Hannah Kuchler and Shannon Bond report in the Financial Times:
This is YouTube talent realising they have built a brand and leveraging that fandom beyond the platform of YouTube. There’s so many ways to monetise influence.
Embarrassing singing, schoolboy pranks and unrequited love. Smosh: the Movie could have been made for any generation of teenagers since the start of the Hollywood movie industry. But Smosh features a YouTube comedy duo better known for free daily snippets delivered directly to camera than pay-to-view feature-length films. The production was released early this summer, shooting straight to the number one comedy movie on Apple iTunes after a premiere in Los Angeles. It even won creators Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox a place as the first digital celebrities to become wax figures at Madame Tussauds.YouTube creators are looking to use their large internet audiences to take on Hollywood by making their own movies, even working alongside big name actors such as Sir Patrick Stewart and Bella Thorne.
The Google-owned online video site, which is growing rapidly as more people watch videos on their smartphones, announced its first film last week. It is working with AwesomenessTV, a multichannel network that signs deals to promote YouTube stars, to create Dance Camp. The film features digital stars Meg DeAngelis, who has 3.7m YouTube followers, and Jake Paul, who has 4.3m followers on Twitter’s six-second video site Vine.Robert Kyncl, Google vice-president and global head of business at YouTube, says the company wants its new slate of feature films to replace the traditional cinematic release process for smaller-budget projects.
The films will debut on the site where they can be watched for free, funded by advertising or sponsorship, for a set period of time. The creators will then be able to sell access through Apple’s iTunes, Vimeo and other video on-demand platforms.“Big tentpole movies like Transformers make money in theatres, but for indie movies theatrical is about creating awareness. We’re aiming for indie movies, not Transformers,” he says. “YouTube is a very effective way to create global awareness.”
Mr Kyncl compares the strategy to “a TV movie of the week” which is first broadcast for free, with advertising support or sponsorship, before being sold on video-on-demand and other channels.
“We’re taking existing models and tweaking them,” he says, adding that YouTube had seen “great interest” from advertisers to sponsor longer content.
YouTuber-led features are unlikely to challenge the dominance of big-budget Hollywood fare anytime soon, but big entertainment groups are not being left out of the picture. They are major investors in the multichannel networks that represent YouTube’s biggest stars, with DreamWorks Animation backing AwesomenessTV and Walt Disney buying Maker Studios for $500m last year.
AwesomenessTV was behind Smosh and is also working with YouTube stars on Shovel Buddies, a movie about four teenagers honouring the memory of a recently deceased friend.
YouTube stars are social media naturals with a more loyal fan base than many groomed Hollywood actors. The site and other video companies hope they can exploit their stars’ followings to create movies that need little marketing budget.
<!--.--> “This is YouTube talent realising they have built a brand and leveraging that fandom beyond the platform of YouTube,” says Rich Greenfield, analyst at BTIG Research.
“There’s so many ways to monetise influence. It’s natural that YouTube is a part of this — why wouldn’t you want to take advantage?”
Expelled, an Awesomeness TV teen movie featuring four YouTube and Vine stars, beat out a blockbuster film about teenage cancer patients called The Fault in Our Stars to become the most talked about movie on social media last year, according to measurement service Rentrack.
Brian Robbins, chief executive of Awesomeness TV who has dozens of television and movie credits as an actor, producer and director, says it spent “zero” on advertising. “That is a gamechanger,” he says.
There are also limited distribution costs as fans can buy the movies online on platforms such as iTunes or Vimeo.
Kerry Trainor, chief executive of Vimeo, a platform on which 150m people watch videos every month, says they have 750,000 paying viewers. He adds that for younger viewers, these creators have just as much star power.
“They are both stars because they have audiences and fan bases, regardless of whether they are traditional Hollywood or from the internet. PewDiePie has 40m followers and Tom Cruise can draw millions at the Box Office,” he says, referring to the most followed YouTube star. “It is more of a generational thing.”
By communicating with their fans everyday and using YouTube’s extensive analytics tools, creators have also developed a deep understanding of what their audience likes and dislikes. Breaking Through, due for release in October, and Dance Camp both focus on dance. This capitalises on the popularity of dance videos on YouTube which are watched twice as often as the average video, according to data from research company Tubular Labs.Kathleen Grace, chief creative officer at New Form Digital, a digital studio backed by Discovery Communications, Hollywood director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, worked on a long-form series due out this week.
Oscar’s Hotel for Fantastical Creatures was directed by PJ Liguori, a British YouTube star, and features dozens of other creators including PewDiePie, Grace Helbig and Hannah Hart. It also features Sir Patrick Stewart, known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek, and puppets made by the Jim Henson company. It will be sold on Vimeo for $9.99.
“In 2016 you’ll see more YouTuber-led features come out,” she predicts. “How successful or not those are is the question. The biggest challenge in online video to build a big audience, especially in the scripted realm, is that it has to feel pretty big: inclusive, fun, interesting. The budgets don’t always match what you need to do creatively.”
Movies by YouTubers have not raked in big bucks yet, so budgets have been smaller. But video bloggers, so-called vloggers, have been able to build huge followings using affordable video cameras and sports cameras made by GoPro that offer the same quality as expensive equipment used to a decade ago.
Reza Izad, chief executive of Collective Digital Studio, a US multichannel network recently acquired by Germany’s ProSiebenSat. 1, says the current experiments with different formats for YouTube stars were “just scratching the surface”.
“Whoever captures that first megahit is going to transform their business and transform the opportunity for all of us in the business,” he says.
Crowdsourcing a screening The popcorn-munching masses have yet to see movies from YouTube creators grace their cinema screens, writes Hannah Kuchler.
Smosh: the Movie premiered with a red carpet event at the VidCon conference in Los Angeles, while next month’s Breaking Through is also due to have a showing in the home of the US movie industry. But the companies behind the films want to focus on reaching the most obsessive fans first through online platforms rather than gamble on the expense of a major theatrical release.
However, Tugg, a start-up founded in 2012, is allowing fans to organise their own screenings by crowdsourcing demand for a particular movie. The event happens at a local cinema if enough people reply before a deadline, guaranteeing that the showing will be financially viable.
Nicholas Gonda, co-founder and chief executive who previously produced independent films, says he thinks the trend towards “event cinema” could revive going to the movies.
“Our most successful film has been Touch the Wall, an independent documentary about Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin,” he says, adding that it was promoted by middle and high school swim teams with some using the screenings to raise money for trips and uniforms.
“What’s really cool is that the film’s first event was last November, but they’ve had screenings almost every week since then. They’ve had over 475 events with more than 53,600 attendees
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