"If the strike of ‘07 was about new media, we all have a stake in making sure new media actually works. Striking for a flop would be, well, embarrassing.
Happily, the studios that employ us seem to be doing a decent job of starting to monetize the web without losing the farm in a blaze of piracy. And in an even happier development, writers are starting to exploit the web for themselves, cutting the studios out of the process entirely.
Now, I’ve always been skeptical of the whole “the average guy will BE the media, man!” philosophy, but we’re not talking about the average guy. We’re talking about Joss Whedon, who cracked the code on original made-for-internet entertainment and actually made some real dough.1 Whedon managed to duplicate, as an artist, the three things the studios are really, really good at: financing, marketing and distribution. iTunes and his own website served as his distribution platform, he financed Dr. Horrible himself, and he let the interwebs handle the marketing part."
(emphasis mine)Craig goes on to talk about how Strike TV hopes to duplicate the success of The Joss and crack the "code" of how to make money on the web. I've talked about this before and if I weren't so inept at half of these web 2.0 search capabilities (at least this early in the morning) I would link to the post, but the fact is that TeeVee is now catching up to where comic books were in the 80's. Does any of this sound familiar?
There's a new distribution system in place.
You can do it on your own.
You don't have to work on their properties - you can create your own stuff and own it all.
You got it. Indie comic books are the grandfathers of today's web programs.
And the fact is that there will be some folks who will "do the internet thing" full time, and there will be others who will use it as their "second job" -- and that's all good. I like the idea of having one job which I'm really good at and can make money doing, and another that stretches different creative muscles and allows me to be more experimental in my choices, while also paying me long term and in different ways.
And as I told Jill Golick the other day - yes, there will be a lot of crap... but eventually people will learn to put it in a bag and call if fertilizer.
The point is to get out there and Create. Stretch. Learn. Experiment. Build. The tools to do this are free and available to anyone with computer access.
Oh, and share it with the rest of us, will ya?
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