Friday, December 12, 2008

internet killed the video star

It seems like I only ever post articles on here, but there's another great one from yesterday's New York Times... YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money. I was pretty amazed to learn that 1) YouTube has introduced ads around some of it's videos (yay for them getting user consent everytime) and 2) that some of the people who are agreeing to have ads and splitting the profits under the partner program are making over $100,000/year. Made me wonder how much Secret Pants would have banked this year if they were participating...

It also brought me back to thinking about how IMPROV can be effectively disseminated on the interweb. YouTube has been a double-edged sword for a lot of sketch groups. It does allow sketches to quickly be released to a mass audience, but on the downside there is a lot of stuff that should never see the light of day getting posted. For improv, videos pose a challenge. A place like YouTube has limits on file length that prevent posting a full improv set, and sites like vimeo which don't tend to be less heavily trafficked.

So what's an improv theater to do? I'm especially curious about this, because looking at the partner program on YouTube I saw an opportunity for the theater to start generating content that could create money for our capital fund - the bank account that is saving up for a permanent space. A few years ago PHIT registered www.phillyimprovtheater.tv and we haven't used it yet... but I would love to see a site that embeds videos of shows (especially for the groups we've created).

Anybody know how we can get longform improv up on the web in a digestable way?

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