How to Create a Sustainable Webseries
The Internet has seen a boom in alternative media opportunities during the better part of the Twenty First Century, enabling anyone with an opinion to impart, knowledge to share or a story to tell the ability to deliver their viewpoints to everyone in the world. Blogs give words meaning. Podcasts then give those same words a voice, while videoblogging can even provide them with a face. The options are endless.
It was within this context of endless opportunities that PodCamp Boston was born in 2006. Billed as an “unconference,” it enabled purveyors of new media to share ideas and experiences, as well as offered workshops to help both novices and professionals hone their skills. Since that initial inception, it has been held in cities world-wide, with Pittsburgh hosting its second during August 2007.
That event was organized by Justin Kownacki, who has been producing his own webseries, Something to Be Desired (STBD), since 2003. Consisting of ten-minute episodes, this online television-style sitcom follows the lives of a group of twentysomethings associated with a fictional Pittsburgh radio station.
“The show is about life after college,” Kownacki explained. “It’s about life after college specifically in Pittsburgh. So if you’re a Pittsburgher, you relate. If you graduated college, you relate. We hit you on two different levels.”
The various levels of new media production is something that Justin Kownacki is an expert on, as he demonstrated during his “How to Create a Sustainable Webseries” session at PodCamp Pittsburgh 2. Although he primarily talked about video, much of what he had to say applied to both text and audio as well.
“All social media, whether it’s journalism, whether it is a family blog, whatever it is, everything that’s been successful has been successful because you’re telling a story,” he remarked. “You don’t just get up on a soapbox and say ‘I think this,’ because it’s too easy for people to tune that out, to block that out, to agree or disagree based on one line of dialogue. What you really want to do is create a story, create an anecdote, create a parable, create something that draws people a little deeper into what it is you have to say.”
For Kownacki, the vehicle he chose to draw people in a little deeper was that of the webseries. Although this medium enables individuals to independently produce television shows without having to go through the Hollywood system or even live anywhere near Los Angeles, it is still relatively new and thus has its own inherent obstacles to overcome.
“What folks like myself are doing is creating sustainable media that is going to have a long shelf life, but it also requires the audience to invest time in it,” he explained. “The tricky thing is, audiences are used to getting media on TV, they’re used to radio shows being on at a specific time. What they’re not really used to is seeing something that requires the investment of their time every week. It’s because, by and large, web media really is text based. We’re only now branching away from the initial wave of text-based programming.”
To compensate for this, producers of a webseries need to be creative with how they make their content available. “It’s not enough to just have this show sitting here,” Justin Kownacki continued. “So Something to Be Desired is available on blip.tv, it’s available on iTunes. You have certain episodes we put on YouTube. We don’t put them all there because we don’t want to give away the story. We don’t want to have everything available so there’s no reason to come back to our site.”
Another device is to give viewers the ability to subscribe to the series via an RSS feed, which then allows them to automatically have episodes downloaded to a personal manager, like iTunes. “It’s the magazine subscription way,” Kownacki remarked. “You don’t want to go to the newsstand every day or every week to get that magazine. So you need to make it as available as possible so your subscribers, your readers, do not have to come back to you every week. You have to be able to give people as many different ways to watch you on the Internet as possible to make it fit into their schedule.”
All this innovation does not mean new media is all that different than the old, however. Many promotional and marketing techniques are similar to how network television operates. Take the case of Geek Riot, another Pittsburgh-based series, as an example. Created by Shawn Smith, it originally featured him alone discussing topics ranging from technology to comic books. Eventually he decided he needed more, and brought in Justine Ezarik, a.k.a. iJustine, to serve as a co-host.
“He realized he couldn’t do it all himself, he realized he had to have another point of view and what better thing to do than bring in an attractive geek who was live-casting,” Justin Kownacki said. “So Shawn tapped into that since he’s a guy. He wanted to bring in somebody who was not a guy, somebody who had a different point of view. By doing that they more than doubled their viewership.”
Geek Riot utilizes Talk Shoe, a web service that supports live podcasts and enables audience interaction. As it turns out, the time slot immediately preceding Shawn and iJustine was occupied by a popular tech show featuring journalist Leo Laporte, and just as network television shows get a bump in the ratings by following a popular series, the same held true for Geek Riot.
“It’s almost like the Nielsen ratings overflow,” commented Kownacki. “Suddenly they went from being a pretty decent show that some people had heard about to having this great audience that was sitting there when Leo’s show was done saying, ‘Oh, wow, what’s this one.’ It’s all about who you are and who you know. That hasn’t changed. That’s been Hollywood’s mandate for a hundred and twenty years.”
Justin Kownacki was likewise able to take advantage of iJustine’s popularity for Something to Be Desired. In April 2007, during a miniature PodCamp held in Pittsburgh dubbed BootCamp PGH, he cast both her and podsafe musician Matthew Ebel, who was in town for the event, in an episode of STBD, thus tapping into another Hollywood staple: the “guest star.”
“Justine mentioned it on her blog, Matthew mentioned it on his podcast and on his website, and our numbers for that episode went through the roof,” Kownacki said. “If you have a successful show and can bring in someone else who is successful in there own right, you’re now smashing your audience together with theirs and naturally there’s going to be an overlap and some stickiness, some adherence. A lot of the folks who came and watched this episode, who wouldn’t have seen it otherwise, stick around and go backwards online and watch more episodes of the show because they enjoy it. But had Justine or Matthew not been on it, they would never have known about it.”
Where a webseries does differ from network television, however, is that it is independently produced. It’s your own creation, on your “channel,” via the distribution vehicle of your choice. You control the content, as well as paying for the expense, which is “minimal” compared to the Big Boys. This gives you more flexibility in regards to every aspect of production.
“Because there’s no barrier to entry, if it’s not working for you after a few months and you really feel compelled to change, you can change instantly,” Kownacki remarked. “Nothing’s holding you back. We’re not a major production company where you now have to justify to a major boss how you invested thirty thousand dollars in every episode, it tanked, you’re never going to work in this town again. Thankfully, if something tanks and you want to try it all over again, it’s free. It’s anywhere from fifty dollars to two hundred dollars to produce (an episode of STBD). A lot of our production money is actually spent on web hosting costs. I’m not paying the cast; I love them dearly, but we’re not yet monetized to where we can make a living doing this.”
These webseries pioneers are instead doing what they do because they have the passion and persistence to create, just like the independent filmmakers of the early 1990s. Eventually the advent of Miramax studios and the Sundance Film Festival gave the Kevin Smiths and Quentin Tarantinos the ability to turn their passions into financial success, and the same will someday no doubt hold true for the Justin Kownackis of the world as well.
Anthony Letizia (October 1, 2007)
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