Interesting interview with Morgan Webb of G4 and formerly of WebbAlert (WebbAlert was a Federated Media author and I work at FM.) I’m really proud of this portion of the interview:
Unlike a lot of Internet video experiments, we were able to make good money making WebbAlert. Federated Media was fantastic at selling us, and I’d like to thank them for helping us do as well as we did. I think the secret to making money in this space is to keep your costs way down. We didn’t have any full-time employees, and our production process was incredibly cheap and streamlined.
Thanks Morgan! Another portion of the interview is pretty sobering:
The script would take about five to six hours, then make-up, filming, compressing and uploading took another hour to two hours, then the show was edited and uploaded by about 1 a.m. That’s about 17 hours of work for one episode.
So many people think of independent web publishing as an easy job. You utilize free (or virtually free) tools, you can do your work in your pajamas, you can work from anywhere, etc. That isn’t the reality. While you might be able to work in your pajamas if you want to it is very difficult work. I work with over 100 independent authors and each one of them is working extremely hard. They are all exceptionally talented and dedicated but none of them are on auto pilot and successful for long.
One of the reasons I think so many traditional publishing ventures have been so slow to excel online is that it is really hard work. It takes more people. It takes as much or more time. It is evolving very rapidly.
It’s hard work.
It’s amazing how complex creating media really is. It’s so easy to say: “That’s easy, anyone can do it” but as this interview shows, it is not easy at all. Simplicity is the resolution of the complex. (AKA the iPod). Making it look easy is how the pros do it.
Since you are interested in internet money making, you may want to check out this article on the clearblog site that talks about internet money making. It really helped me out.