Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterMark In
Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Famous on YouTube
The Meth Minute web series features Frederator Studios' Dan Meth's Adobe Flash handy work. An "unpopular" episode might only get 300,000 hits on YouTube; popular ones break 1 million. Plans are in the works to create a DVD and a spin-off series of one or more characters from The Meth Minute.
Fifty million viewers can't be wrong, but could they make you money?
By Trevor Boyer
Miss Teen South Carolina 2007 is famous. Lauren Caitlin Upton's nervous answer to a standard beauty pageant question about education was such an improbable, glorious trainwreck that it has attracted more than 25 million views — and that's just from the most popular version of the NBC clip on YouTube. That's fame, Web 2.0 style.
Over the past few years — especially since the birth of YouTube — professionals have been looking at numbers like that and wondering how to capitalize on them. Indeed, an eclectic group of video professionals are making money, either directly or indirectly, by posting their clips to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Metacafe.
There's definitely money in hits. YouTube, for instance, pays through the Google AdSense model, and Metacafe uses its ad revenue and venture capital to fund a partner program. Once your qualifying video reaches 20,000 views, you get $100; then it's another $5 per thousand. So a million hits for a Metacafe partner is a cool $5 grand.
How do you go viral? Robert Ryang found out accidentally in the pre-YouTube era. Working at New York-based editorial house P.S. 260 during the summer of 2005, he entered an Association of Independent Creative Editors contest for assistant editors. The mission was to re-cut a movie trailer using only footage from the actual film in order to shoehorn the feature into a completely different genre. Ryang somehow transformed The Shining into a family comedy, using Peter Gabriel's “Solsbury Hill” to seal the deal (www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfout_rgPSA).
Ryang won the contest, and then he posted the clip, Shining, on his company's server to show a couple friends. A week and a few hundred thousand hits later, P.S. 260 was wondering why its network was running so slow. The Times (both New York and Los Angeles) came calling. Shining was officially viral.
For Ryang, viral fame has meant offers of freelance work and perhaps a faster track to promotion within his company. (He's now an editor with P.S. 260.) For someone with ambitions to edit full-length features one day, Web 2.0 has provided a boost.
He's also seen his The Shining remix copied and reposted — and canonized. “Internet People” is the first episode of the The Meth Minute, an animated web series that's winding up its run of 39 episodes. It's a goofy 3-minute song that wedges in a series of people and characters that have become Internet memes, illustrated in Adobe Flash by Dan Meth of Frederator Studios. And yes, Ryang's all-work-and-no-play Jack gets a name check.
Interviewing Meth, I realized I'd seen “Internet People” on some blog, somewhere, sometime in the not-too-distant past. It's about nine months old, and it has garnered about 3 million hits on YouTube alone. Meth, who has been obsessed with Flash since he downloaded a trial version in 2000, told me that my vague recollection was somewhat the point. “It's kinda what the video's about,” he says. “When you watch ‘Internet People,’ you're like, ‘Oh yeah, I've seen that one. And that one.’ There's no memory until you're reminded. Eight months ago is, like, totally ancient.”
Frederator hired Meth based on some of his pre-YouTube Flash work that made the rounds. Company namesake Fred Siebert, a former network exec at MTV, wanted him to pitch ideas for a web series. The result was The Meth Minute, an attention-deficit series of skits and songs animated in a hand-drawn style. Each of the 39 episodes have little connection to each other. Pop culture parody is often the subject, but the series is also a clearinghouse for original characters that Meth may or may not ever animate again.
That's the beauty of sites such as YouTube, he says: instant feedback from the audience. For The Meth Minute, a relatively unpopular episode might get only 300,000 hits YouTube; popular ones break 1 million. “There's, I'd love to say, a cult fanbase now,” Meth says. “People who know the catchphrases. If you bring back a character, they comment about that.” Where does this all lead for Frederator? Details are not ready for disclosure yet, but the plan is to release a DVD and spin off one or more characters into a new web series.
Traditional shooters and editors might be wondering if there's a viable way to make money without having to throw a bunch of jokey potential memes at a wall and hope they'll stick. Those professionals should check out the work of Kip Kay, a shooter/editor who for 25 years had been doing corporate and cable commercial work that never really satisfied his creative bug. A lifelong tinkerer, Kay noticed the explosion of video on the Web and went to work creating DIY instructional clips.
He noticed that one way to get attention was to show people creative ways to burn things. To date, Kay's most popular instructional video describes how to make a laser flashlight using the red laser from an old DVD burner and a Maglite (www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgJ0EpxjZBU). Kay's strategy is steady work. He shoots with his Sony HVR-V1U and edits in Adobe Premiere Pro. Kay posts to YouTube, Metacafe, and instructional video sites that pay, such as makezine.com and instructibles.com. He has 92 videos posted to Metacafe, and his hits there make him the site's top earner. (No privacy on the Web: Metacafe's paid Kay $106,423 to date, according to his profile page.) His videos include “How To: Spy Sunglasses,” “Illuminated Keyboard Hack,” and “Chill a Coke in 2 Minutes!”
“My videos are between 30 seconds and maybe 2 minutes long,” Kay says. “The Internet viewer doesn't have 8 minutes worth of concentration.” This short format poses a challenge for the step-by-step narration that Kay needs to accomplish. Some steps are covered only in voiceover; others pass over lightning-quick. But this is, of course, the Web, where a pause is only a mouse click away and a second viewing makes its producer another 5 cents.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.