Thanks, Dave. That was a totally interesting and inspiring read. When people are asked to share their story, generally everyone assumes that it is a success story. In my case, I am getting a lot of viewers for my web series and I make some money out of it. However, I do not consider the number of views or amount of money as a quality parameter. I know I have to improve a lot in different areas. My videos still got the views because I think, web series world is different. I wanted to make zero budget web series with the help of my handycam and laptop. I started thinking about it during October 2009. I found that blip.tv is a good way to host a web series, distribute it, and make money out of it. There are other ways to do these things, but let me share my blip story as I have experienced only that. Unlike Youtube, blip.tv puts ads to any video episode you upload. However, they like only episodic contents and not unrelated videos. Revenue sharing is 50:50. That is, blip takes 50% share and gives the rest 50% share to the video creator. Revenue started appearing after the views reached the count of 800 or so. Blip considers one view from one IP address. That is, tricks like refreshing many times, won’t increase the number of views. Another fact is that the views from US gather more revenue. I am based in India and when my friends and fans located in India see my web series, it increases the view count but not much the revenue. As I wanted to do a zero budget web series, I wrote the script, did the direction, edited the videos, and even acted in all roles JI chose office politics as my subject. I titled my web series as Bose is always right. It is one of the earliest web series in India. Bose is a common name in India and is pronounced like the way we pronounce Boss. There is a boss whose name is Bose, an employee who does not have any name, an HR person whose name is Helmet and a driver whose name is Speed. The first episode premiered on November 1, 2009 at http://surag.blip.tv. To begin with, there were some views and less money. Though it told a big story, each episode too was independent as I dreamt one of them will become viral and will gather attention. My plan was to complete the first season with 20 episodes. I was not gathering any extraordinary views till 13th episode and I felt normal was boring to people. The web series did not have any good lighting or sound techniques. The characters like cab driver who ferry employees were familiar to Indian audience only. The official life of these characters, though exaggerated to some extent to get a humor touch, did not gather much international audience. I then made the mistake of catering to everyone. I introduced an extra terrestrial character and my insistence on zero budget meant the character had just a mask and a jacket to look extra terrestrial! I uploaded the 14th episode with this extraterrestrial character and the next day just checked the view statistics. To my surprise, in a single day, it crossed all the views I had for my last 13 episodes. I initially thought there was some mistake in the system. Then I searched for my web series in the search engines. Well, I found that my web series was seen by a lot of people because someone did not like it and tweeted about it. It was tweeted and retweeted by many people, it was blogged and reblogged by many others, and it was spread across the world through social network sites, mails, and so on. People were curious to know why the person communicating about my web series to them did not like it. Yes, it became viral though not the way I would have liked it. I got international views and more views meant more money. I understood the power of Web 2.0. I understood that online video was different. No one would send you the ticket of the movie they did not like. But everyone will send you the link of the web series they did not like and would want you to have a look at it. After some days the trend seemed to change. I got comments and mails across the world from people who started to like my web series. They did find some positives. They congratulated me as I was doing everything alone. They felt my contribution from India was needed as it was different from other web series from West. They felt my web series reflected some of the situations they encounter in their work place. As decided early, I did my season finale with 20th episode on March 8, 2010. It was a fascinating journey and I was very thrilled to accomplish something that I always wanted to. Yes, just because it got some views doesn’t mean that I should stop from improving. I will do a season 2 or do another web series and this time I will go out to shoot rather than confining most of the action to indoors. Yes, I will remember the advices that I gathered from the recent thread of discussion on “Shooting in Public”. J Cheers, Surag Ramachandran Bose is always right: http://surag.blip.tv
________________________________ From: David Jones <david.jo...@altium.com> To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thu, June 10, 2010 8:38:40 AM Subject: [videoblogging] My Story Ok, I'll lead by example as I normally do, here is my video blogging story: Hi, I'm Dave Jones from Sydney Australia. I started a niche electronics engineering video blog in April 2009. http://www.eevblog.com and http://www.youtube.com/user/EEVblog I wanted to differentiate myself from boring text blogs, and figured it would be fun to have a regular video blog about electronics. As far as I could tell no one else had ever attempted one, so I gave it a go with a crusty old 320x240 webcam in my study. No script, no idea, no name, I just did a talking head blog and reviewed a few products. I knew the result was crap, but I posted it on my personal Youtube channel and announced on an electronics Usenet group anyway figuring you have to start somewhere. I had some positive feedback and advice from the few dozen views I got, like ditch the study and film it in my lab. I also asked for name suggestions. The 2nd one was in the lab and was greeted with more positive feedback. I switched from the webcam to my old Canon MV700i PAL DV tape camcorder with internal mic. By the 3rd or 4th episode I had a basic Wordpress blog page with embedded Youtube videos on my personal website. Still no script, no idea, and no name. I could not come up with a better name, so it remained the Electronics Engineering Video Blog, or EEVblog for short. I would later figure out that name and branding can be quite important to get right up front! I was kind of lucky in this respect, "EEVblog" now works well for me as a brand. I also switched to a dedicated Youtube channel. It soon became clear that it was slowly gaining in popularity, and I experimented with various audio and video settings. I also realised that a lot of people were finding me via Youtube searches, and it was important to have a dedicated topic for each episode instead of the "mixed bag" of stuff I had in each blog. i.e. people didn't want to sit through 5 minutes of other stuff to get to the topic they found on the search. That was an important change I thought. I soon got complaints that I didn't have my own domain name, so I got eevblog.com and moved the Wordpress account over. At this point I had a name, a brand, a slogan ("An off-the-cuff video blog about electronics.."), and a silly photo people recognising the blog by. I came to realise how important sound was to a blog, so a I bought a cheap $50 2nd hand DV tape camcorder which had an external mic input and got a $30 shotgun mic. This got rid of the tape noise and improved the blog a lot, made it much more watchable. I was still shooting in 640x480 and experimenting with widescreen. I was using VideoStudio X2 edit software and was limited to the 10minute Youtube limit. Many of my blogs were in two parts because of this. Lots of heavy editing required to fit inside 10 minutes sometimes! I was not advertising the blog in any way but it seemed to just keep growing with people finding me by Google or Youtube searches. Somewhere along the line I added some Adsense text ads and they started to work like they had on my other web sites at the time. I also added a user BBS style forum and that has really taken off. Almost 1200 members, over 7000 posts and 600 topics. The EEVblog has really turned into a quite a decent user "community". By Blog #42 I switched to a Sanyo Xacti HD-1010 camcorder and started to shoot in HD as Youtube now supported HD content. This blog was a turning point because it went semi-viral with 40,000 hits in a day or two via Boing Boing, and then Youtube emailed me an offer to become a Partner. That took a month or so, and then I had ads on my Youtube videos, and no more 10 minute limitation. Editing HD was much slower than SD, but I persisted (and discussed this on this group) and it is now working pretty well, I edit directly on the 1280x720 MP4 files from the Xacti camera. I have since switched to VideoStudio X3 edit software and render in 1280x720 MPEG2 which I then convert to 1280x720 MP4 with Handbrake which is uploaded to Youtube. Somewhere along the line I got the PodPress plugin for Wordpress and started producing at first a 320x240 podcast version but then switched to a 480x272 16:9 widescreen version. I came to realise how important it was to get listed in iTunes and have a podcast version and an RSS feed (via Google Feedburner). About a 1/3rd of my audience now watch via the podcast version. The rest of my audience are split about 50/50 between Youtube subscribers and my Wordpess blog. I also do an MP3 version for my "drive time" blogs that many like to listen to instead of watching the video. I experimented with a live show and Ustream, and once I get over a few technical hurdles, that might be a regular fixture too. I had at least 70 people tune in to my first live chat session, not sure how many actually viewed and didn't participate. I decided to keep my focus on Youtube and only host there so as not to dilute my views and stats. And also I found the Youtube Adsense ads were working, so did not want to rock the boat by trying another embedded host like Blip.Tv. I do have videos on Blip.Tv, but no one finds those via searches, unlike Youtube. And it's been pretty much plain sailing and consistent growth since then. I still have no script or plan, it's still off-the-cuff, and it's still growing at a good rate. Almost 100 episodes now, 600,000 views on Youtube, and consistent growth. Probably around 5,000 regular viewers split over Youtube, Wordpress, and the Podcast, and 2000 subscribers on Youtube now. Unlike many video blogs with 10's or 100's of thousands of subscribers, I find almost all of my Youtube subscribers are regular viewers that watch almost every episode. Around 4000 views a day now on Wordpress, and about the same number on Youtube. Around 15 new Youtube subscribers a day now. Some of my stats: http://www.eevblog.com/images/stats/eevblogstats-YoutubeDailyViews.png http://www.eevblog.com/images/stats/eevblogstats-YoutubeSubscribers.png http://www.eevblog.com/images/stats/EEVblogStatsSummary-June.png http://www.eevblog.com/images/stats/EEVblogStatsDays-June.png http://www.eevblog.com/images/stats/EEVblogStatsWeeks-June.png http://www.eevblog.com/images/stats/EEVblogStatsMonths-June.png I'm currently #38 this month on Australian Youtube Partners, so I'm almost insignificant in terms of what views and money others are getting, but they have been around a lot longer than me and grew along with Youtube. Coming along late to Youtube I realise how hard/slow it can be to build up a regular audience now. But I found that if I just kept producing good searchable content, the growth starts to compound and become a bit self perpetuating. i.e. the more views you get and the more videos you have, the higher you get ranked on Youtube, and so it grows. I still haven't done any marketing, yet I'm getting well know in my industry and have partnered with half a dozen major companies, and am starting to get commercial video blog offers. I'm now making a decent return on the Youtube/Adsense ads, roughly split 50/50 between the text ads on the Wordpress site, and the overlayed ads on Youtube. I'm not allowed to say how much I make, but I've realised that revenue is pretty consistent with the numbers of views on average. So you can pretty much guarantee that more views = more money, just multiply the average numbers. As I've mentioned, if my current audience grew say 10 fold, I'd quite my job tomorrow. Even if it grew say 5 fold, I would also not have to work if I could have some other supplementary income (not hard). So I'm really ecstatic with the result so far with only 5000 or so viewers, and I can't image what the next few years will be like. Maybe one day I might be able to take it full time, that would be really neat! Still no real clue what I'm doing, but it seems to be working so I'm amazed at how far I've gotten in the last year and a bit. It's still a "minimal effort" affair, with as little production work put in as possible. I honestly thought I'd be lucky to get a hundred viewers who cared enough and would tolerate my overly enthusiastic no-bullshit non-scripted style. I'm still the only one doing a regular electronics engineering video blog/show, so I figure I have the market cornered, whatever that market happens to be! I'm sure there are many ways to improve and grow and I'm always looking for new ideas and ways to do things, without of course changing my seemingly winning formula too much. So that's my video blogging story so far, what's yours? Dave. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
