We asked the experts: How do you do YouTube?
Everyone uses YouTube, but how exactly do people discover new videos? We asked both web video professionals like Amy Pham and Zadi Diaz as well as your average 12 year old girl to find out.
Podcast: How to write a web TV series
Web series vet and author of the book Scriptwriting 2.0, Yuri Baranovsky talks about what it takes to write an online show.
What happens if your web series doesn’t hit it big?
For Solo creator Jonathan Nail, producing his own web series was an opportunity to create a showcase for his acting. But after two years of hard work and thousands of dollars, he found that the rewards of independent production are not universal.
Yahoo: Audience First, Then Comes the Show
Yahoo (s YHOO) has found religion when it comes to web shows, or so it tells The New York Times, and is now opting to find existing audiences and build shows around them, rather than the other way around.
The latest web series from the Internet portal is Spotlight to Nightlight, a show devoted to news and information about celebrity moms. Spotlight is hosted by former Miss USA Ali Landry and provides news and information topics such as wacky baby names and the high price of nannies ($120,000 a year! Stars, they’re just like us!). Moms have proven their online video worth in the past for web shows like In the Motherhood, which started on MSN and will launch on ABC this month as a new sitcom.
Spotlight fits in with other web shows that Yahoo has launched over the past year such as Primetime in No Time and Tech Ticker. It’s low-budget, non-fiction programming that features a host either recapping news or interviewing someone. What’s a little surprising is how much play the NYT is giving this tactic, as it’s the same as just about every other new media studio. Revision3, Deca and Next New Networks all build shows around existing targeted communities.
How Much Can a Web Host Make?
Non-fiction shows are a popular format for web series; pretty much all you need to get one off the ground is a camera, a green screen and a host to recap the news, make jokes and offer an opinion. And perhaps you’ve watched web hosts and thought to yourself, “Hey, I could do that!” Maybe you could — but could you make a living doing it?
As the number of non-fiction web shows (and their hosts) continues to multiply, the question of remuneration will only become more important. With that in mind, I contacted a number of new media companies (all of whom asked to remain anonymous) to see what they paid their “talent.” As you can imagine, the answers were pretty diverse, but following are some ballpark figures for what a web host can make: