YouTube can be a Star

57 billion channels and nothing on...

In June 2006, a 16-year-old girl by the name of Bree began posting short video clips of herself to YouTube, the extremely popular online video site. In that month alone, YouTube reported that 2.5 billion videos were being watched.

Bree should have been just another teenage girl with a video diary that hardly anyone bothered to keep track of. Instead, within a few months, hundreds of thousands of people were tuning in to watch the four or five diary entries she posted, as lonelygirl15, each week.

It helped that Bree is pretty and lively, but people were also fascinated by what appeared to be an evolving story. Bree was home-schooled and her parents belonged to a never-explained occult group. Her peculiar relationship with her best friend, Daniel, seemed to be the beginnings of a teen romance. The secrets that she felt her parents were keeping from her, the complexity of her life, had the feeling of a soap-opera. It was addictive watching.

With 200,000 fans discussing and obsessing over her life, it wasn’t long before the story came out.

Bree was actually 20-year-old New Zealand actress, Jessica Rose. The static, apparently self-filmed videos, were being carefully staged and directed by Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney.

The Lonelygirl series continued till August 2008 when the 547 episodes had been viewed a collective 110 million times. The creators of the series formed a studio, EQAL, to produce additional series. They recently signed an exclusive deal with YouTube and MySpace, and received investment of $ 5 million.

Welcome to the astonishing world of independently-created and produced creative content.

There are now even awards programs for the best online series. South by SouthWest (SXSW) is an annual film and media festival that takes place in Austin, Texas. Even Yahoo! and YouTube have their own awards.

The “episodes” of each series are kept extremely short; at their longest they are six to eight minutes. They also cater to small niche markets.

The Guild is produced by Felicia Day who, after spending two years playing World of Warcraft – an online fantasy roll-playing game – decided that she wanted to tell stories inspired by her experiences. Mainstream media companies felt that the material was a little too focused for a wider audience but, as an online series, episode 1 has been watched more than 2 million times.

Many of these series are produced in the hopes that larger studios will pick them up and so return on their creator’s investment. However, the success of the shows has created a situation familiar to the music industry.

Highly successful stars decide to leave the formal studio system in order to maintain creative control and – hopefully – keep all of the profits.

So far, though, for every LonelyGirl there are thousands of awful clips that no one ever watches. Worse is that, with a life that started with the distribution of free content, Internet users have not shown any desire to pay for the media they consume.

Google, which bought YouTube for $ 1.65 billion in stock back in 2006, is still losing millions of dollars on the service without being able to sell anything. As popular as it is, only 3% of their videos carry any paid advertising – their sole revenue source. A competitor, Hulu, was set up recently by the major network studios in an effort to bargain with Google. About 80% of the videos there carry advertising and after only a few months, and to everyone’s surprise, they are running a profit and look set to exceed YouTube in popularity.

Those looking for an exciting career producing independent films and stories now have a range of choices by which to gain fame and fortune.