Re: [videoblogging] Video Goes Underground
All right, you bastards, here it is.
Videoblogging is my hobby. I’ll never make any money out of it.
When I lived in London, people used to hire me to make videos for their companies because I was one of the only people there who had a videoblog. But that’s not the same thing.
And now I live somewhere much cheaper, I don’t have to do that anymore, and it’s a relief. I can concentrate on my own stuff. Without worrying about how it’s going to pay.
The reason John’s so pissed off is because he thought making videos was going to change something in his life, make him money, change the media landscape. And then he sat through that Keynote at Pixelodeon. So did I. Halfway through, the person sitting next to me turned their laptop screen black and wrote in large red letters I WANT TO DIE.
The point is, if you want money, you have to ask yourself who’s going to pay you. Follow The Money. Consumers haven’t paid directly for media for a long time.
No one pays for media. People don’t pay for the movie when they see it at a theatre. They could wait and watch it on the telly or BitTorrent it. They pay for the EXPERIENCE of going out - huddling together in the dark to feast on sugary crap and distract themselves momentarily from the ever-present inevitability of their encroaching loneliness, senility and death.
Just like you pay for Chinese food when you don’t want to cook and the inside of your apartment is starting to feel like the Overlook.
So - the only people who are going to pay you are advertisers. If your ‘content’ doesn’t fit with what they want, then fuck you, you won’t get paid.
Fuck you? Fuck me. Fuck them. My ‘content’ is *never* going to fit with them. So I never ever expect to get paid. Unless I change what I do. Which I’m not going to.
Almost all of the 60 or so videoblogs I subscribe to are produced for nothing. It doesn’t cost anything to produce them. I’m producing my stuff for nothing, too. Except my time. Why on earth should anybody else pay me for my hobby time? You want a hobby that makes money? You picked the wrong one. There’s too many cutthroat professionals making media that’s tailor made to make money. Go learn how to carve arty dollshouse furniture.
Too expensive to live in the city and make art/indulge your hobby? You have to spend all your time working? Move somewhere less expensive. Can’t? Well - that’s either your unavoidable circumstance that has nothing to do with web video, or it’s your *choice* of priorities. Who said that advertisers should spend their money on something they have no interest in so that you can have it all? That MBP you just bought or want - that HD cam - are they really the basic tools for your art?
Pissed off that 30 million people have watched French Maid TV and only 250,000 have watched yours? Who’s wrong - the 29,750,000 people who chose not to watch you, or you? Want to be loved by those 29,750,000 people? Make French Maid TV.
If I put a massive amount of effort and discipline and thought and resources into making a long film, then I’d think about whether I want to get something in return. And if I did, I would make some efforts to Follow The Money, to think about HOW to get something in return.
But probably I’d just do it in my spare time, without expecting anything in return. So that I didn’t have to Follow The Money.
Because we can do that now.
THAT’S the fucking revolution, people. That we don’t HAVE to be paid. The making of the thing doesn’t COST anything.
When I started making 16mm films, they were seen by hardly any people at festivals and cost thousands of dollars to make in rental and processing costs. Now I make better stuff on my free-with-my-contract phone for hardly anything except time, and it’s seen by thousands.
Everything else is bullshit.
Rupert
http://twittervlog.tv
