The Loyola College paper interviews Rooster Teeth. Burnie, Matt, Geoff, Gus, and Jason chime in.
Thankfully, RTP prizes their undependence. These folks get it.
The Greyhound - Hilariously popular Internet cartoon comes to an end
You guys have recently reached a milestone in episode 100 and decided to end the series. What’s next for RVB? A sequel? […]
Undie Adam Phillips collected another big orange rubber arrow for his mantle when he took home the People’s Choice award at the Flashforward Film Festival in Boston last week for his wonderful 30 Shorts in 30 Days project. You can see his acceptance clip here.
Adam also recently posted this message at his site:
Big Announcement
Soon to be bigger - - Hear that mighty engine in the distance? It’s the Brackenwood merchandise machine approaching fast. Some have already noticed that my brackenwood.net domain is down. That’s because it’s the site of the upcoming all-new Brackenwood Store. It’s currently full of hammering and sawing sounds, so in a few weeks there’ll be a better range of Brackenwood and Bitey Castle merchandise than there’s ever been.
The best way to support an Undie, of course, is to buy from them. So check back in with Adam soon and often.
In this interview with Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash, Adam talks about deciding to go undie:
AARON: Was the decision to finally leave Disney a difficult one?
ADAM: It was a very impromptu thing. There was a billboard at the train station that I would see every day as I was going home. It was an advertisement for an employment website called jobseekers or something like that. Anyway, there’s a picture of some goofy looking chick thinking to herself ‘when will I ever have the guts to quit my job?’
It played on my mind over the next few weeks, and I discussed it with my girlfriend who thought that the only thing holding me back was that job. So one day I got a new scene on my desk and for the millionth time, wished I could be home working on the next Bitey movie.
I walked into the Supervisor’s office and gave two week’s notice. I always loved the job so it wasn’t a bitter thing, but damn it felt good.
If you don’t follow his work already, make sure you begin. Grab his RSS feed here and enjoy.
–JLB
Fleen’s Gary Tyrrell shared his analysis of the Zuda contract docs in a series of posts on the submission agreement, the rights agreement, the services agreement, and his final thoughts.
He concludes with:
But as written, the Zudadeal stands in opposition to the creator ownership that has been one of the core strengths of webcomics since Day One. Webcomics can do better, and so can you.
Clearly, many creators will conclude that they don’t need Zuda at all, that winning their competition is worth, well, not much.
–JLB
Undies thrive on a direct connection with their fans. Audiences definitely appreciate the ability to interact with creators, whether at conventions or online. This direct relationship lets creators earn and enjoy high unit margins on their sales because they often need no label, publisher, wholesaler, retailer, etc.
Successful community strategies vary as widely as the Undies themselves. For instance:
The web continues to evolve new ways to build and manage your community. TechCrunch has reviewed nine such tools. I like Ning a lot myself.
Ask A Ninja has announced an upcoming upgrade to their community platform. We’re eager to see what the Ninja unleashes for fans.
Creators, how do you encourage and engage your tribe?
Fans, what community features do you like the most?
–JLB
The Telegraph provides a nice overview of webcomics with Penny Arcade and Achewood profiles, news of industry heavies trying to move in, and some decent macro numbers:
Drawn into the future of online comic strips - Telegraph
…over the past decade, online comics have mushroomed in popularity, with some providing a handsome living. “There are probably 1,000 strips with an audience beyond the creator’s immediate family and friends,” says Gary Tyrrell, editor of the webcomics blog fleen.com, “and 100 or so where the creators are deriving some measurable income from it. Probably several dozen are living completely off their webcomics.”
–JLB
In What Constitutes an Online Hit?, NewTeeVee tries to define “success” for Internet video content. Chris Albrecht acknowledges how elusive that definition really is…
Even with all the fetishization of the long tail these days, it’s important to remember that entertainment (and therefore online video entertainment) is a hit-driven business. People flock to hits, advertisers flock to people.
But agreeing on criteria is not so easy. The easiest measuring stick is, of course, the play count. But since content online never really goes away, does it matter if it takes a week or a month to reach a million plays?
Amplifier defines success differently. We submit that it’s not about raw viewers, it’s not even about video. It’s about a state change, namely, are you self-sustaining? Is your audience large enough (and do you monetize it well enough) to KEEP creating new content?
Getting Paid
Mass and Internet media inadvertently operate as a kind of ad-hoc, unofficial business school. For convenience sake, let’s just call it Greater Fool University (henceforth GFU) Students are taught (largely by example) that building a new, sustainable business isn’t necessary to become successful. The goal becomes personal liquidity. The business can be highly profitable for founders/principles without earning profits or even having trendlines pointing to future profits. One can leave the burden of creating a working business model for someone else to deal with.
With VCs moving into the Internet content space, GFU is signalling students of very recent history that imminent fortunes are going to be made. Get your game faces on. Many will do so and some will get flipped into fortunes.
The Road Less Travelled
We submit the greater accomplishment for creators is to make it work without the Deus ex Machina. Create something compelling enough to draw an audience and monetize them yourself. The means to do so are now so much easier to acquire. Your audience won’t fault you for making money from them, they’re eager to support you. Most people consider Homestar Runner the referential gold standard for that other, underappreciated school. The content equivalent of “we make our money the old fashioned way, we earn it.”
Homestar’s Matt Chapman sums up their rejection of a Cartoon Network TV deal to WIRED Magazine this way
“Being in Atlanta, we have friends that work there, but we’re not waiting for a big reconciliation,” Matt said. “What they do works for them, but if we were doing our show there, we’d still have producers telling us what to do, what to change, what to write, etc. We love the control and the immediacy that writing and creating cartoons on the website brings us. As the ideas come, we can do whatever our whim is that week.”
Homestar Runner is so popular now that revenues generated by the site’s merchandise sales allow its creators to devote their professional lives to the cartoons.
This model clearly inspired folks like Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns who referred to the Homestar Runner School of Economics in his 2006 SXSW keynote. (2 minutes, 20 secs)
This is the road less travelled, to be sure. It takes so much more creativity, talent and discipline to attract and sustain the interest of a large audience. But this is the essence of true success. This is not the pyrite being sold to some distant investor in public offering/fleecing. It’s real gold.
Audiences know it and most Content Creators in their heart of hearts do too.
First of all, Next Generation’s print edition was one of the truly great game magazines. I think it’s long since toast. Anyway, they’re writing about Machinima. And that means Rooster Teeth. Writing about Machinima without Rooster Teeth is like trying to write sentences without vowels. Theoretically possible, but so impractical as to be futile.
“I think that machinima begins the moment a player stops interfacing with a virtual world in the context of a game,” says Burns, when probed for a definition of the genre. “A videogame is simply an amazing piece of technology that displays a virtual space in realtime. The ‘game’ is the set of rules you are given to interact with that world. The moment you choose to stop interacting with that place by the rules—and to start exploring the world on your own terms—then the game has ended and machinima has begun.”
RVB gets some props at ComputerWorld…
Red vs. Blue brought machinima to the masses - Computerworld Blogs
Rooster Teeth wrote phenomenal scripts and brought their helmeted heroes to life by giving them identifiable voices and verbal characteristics. Rather than make their fighting squadrons true heroes of Halo, they are instead pessimistic, antagonistic, realistic, and sometimes downright dumb - just like any real person would be in a war situation. The characters and their situations are so absurd that to hear them in various one-shot public service announcements, warning about the dangers of tattoos or this thing called “the Internet”, drives home the unexpected juxtaposition.
Here’s a heads-up on a great new show hosted by Brad Guigar of Evil Inc.; Dave Kellett of Sheldon; Kris Straub of Starslip Crisis; and Scott Kurtz of PvP.
Grab this feed. Listen and learn and laugh a little, too. You’ll pick up tips and tidbits galore.
The show serves up excellent insights on web comics, and it also offers good ideas and a right mindset for undies of every stripe.
Enjoy.
-JLB
It’s one thing – and quite a good thing – to grow both your audience and your operation to the point where you can confidently attend various conventions around the country. Many undependents exhibit at shows to meet fans, have fun, and sell stuff.
It is another thing entirely to become so huge that you can run your own convention.
The fourth annual Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) brought 30,000 folks to 130,000 square feet in downtown Seattle’s Washington State Convention and Trade Center for a great experience. Wired Magazine recently reported that this event is now the largest gaming convention in the USA.
Now that’s undependence.
For more on Penny Arcade and PAX:
-JLB
Undependent™ tracks the emerging class of self-sustaining Internet-based artists. By artist we don’t mean artiste. We mean those content creators whose self-expression originates in and emanates from the Internet itself. The compelling ones attract audiences and in so doing are capable of creating completely self-sustaining businesses with total artistic control. (Read more here)
more
Loading content...
