By taking into account the online audience, the process of showing work has changed dramatically. Before internet was a mainstream service, available to basically everyone, if you wanted to show something, you had to produce it and show it either on TV, or by giving someone a physical object, such as a video or DVD so they can watch it. If a show was on TV, you had to either record it or make sure you were home to watch it. Nowadays, however, you can watch a lot of mainstream TV via online catchup such as BBC iPlayer, or 4OD. With products like webisodes, however, the internet is even more useful that simply a means to display your product to a bigger audience. Especially if you create the episodes as we have, where you film one or two, release it and wait for the response.
The internet is useful simply due to the sheer convenience of it. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world have access to the internet. This graph clearly shows the amount of people with access to internet from various parts of the world. Being able to tap into this incredible amount of people simply by uploading a video is mind-blowing. Though i very much doubt that the internet is ever going to replace traditional forms of showing work, such as TV or theatre, i think it will be a close call for a while. TV has faults, being that everything is only shown at a certain time instead of when you want to watch it, but that's what Sky+ is for. The internet, however, while you can watch almost whatever you want whenever you want, it has to be streamed from somewhere on the internet so you have to wait for it to load, buffer, download or whatever you are doing to play it. I have spoken to people who feel that TV will soon be a thing of the past in favour of online TV, because it's more convenient but i disagree. For our purposes, advertising our show on the interenet was the best thing we could have done, as we managed to target our audience easily as it was aimed at teenagers really, and teenagers basically live online nowadays.If we had solely advertised our show through conventional methods, such as putting adverts in papers or on TV, not only would we have totally blown our budget instantly, but we would have attracted the wrong audience. My stereotype of somebo
dy who would read the paper, is a 'suit'. Does some dead-end job in an office somewhere, somewhat older than our target audience and wouldn't care about a 3 minute episode about some kids locked in detention. Adverts on TV, while they would potentially hit far FAR more people than our methods, again, even with a big budget, a traditional TV advert is about 30 seconds long. That's 1/3 of our show shown in the advert. These factors considered, the internet seemed the best option, because there is still a massive audience, and social groups mix and match with millions of people. If one of my friends joined the group we set up, it would then tell all their friends about it. Then they could check it out and if they liked the look of it they could join, and it would tell their friends about it, as the image shows.Online video sites such as YouTube are very useful because you can upload videos, send people links to them, get them to watch them and wait for them to make comments on it. Occasionally this will be good and you can use your feedback to improve you show. If you get several comments saying 'I don't like this character because of this reason' you can decide to kill him off in a hilarious way, or change the character. Changing a charatcer already known to the audience, however can be risky as some people wouldn't want them to change, or it could get confusing. You can also ask people what they would like to see in future episodes of the show, so you can aim your show towards what people say they want, instead of what you th
ink they want. You can also find out various stats about your video such as the star rating (out of 5), where it has been viewed most, the age groups that are watching it and how people have come across it.It does also mean that your audience base increases significantly, a video i made last year, an animation of the CSI: Miami opening credits, now has more than 1,700 views, as you can see, mainly in America and Canada, but it has been viewed all over the world. This in an incredible audience i would not be able to access without the use of the internet. This is because when i crated it, i posted a link of a worldwide forum, so people from all over the world got the link to it and could watch it whenever they want.
Mass forums like this are a great way of getting your products out there. When Dave actually got round to putting the first episode of our webisode on FacePunch, an online forum, our first episode is rolling into 800 hits, with plenty of feedback. This number dropped signifiantly with episodes 2 and 3, because he didn't bother posting them on time for whatever reasons. Hopefully they will get uploaded soon and our videos will get more hits.
While we still decided to put up posters advertising our show, i believe using the internet was a
better way to advertise, because it is just easier. The use of Social Networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace can easily increase your fanbase, because it is a good way to get constant updates and information about the series you are following. Red Vs Blue is a good example of this. It is an incredibly popular machinima webisode made from Halo models. As you can see, their FaceBook page has over 120,000 fans, and they announce whenever episodes are going to be released and how things are going. This type of information makes sure that anyone following you is constantly reminded about the show, and the more you say about it raises the hype for the next episode. You can send someone a link to a video, and all they have to do is click on it. If we had only advertised on posters, the first episode wouldn't have got many hits at all, because people can't be bothered to remember web addresses or anything unless they are incredibly interestd in what is on the site. As our posters didn't really say much about the episodes, i don't think they would have got much attention.
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