Hey! Scott here.
While we wait to pull back the curtain on Major Faultline’s first episode, I thought I’d update you guys on how our soft launch is going.
The short answer is, it is going great!
Before we get into numbers, I’d like to point out a few things to people who may be more familiar with film and TV than with web series. With film and TV, all that matters is getting the largest number of people to all sit down at once and watch your stuff. With movies, they can accurately predict how much money they’ll make in total from that movie by how many people go to see it Friday night. Except for sleeper hits. That’s why they’re called that. And with TV, we are familiar with the ratings game.
But web series and online content is different. Sure, you want as many to watch it as possible, as quickly as possible. And, your best chance to have someone stumble upon any one episode is when you’re at the top of the pile because you’re new. But those episodes don’t come and vanish, only to be seen in repeats. They are still up there for new people to discover and enjoy as if they are brand new. It takes time to build your views into the kinds of numbers movies and TV shows get. So we’re not expecting a million people overnight (although that would be nice). What we’re hoping for is a nice build – a steady rise in the number of views over time. Not a sharp rise and then a flat line, like you would see if it goes viral.
Since our numbers are there for everyone to see on YouTube, there’s no harm discussing them here.
We launched our teaser episode two weeks out to both generate some traffic and some intrigue. We consider it was a success on both those fronts. It’s gotten 771 views since it launched, which is just from the wtf factor. And it continues to get new views. So we’re happy.
Our regular videos only started posted on Friday. We got about 450 views in the first day across the three videos (two episodes and a bumper) which is about what I had hoped for. It can be challenging to promote two episodes at once. Some people won’t have time for both. Some people simply won’t notice the second one. What is good is that both episodes have very similar numbers of views. At this moment they’re both about 300 views. That means that many people watched the Evil Trojan Borscht episode and went on to watch the Leopard Woman episode, or vice verse. Again, we’re very happy with that.
Our total views on Tights and Fights: Ashes is about 2000, including our trailer and bumper. That’s pretty good for so soon in the series. Our channel, which began as a side channel for Captain Euchre, has around 8000 channel views. And on our first day we got up to #25 Most Watched comedy Channel in Canada, on YouTube.
So, we’ve got a long way to go, and much work still to do. But all in all, we are very pleased with our soft launch.
