The Blip Blog

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Wednesday June 9, 2010

Original Web series are finding a niche at night… At Blip.tv, which distributes tens of thousands of independent online video shows, peak viewing time has moved from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. a year ago to 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. across U.S. time zones.

Web Series Tap Into Prime Time - WSJ.com

We believe this is important. Viewership of Web shows distributed by blip.tv peaks during prime time. Not only that, but we’re about to hit a magical number: one hundred million video views per month. We should hit that milestone this month, in June.

These two statistics, together, are meaningful. People are watching blip.tv shows in prime time and blip.tv shows are garnering 10% of the audience of network television shows from ABC, NBC and FOX combined (Hulu does about 950 million video views per month). Now think about the amount of money that has been poured into Hulu and the content on Hulu. Individual episodes cost millions of dollars to produce. Hulu itself has raised one hundred million dollars. The total production cost of all of the content on Hulu is probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

And yet blip shows… shows with budgets of a couple hundred dollars per episode… shows produced by striving artists and entrepeneurs for fanatical audiences… are capturing share during prime time. The content on blip.tv probably costs one tenth of one percent of the content on Hulu. But it’s now garnering 10% of the audience and during prime time. Something important is happening here.

And before you say that we can never get the next Lost this way, two things: 1) it’s unlikely there will ever be another lost, on network television or not because it’s simply too expensive, and 2) the virtuous cycle is our friend. Good content leads to audience leads to ad dollars which lead to better and more expensive content. We’re bootstrapping ourselves into a new television industry.

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