Want to be a filmmaker? Maybe you should start a web series…

Everyone knows that breaking into the film world is tough, if not nearly impossible. The cost of creating a film is enormous, and the likelihood of making a profit on your first feature is extremely small. But over the past few months, I’ve realized there is a better way. That way is to create a web series…

Think about it. No trying to convince a big studio to finance you, only to subsequently destroy your vision. No shifty distributors to deal with. Just grab a DV camera, find some actors, buy lots of pizza, and start filming.

But what about the fame, the money, and the admiration? Well, I don’t know about the fame (unless you consider the numa numa guy to be famous), but lets talk about the money.

Four ways to make money with a web series
Is it possible to make money with a web series? For the longest time it was my intuition that it wasn’t. Boy was I wrong. In fact, I wonder if its possible not to make money with a web series. Think of these various streams of income:

• CPM Advertising - Video sites like Revver and Metacafe offer you money based on the number of views you recieve. And just recently, YouTube even announced it would expand its Partner Program to include even more users, and thus you could even make money on YouTube. Each site has its own policies, but fortunately most of them are non-exclusive. So you can actually upload your video to all of them.
• DVDs - Just like a film, you can easily sell DVDs of the whole series. In fact, if you provide enough content you can probably charge even more than a standard film.
• Merchandising - Develop interesting characters, catch phrases, or plot elements and you can turn that into all sorts of merchandise including T-shirts. The beauty of a web series is that it provides a unique “in the know” feel to your fans, and thus having T-shirts with your characters on it is more appealing than a very small indie film. It wouldn’t even surprise me if you’d sell more T-shirts than DVDs
• Website Advertising - In addition to the advertising embedded directly in your videos, you could also put advertising on your website. This could be CPC advertising (you get paid for each click, like google Adsense), CPM (you get paid for every 1000 views), or affiliates (you get paid when someone buys something through your link). If you put advertising on a website for an indie film, most people would be turned off by it. For a series where they are viewing content for free, people pretty much expect advertising to be present.

So you can certainly make money, but how much? Well, from my research I’ve found that $5/CPM is pretty much the low side of video advertising, in fact Metacafe pays that rate. That means for every 1000 views, you get $5. They may not seem like much, but consider the fact that many web videos get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

I have a ton of new posts coming up that could help you create you own web series, so make sure to subscribe below either through email or RSS…(if your into that sort of thing.)

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