TV Show Released On BitTorrent Raises $20,000 Pretty Damn Fast http://bit.ly/cbvbcl
Zubin Madon alerts us to the news that in just about a week, the producers of the show have hit their goal of raising $20,000 to produce the next batch of episodes. This isn’t a “give it away and pray” sort of deal. It’s a recognition that the first episode is the “pilot” and the scarcities that are being sold are the creation of more episodes. This is one of the more complicated scarcities for people to understand: content, once created and released to the world, is infinite. However, content not yet created is scarce. So it’s a perfectly reasonable business model to try to sell the creation of new content, which is exactly what the producers here have done successfully.
Torrent Freak has a longer article about the same project.
With traditional methods of funding drying up, producers will need to be creative in the future. Growing and Monetizing an Audience is one of my most popular presentations.
On the other hand, this shows the difficulty of funding in the digital age: The regular quality version has been downloaded over 1 million times, and the HD version 300,000 times, to raise $20,000. We’re not there yet, are we?