As I type this the 6th and final episode of this run of episodes of Peculiar is uploading to the network.
That is a huge milestone. So I thought I’d take stock of a few things for a moment. Some of these may seem negative, but i’m not meaning it that war. Lying to ourselves about what we are doing is dumb. I’m trying to do an honest assessment about out current situation. There are some very strong positives.
Accomplishment. A group of volunteers who had never done it before, created a television series on an extremely thin budget. And we did it in a very short amount of time. Seriously, when I talk to people who know how to do TV, they are flabbergasted that we made this work. Production and acting quality, every episode is better than the last.
Broadcast. The show is broadcast on The Walk TV (formerly Legacy TV), which has 234 affiliates and reaches a possible 46 million homes. They have agreed to re run the episodes until we tell them to stop or deliver more. The network doesn’t subscribe to the ratings information, but I know that no show will ever actually be watched by all 46 million homes, so let me try to guess-timate how many people are watching..
Top rated shows for the past few years (American Idol and Sunday Night Football) are in the 13-17% range for viewers. Meaning that 15,067,000+ households out of 115,000,000+ (13%) were watching NFL on NBC Sunday nights at 9:00 PM during 2011. That’s a lot. We are not even in the same ballpark, and not just because our possible households isn’t anywhere near 115,000,000. But, with 46,000,000 possible homes, someone was watching.
Let’s say that one half of one percent of those homes tuned in. That’s 230,000 viewers per week. Even at one tenth of one percent the viewership would be 46,000. These are total guesses. I think they are reasonable, but they are guesses. It could be much more, or much less.
That’s good news. For perspective, large churches spend anywhere in the range of $100,000-300,000 in large markets for local broadcast time and get less viewers each week. I once started a TV ministry is a mid level market. We spent a little under $40,000 a year and hoped we are getting 20,000 viewers.
I believe that we can do a few things, and put the show on more networks and stations, and it will be seen by even more people.
Website. When the show airs, I can see a small jump in website traffic. That means that people watching took the time to drag out their computer and type in the website address. I’m told the 10-20 new visits when it airs is pretty normal for this network. Not a huge amount of traffic.
The current theme was great when we had one video to promote, but it doesn’t allow me to show enough content on the front page. I like the design, but an update should be done soon. I’m leaning toward the Standard Theme, which also allows sponsors on the page.
Youtube views. The pilot, in it’s various forms has been seen about 2000 times since last May. Subsequent episodes have been seen a hundred to a couple hundred times.
To put this in perspective. 70% of Youtube views are seen less than 100 times. 80% are seen less than 500 times. 90% are seen less than 1500 times. Only 2% are seen over 100,000 times.
Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine. According to Youtube, 800 million users visit each day. 72 hours of video is uploaded every minute. (let that sink in…) So being in the top 30% of that is still being in a massive sea of content. By massive, I mean a grain of sand in the bottom of an ocean. I’m doing some new things to improve SEO for the channel, but there is a lot left to be done.
The great thing about the online video trend is that there are no gatekeepers to stop you. The bad thing is that there is nothing to stop anyone, and you have to rise above the noise to be seen. That’s where social media comes in.
Social Media. We’ve about doubled the Facebook.com/peculiarshow fans since the pilot was released in May. Part of that is due to a couple small advertising campaigns. Currently, 417 people “like” us on Facebook. I expect we will be at 500 fans by the end of the year.
Twitter and Instagram have accounts, and I have a Pinterest board for the show. But I’m not doing much with those.
Money. It costs to create a TV series. Someone asked me today how I made money off the show. The answer is, I don’t. At least not yet. I spend money on the show.
We are a part of Christianima.com, a Youtube network. Among other things, this helps with the split on monetization of views. So we earned a whopping $4 over the last few months… In order to make decent money on Youtube you have to be in the top 1% of videos.
I joined cinevee.com and uploaded 2 episodes, where people can pay to download their own copies. We get 70% of the revenue. Or would. We have sold none of those. Obviously, if you can watch for free, why pay? The only reason is to help us raise money to make more episodes. I was told that if I would remove the full episodes from Youtube I would sell more. True, I’m sure we would sell a few. But we would lose dozens more viewers who wouldn’t buy the episodes.
We raised and spent $3600 for production of all 6 episodes (that number still amazes me. Should have cost closer to $90,000.). I sold one ad spot, and got a little more donated. We’ve got a few hundred in the bank. (emphasis on “few”)
We have not captioned the show yet because the network is exempt (for now) and we haven’t had to spend that cash. But to expand the broadcast presence, we need to do it, and we need it for any sort of DVD distribution. Cost: $1,590.00 for 6 episodes. This is te biggest priority, because we cannot expand the broadcast, and get the show out to more people until we have the captioning done. We cannot create a complete master of DVD until this is done. I need to raise about $900, soon..
If we create a DVD, and have to front the cost ourselves… That’s about $600 for 1000 replicated DVDs (not the burned kind, the pressed kind, like what you buy from a store) without packaging. 300 with packaging runs about $800. Plus shipping. And no guaranteed distribution. I’ve got some contacts here.
Perspective. Making a TV show is hard work. Not just the pre production, production, and post work, but the marketing and distribution as well. For most of the world, the only time they could have heard of the show is in the last 5 weeks. It takes time to build an audience, especially with almost no budget for advertising. It would be nice if it would just magically happen, but in reality it takes hard work, money, or time. And since we only have 2 of those…
Positives. We owe nothing. Thousands of people enjoy the show each week. We have a cast and crew that is eager to do more. We have a lot of gear and locations for free.
Negatives. We cannot pull off another production schedule like last September. I don’t want to ask everyone to do this for free, again. I need to make enough money to survive.
Desire. I want to make 4-7 more episodes this Spring. I want to see what happens with the characters. I want to figure out how to make a living creating Christian TV that doesn’t rely on the old model of viewer/donor funding. I want to reach people under age 50 with video and programming that shows them a biblical worldview. I want the Holy Spirit to draw people to Christ through the shows I produce.
Now, to make that happen.
The guys from over at Video Game High School posted up exactly what it cost to do their 1st season of their hit web series.
Peculiar 