YouTube Rental?

Sweeney Jet

Sweeney Jet

I've made several low budget features and I am currently making a series. I wanna have people pay to watch on YouTube.

Has anyone ever tried this and how is it like, will I make a good profit?
 
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This was mentioned in a couple of threads (I brought up a similar idea in one of them :))

Maybe you won't be able to get people to pay for the series-however if you get a following you could release seasons on DVD, and get people to buy them then-or at the very least get the attention of a studio.
 
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Blip.tv

They pay a share of advertisement to you.

I use them because I only have to upload once and they will distribute to the various suppliers. But your not going to make serious $$$ (PM Me and I'll let you know how I'm doing).

Createspace from Amazon has digital downloads, where you get paid every time someone downloads your content.
 
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But to get an account at YouTube Rental, you pay for promoted videos. What if YouTube promoted my videos on the homepage and elsewhere for like a day? Millions upon millions of people visit YouTube everyday. Anyone know about that?
 
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Sweeney Jet YouTube could promote your vids on every website known to man and you still wouldn't be making money just for the fact that you are not known and people do not want to spend cash on an unknown unless it's super cheap. If it is super cheap you will be seeing only a few cents from each rental.

What you should do just post your vids on as many steaming vid sites as possible to just get your work out to the mass and then try and get a distro for an upcoming project of yours.
 
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You should probably work on creating an online rep and then upload some content to prove that your work is worth the money.

Besides, it's hard enough getting viewers through free videos, imagine trying to bait them with a price attached.
 
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Sweeney Jet said:
Can I get the links?
Click to expand...

There are either threads where the idea of a web series is mentioned in some form(when I said "I've seen this idea-I meant more the web series on youtube-I'll see if I can find more about youtube rental ideas)


This thread was about promotion-I didn't start the thread, but where I asked if anyone has done the idea of a weekly type series in it)

http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=19231&highlight=film+short+series+youtube


http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=22597&highlight=youtube+series (No one one responded to this one for some reason


http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=19465&highlight=youtube+series


Sadly, we live in a culture where people don't want to pay to watch feature films, so it's that much harder to get someone to pay to watch series on youtube.

Bliptv looks interesting, however (thanks Graeme :))
 
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I disagree with most of these posts. If you can get yourself on YouTube Rentals then i would do it. Granted, you aren't going to get rich but you never know what may interest people. In other words, it depends on your film and THE ARTWORK but you may be able to make a little cash. I believe the rental section is brand new so NOW is the best time to get on there before it gets super crowded.

I've had decent luck on Amazon's VOD and I finally got a reply from YouTube about rentals yesterday. If they will include me then I'll be there with my movie. The more of you that throw your hands up and say it's a waste of time the better for me.

Mike
 
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Sadly, we live in a culture where people don't want to pay to watch feature films.
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Yep. That's the state of this business. People want to pay $1.00 to rent a movie if they can't download it for free off PirateBay. With the proliferation of RedBox, there's only room for "the hits". What does that leave indie filmmakers with? NetFlix paying you a one time fee of wholesale price to rent your movie out as many times as they can? That doesn't work for indie film makers either. Indie filmmakers need consumers that buy movies or rent from a "virtual store" and get paid royalties (not the NetFlix one time payment structure).

I hope there comes a day when renting any movie under the sun off your TV set becomes the norm. Or maybe a method whereby people download movies from Amazon or iTunes onto a memory stick that can then be connected to a TV set and watched easily.

It's already happening with music. Record stores are going extinct. People don't even like to buy CD's off Amazon anymore. They prefer digital downloads off iTunes and Amazon for their iPod. It's nice because artists who produce audio CD's (music, comedy, etc) don't need to deal with traditional distributors any more.

But for now nobody has the patience or know how to download and burn their own DVD's. There's gotta be an easier way if video contect will ever follow the path of audio content.
 
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Blade_Jones said:
Yep. That's the state of this business. People want to pay $1.00 to rent a movie if they can't download it for free off PirateBay. With the proliferation of RedBox, there's only room for "the hits". What does that leave indie filmmakers with? NetFlix paying you a one time fee of wholesale price to rent your movie out as many times as they can? That doesn't work for indie film makers either. Indie filmmakers need consumers that buy movies or rent from a "virtual store" and get paid royalties (not the NetFlix one time payment structure).

I hope there comes a day when renting any movie under the sun off your TV set becomes the norm. Or maybe a method whereby people download movies from Amazon or iTunes onto a memory stick that can then be connected to a TV set and watched easily.

It's already happening with music. Record stores are going extinct. People don't even like to buy CD's off Amazon anymore. They prefer digital downloads off iTunes and Amazon for their iPod. It's nice because artists who produce audio CD's (music, comedy, etc) don't need to deal with traditional distributors any more.

But for now nobody has the patience or know how to download and burn their own DVD's. There's gotta be an easier way if video contect will ever follow the path of audio content.
Click to expand...


It would be nice to see it follow that path, though Itunes you get songs for 99 cents. The rentals on youtube are min 4 dollars I think. Outright owning the movie for 2-3 dollars, I don't know if the studios would go for it (I guess the whole idea a movie 90min, while a song is 5)-still you'd figure people would jump at buying a movie for2-3 bucks online (I would).
 
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