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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Off Topic → Web Series
That Youtube distribution model is horrible, it might be ok if you are a video blog series (or Let's Play), but it handicaps creative works since you either have to chop up your narrative or you have to make truncated works suitable for the ADHD crowd. All for a pittance.
It's just not that profitable.
Coming at this from the perspective of a let's player, although I'm not big enough to be making any money yet, I'm more immersed in the culture than most people I'd imagine. And yes, the people that can do it are absolutely making their living doing it. Guude is making his living completely off his ad revenue, bdoubleO is just about to do the same, KurtJmac has been doing it for a while now, the yogscast, is just fucking insane with their profits.
But the thing is, these guys have a constant stream of about 20-30 thousand views per video, and are putting out 3-4 videos a day. And even then it's just enough to be surviving with, they certainly aren't getting rich doing it (Well maybe yogscast is, but well...I have other issues with them).
If you're just doing a mini series or something that will only be 8-10 videos over it's entire run, and even if you can get a half million views per episode, you still aren't making enough to turn a profit, most likely you aren't even making enough to break even, depending on the project. It's just a bit of nice pocket change.
The thing about content like this is that you don't have to just limit yourself to the one thing. There's a ton of options out there, and you don't have to limit yourself to just one or two of them. Just by doing Let's Play stuff there are a lot of options. A lot of them do live streams via Twitch.tv, so that's another source of ad revenue. Some of them have forums, and those forums have ads, so there's another little bit of income. One of the guys I follow is a decent little sketch artist, so once in a while he'll do a sketch thing where for a few bucks he'll do a quick drawing for you, and he streams that as well so the people who paid to get the sketch done end up contributing ad views as well.
If you have any sort of fan base, even a small one, you can get some traction on a revenue stream. You can do things beyond just creating media content and hoping enough people watch it. If you can get 10K views per video, that's 10K potential buys for one of your other hobby projects. Maybe you knit scarves or something and sell stuff on etsy. Tell your youtube fans. Some of them are bound to buy something, and the people who like your videos probably won't mind if you mention you've got to make some cash once in a while.
@Squiggy: I know, but that post wasn't about me. I was just using the let's play as a case study for why simply trying to do ad revenue on a stand alone web series (Where you can't do all that other shit, or at least not as easily, because it's meant to be a stand alone series) won't garner the results you want or need for it to be profitable. And your post actually just cements that further.
It doesn't seem like some of the people on youtube think of it as a second part time job. At least not the vloggers... They still don't seem to make the cash to justify making youtube their primary job. For example, CTFXC, one of the more popular vlogs, racks up about a solid 50,000 views a day. Multiply that by 5 just to be generous and they rack in 250 bucks a day. Freddiew get about a million hits a week. Which means that freddie and company bring in about 5 grand a week. How it Should have Ended, one of my favorites, racks in close to 800 thousand hits a week. I think he can justify youtube being his primary job since everything is done in a computer. 
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Off Topic → Web Series
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