Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit
Part Four — Transforming Success Into Dollars (cont.)
YouTube Animation
Other items that you might also want to sell through a fulfillment service that would not normally be manufactured by Cafe Press or Zazzle would include figurines of your character, and toys or other novelties that relate in some way to your cartoon. You animators will at some point want to sell collections of your work on DVD.
YouTube is becoming a potential revenue source for animators. Keep in mind that people surfing the internet typically have short attention spans, so a piece of animation need not be more than 30 seconds to one minute. This can be thought of as the video equivalent of a daily newspaper comic strip. I completed my animation of Viagri doing her sexy walk, and Michael Caroff posted it for me on YouTube, and embedded the YouTube post on Viagri’s website. That way, each crosspromotes the other. When people go to Viagri’s website and see the animation, it counts as a view on YouTube, and the people who find Viagri’s animation on YouTube will see a link to see more of her on her free website. (The word “free” is important, since many websites of an erotic nature charge a membership fee to view, and that in turn usually requires the member to provide some personal information to sign up.) And on Viagri’s free website, people will see the option to purchase her character merchandising.
YouTube has grown to the point that it now has over two billion views every day! That’s not a typo: two billion (with a “b”) every day! That’s more than all the television networks and cable TV channels combined. So advertisers are flocking to YouTube and paying good money to place small ads on the video posts that attract a lot of viewers. The amount of money paid is on a sliding scale, depending on the number of views that a given post receives. I think the threshold number of views is about a hundred thousand. So over the past year YouTube has spent millions of dollars to advance their technology and upgrade their service.
Around mid February, 2011, YouTube made a public announcement at a big media convention that now, more than ever, they are courting everybody to post their videos on YouTube — for free — YouTube refers to us now as the “content providers” — and we retain ownership of the copyrights to whatever we post on YouTube — and if what we post attracts enough viewers to attract paying advertisers, YouTube will pay half of that revenue to the “content provider”. Also, if any one of us posts more than one video on YouTube which also attracts a significant number of viewers, YouTube will give us our own “channel”, so that people who like what we posted can easily find whatever we post next. It’s like we now have our own cable TV channel on the internet, which the public can see for free even while we get paid by advertisers that we don’t even have to hunt for. It’s an incredible win-win all the way around.
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