Two questions I often get asked by people who want to explore this blogging thing but spend most of their day doing whatever it is they do for a living:
1) How can I justify spending time producing stuff for the Internet that doesn’t immediately earn me an income?
2) How can producing stuff for the Internet earn me an income?
A nice illustration of the answer I usually give popped up behind door number 6 of 383 Project’s advent calendar of cool stuff they found this year.
Chris Pugh created a poster called Science Machine. This was to be a limited edition run of 250 prints selling at $45 each. I haven’t looked into how he went about selling them but let’s assume he bypassed the usual channels and just sold them off his website. Selling all 250, which he did, would give him $11,250 before costs and with no commission to pay. Not bad.
But how to sell them without an agent, distributor or gallery? Luckily he had the foresight to set his computer to take a screenshot every five seconds which he then made into two movies, a short seven minute edit…
And the full eighteen minute version…
The short video has been watched 297,000 times while the longer one (which presumably didn’t “go viral” in the same way) has been watched 7,000 times. And someone ripped the video and put it on YouTube gathering another 17,000 views. Interesting to note that they also copied the description and links ensuring those who wanted to could follow through – that doesn’t usually happen unless the ripper admires the individual behind the original work. Some rough and ready analysis therefore says that 1 in 1,284 people who watched the video bought the poster. That actually seems a little low to me in Internet terms but you’ll note that nowhere does Chris allow people to scroll around and explore the image. You watch it being made and you can look at photos of the prints but if you want to see the details and dwell on the art you have to buy it.
Compare this with Rhodri Marsden’s lament that despite 250,000 views of his music video he only sold 58 mp3s, a ratio of 1 in 4310. Rhodri’s problem here, I think, is that once you’ve watched the video there’s no incentive to buy the mp3 unless you really really really love the song. I saw the video when it was doing the rounds. I thought it was nice, watched it a couple of times, possibly blogged it and then moved on to the next thing. There was nothing else to see there. Chris Pugh, on the other hand, has made me hungry. I want to see more of his artwork. I want to drill in deep and really get my head around it. If that hunger stayed with me I might well send him $45. If I could download a high-res version of the print my hunger would probably be satisfied.
I was going to avoid too much maths but got curious so here’s a little bit more. In order to make the same amount as money as Chris, Rhodri’s video would have to be watched 48 million times (11,250 / 58 x 250,000). To be honest that sounds about right for a music video.
Rhodri’s situation also helps me illustrate the answer to question one. He spent a good chunk of time and money making the video which is the main reason for his lament. Chris simply set his computer to automatically take screengrabs as he worked, threw them all into some video editing software (iMovie would suffice), whacked a music track on top and uploaded it to Vimeo. Financial outlay: zero. Time outlay: a couple of hours, maybe more. The video was a byproduct of his actual work.
So here’s the lesson.
1) Look at the process by which you do what you do. Is there a byproduct? Can you very simply create a byproduct?
2) When releasing the byproduct to the world make sure you don’t accidentally give away the product itself.
There’s much more to it than that of course. But if you want to know more you’ll have to employ me. See what I did there?