. It's kind of a mess.
More advanced and custom tailored approaches are possible, but rely on funding, which can be hard to come by in such an exploitation prone market as YouTube. This often has the effect of reducing the advice you get to LCD fare involving the social media marketing strategies you can use to propagate banal content such as "I like this brand of makeup" or "Here's the best kind of camouflage jacket for hunting" rather than actually focusing on better content, or better business models. I'm just saying, I wouldn't be too shocked if you went to those conventions and just found hundreds of marketing clones explaining the same one size fits all approach to saturation bombing social media platforms. "Your channel, how to heat up a can of soup, can benefit from at least 30 targeted Instagram posts per day" "encourage your viewers to comment on whether they would eat the soup, that drives up your engagement metric" "Did you know that affiliate marketing (product placement with links) can boost your YouTube earnings by 300%" and so on. All this type of advice is available for free on the web, so you might consider availing yourself of that resource as well. You can learn about YouTube marketing and revenue streams, from YouTube videos.
If you're interested in doing something like we were discussing earlier, namely creating sci fi content and monetizing it, I think you might be disappointed by what you'd find amongst the YouTube promotion industry people. Intelligence, ambition, skill, these are relatively rare in comparison to cooking shows, so they are going to be catering to the larger market, and that advice will only be semi applicable to a more sophisticated approach such as utilizing YouTube as a direct sales channel for a scripted fiction show.
Sorry that went on a bit long, I'm just warning you about what you might encounter. People trying to make legitimate shows on YouTube still represent a tiny minority, and I suspect most conventions will be geared towards influencers, not so much a business model as a group of attractive young people hawking energy drinks by making low grade content about generic activities such as playing video games, or applying makeup.
Here's a sample of a YouTube convention. You can't become the smartest person in the room by copy pasting from the lowest common denominator.
Take a simple video type like people with guitars playing covers. I've watched virtuoso players study theory, attend conventions, escalate technique, rebrand channels, and the like for a decade, until they are obsessively dialing in every metric to perfection. Then a very attractive girl picks up a guitar and plays "smoke on the water", posts a thumbnail that's just a picture of her face. That video gets 400x the hits that the guys entire channel. So it can be a very shallow and simple medium at times, and on some levels, quite unrewarding for people trying to engineer success.
Simple interest baiting is effective, but quickly backfires, though often not soon enough to counteract the market destabilization it creates. So National Geographic flies a team of top cinematographers to Zimbabwe and hacks through the jungle with expensive night vision camera equipment to make a well written documentary about a rare breed of tree snakes that jump from limb to limb in the middle of the night stalking prey. It costs 1 million dollars. It gets 3 million hits and looses money. Then a complete idiot makes a zero dollar video in their room. It has a stolen web photo of an albino rat, photoshopped so that it's eyes glow. The caption reads "Dead After one Bite: The new rat species that may kill every person in America by 2044" That video gets 22 million views. Once people watch the video, they realize (or in some cases they don't) that there are no such thing as killer rats with glowing eyes, and that the world is not about to end, but by that time, the video creator has already made more money than Nat Geo, and diluted the audience enough to have a financial impact on the real filmmakers. Maybe people don't watch a second video by that creator, but the damage is already done, with the unethical low grade filmmaker taking home 7x the revenue of their legitimate counterpart. It's kind of a mess.
More advanced and custom tailored approaches are possible, but rely on funding, which can be hard to come by in such an exploitation prone market as YouTube. This often has the effect of reducing the advice you get to LCD fare involving the social media marketing strategies you can use to propagate banal content such as "I like this brand of makeup" or "Here's the best kind of camouflage jacket for hunting" rather than actually focusing on better content, or better business models. I'm just saying, I wouldn't be too shocked if you went to those conventions and just found hundreds of marketing clones explaining the same one size fits all approach to saturation bombing social media platforms. "Your channel, how to heat up a can of soup, can benefit from at least 30 targeted Instagram posts per day" "encourage your viewers to comment on whether they would eat the soup, that drives up your engagement metric" "Did you know that affiliate marketing (product placement with links) can boost your YouTube earnings by 300%" and so on. All this type of advice is available for free on the web, so you might consider availing yourself of that resource as well. You can learn about YouTube marketing and revenue streams, from YouTube videos.
If you're interested in doing something like we were discussing earlier, namely creating sci fi content and monetizing it, I think you might be disappointed by what you'd find amongst the YouTube promotion industry people. Intelligence, ambition, skill, these are relatively rare in comparison to cooking shows, so they are going to be catering to the larger market, and that advice will only be semi applicable to a more sophisticated approach such as utilizing YouTube as a direct sales channel for a scripted fiction show.
Sorry that went on a bit long, I'm just warning you about what you might encounter. People trying to make legitimate shows on YouTube still represent a tiny minority, and I suspect most conventions will be geared towards influencers, not so much a business model as a group of attractive young people hawking energy drinks by making low grade content about generic activities such as playing video games, or applying makeup.
Here's a sample of a YouTube convention. You can't become the smartest person in the room by copy pasting from the lowest common denominator.
For me, it's all or nothing - either I become a mogul, or I don't. With that in mind, I am thinking of starting a youtube series, on low budget, to build an audience and use that as a basis to pitch. Along with that, I can self publish those stories, perhaps even a self-published comic-book series, again to build that audience and pitch.
IMO that is destined to fail. Audiences don't respond to narrative content on youtube.
Remember when youtube would make it's own original series? They stopped all that. It didn't work.
Not even the *official* youtube series with famous hollywood director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow) could capture peoples attention.
Season 1 was one of the best new shows I'd seen in years but audiences just didn't show up for it. because it was on youtube.
YouTube will stop making most original shows
YouTube will only fund the Black Voices and YouTube Kids Funds
www.theverge.com
TLDR all they do now is kids stuff and "black voices"
What is youtube great for? Well you never have to read a user manual again.
Anything you want to know how to do.. you can just look it up! Or cell footage from live events. stuff like that, it's great.
What people don't use it for -- watching original programming.
Just be normal and take a normal route - make a pilot, pitch it to a network/netflix
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most people just make a series pilot episode and then pitch that.
On youtube or as a movie? I know of back-door pilots.
How To Create A TV Show
How do you create a TV show? It's a black box, even to Hollywood insiders. We’ll guide you through the six steps to start your own show.
christopherming.com
you're looking at 5 or 10 million dollars to film a pilot, depending a lot on what you're doing and how you're doing it. For Sci Fi, it's on the expensive end, in comparison to shows about people that live in the woods, or shows about people talking in their house. Spend that 10 million and make a mistake, and it's gone. Making a Superman pilot for example would add a number of barriers to success. It's not that it's never been done before, but I can say this, when it comes to established IP, studios prefer ideas that they come up with, rather than outside ideas.
An excellent example is the huge number of unsolicited Star Trek pilots. Every year people make pilots for new Star Trek shows, and none of them have ever been picked up. There must be a hundred now. People drop 2-3 million on a pilot, sometimes much less, and then the network politely or otherwise tells them no, and then the next year the studio announces it's own internal pilot, which is accepted.
While Sean is essentially correct about youtube and narrative fiction, there are some exceptions, and the main issue is that the revenue streams just don't cover the budget for a conventionally funded show. There are a lot of different formulas for shows though, and what doesn't work is following a template created by people with unlimited funding, and then trying to deploy that somewhere with a decimated economy. It's a whole new system, with totally different dynamics, on both sides, and a new, custom tailored approach is required to succeed. Trying to design a show for youtube the same way we made Mannix in the 70s is about as smart as trying to drive a car on the ocean.
The only reason I think my project can succeed is because the overhead is scaled down across the entire system, corresponding to the income that it's likely to produce. It's also divided into smaller segments, each of which generates revenue independently. If you make a 10 million dollar pilot on youtube, you will definitely loose money. Also keep in mind, even the established formula is not to make a show and then collect twice the money. The way it's done is similar to developing a stock portfolio. You make 10 of these pilots, and 2 of them work, eventually covering the losses from the others. Statistically speaking, it is a terrible business plan for an individual to make a single expensive show and hope it works. Diversification of investment breeds stability.
For someone like yourself, Youtube, while offering a lesser market, can be advantageous in that you can make multiple shows at custom budgets. ROI is the main factor, and you can set up to have 10 youtube channels cross promoting each other for the same price as a network pilot.
There are two other primary options, one is to target lesser networks, which don't require nearly as much investment for a pilot. You could probably pitch a pilot to the Sci Fi channel for a few hundred thousand. Food network, even less. Unfortunately, Jackass is probably the most successful indie pitch ever, with a pilot cost of almost nothing, and a financial return in the tens of millions. Personally, I wouldn't go out of my way to establish that particular legacy. The second would be to do a reality tv pilot, which is similarly cheap and might help bankroll other shows, even though making a reality TV show is nothing to be proud of.
Selling a pilot to a network can be a huge win, but it also comes bundled with a lot of negatives, such as loosing control of your own show, and only receiving a small fraction of it's revenue. In addition, and this is why I don't want to deploy my project that way, they can cancel your show for any reason at any time, and essentially fire your entire crew on a whim. Often they have good reasons, but just as often they will destroy all your work based on one executive's opinion. Family Guy for example is one of the most successful shows in network history, right up there with Gunsmoke and Law and Order. Fox tried to cancel the show and fire everyone twice, before the show even had time to find it's footing. So the point is that they can create a failure out of a success, and then hand you the bill.
I'll show you a Youtube channel that has been fairly successful at narrative sci fi monetization, and watching some of this would also give you some insight into what you yourself can realistically achieve on a smaller budget. You can see that this channel has about 3 million subscribers, they are putting out 3 episodes a week, from a number of teams. So this is a relevant picture of how you could establish a small sci fi business that generated a million a year in revenue (estimated).
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?
You need to build a following on YT for YT to work. You need to start with something you produce free or cheap and you need fans. THEN you start a kickstarter to raise funds for your sitcom pilot and you tell your fans. It being YT you will need a video and maybe even a teaser trailer at that point. You don't just pop onto YT with a serious well-funded pilot and no fans.
With no intention of being judgmental.......from an outsider looking in, but also from someone who has prepared tax returns for businesses for over 40 years having both profits and losses, this business idea seems like it has a high risk of failure........not only financially, but also with your time, which usually is not calculated in a failed business venture.....If you have the money and the time to spare and it's one of your life's goals?......then I can truly understand the attempt.....I wish you success.
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@Bean Counter, this is a high-risk business, and it's like playing the lottery - the overwhelming odds are that the player will lose everything, but there's always the chance of acquiring fame and fortune for the price of an expensive car. Players also play the game to indulge in their creative impulses.
With that in mind, I'm not going to risk everything to play the lottery, so I may want to use Youtube, which costs less and so is less risky. And, since no one knows anything, it would not matter, in terms of probability theory, if I spend $10,000 or $10 million on a film, because the chances are the same.
With that in mind, I'm not going to risk everything to play the lottery, so I may want to use Youtube, which costs less and so is less risky. And, since no one knows anything, it would not matter, in terms of probability theory, if I spend $10,000 or $10 million on a film, because the chances are the same.
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.
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