Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part Four — Transforming Success Into Dollars (cont.)

DVD Sales and Other Income Streams

Content on YouTube can be edgy and erotic. People who look for entertainment on the internet usually want to see edgier material than they can see on regular TV or the cable TV channels. YouTube will not accept porn, although an example of raunchiness that YouTube will accept can be gauged by looking at an animated cartoon video produced by a rapper named Snoop Dogg, titled “A Bitch I Knew”, which can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SymVIZLNFgE

I expect that there should be sizeable audiences for much tamer material on YouTube as well, if it is reasonably well written and drawn and animated. (We know how creatively stifled the current Hollywood product is, so now that actually works in our favor.) Every day more people of all ages are coming to the internet for all different reasons, so there should be an audience of some size for almost any subject.

I’ve heard hopeful talk about i-Tunes being a possible revenue source for animation. Increasingly, people are surfing the internet on their cell phones, and downloading music and short pieces of video entertainment from i-Tunes for small fees, which are simply added to a person’s monthly cell phone bill. Unfortunately, i-Tunes does not accept videos made on Flash software, which most amateur animators use. But new software programs are becoming available that work similarly to Flash, which are acceptable to i-Tunes. I don’t know much about this yet, but as soon as I learn more, I will add it to this post.

Later down the road, when you animators have attracted a reasonably sized group of enthusiastic fans and you want to take a step forward into making a larger cartoon movie but you lack the financial resources, there is a way to raise financing in advance on the internet. Describe to your fans the kind of movie you’d like to make (along with your credentials), and the cost of making it, and ask how many of your fans would be willing to purchase a DVD of the movie in advance, to finance the cost of making the movie. The DVDs would retail for $20 each, and so a certain number of DVDs would need to be sold in advance to cover the cost. Since most DVD authoring companies charge about one dollar per DVD (if amortized over a reasonably large print run), that leaves $19 profit on each DVD for the filmmaker. Keep in mind that preselling DVDs is a form of seeking investment, and as such it is illegal to spend people’s money to begin a project that is underfunded and might never be completed, so first you just ask if there are enough people who would be willing. Once enough people say yes, then you announce that fact and tell people to send in their money so that work can begin on making the movie. After the movie is made, you can probably sell lots more DVDs of it and see some real profits.