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All the World’s a Stage (That Includes the Internet)
Roy Raphaeli, who is known professionally as Magic Roy, has video clips of magic tricks on Metacafe, a Web site that pays him if he attracts a lot of viewers.By SCOTT KIRSNER
AT lunchtime, or when he is walking the halls of his workplace, Roy Raphaeli’s colleagues often beseech him to do a magic trick. Usually, he obliges. “I take the opportunity to show people my new stuff and see how they react,” said Mr. Raphaeli, 23, a Brooklynite who works for a mail-order camera retailer.
While Mr. Raphaeli, known professionally as Magic Roy, has been entertaining people with card tricks and sleight-of-hand since he was 5, he does not perform at birthday parties or casino showrooms.
Instead, Mr. Raphaeli’s stage of choice is the Internet, where he has posted 30 short video clips to Metacafe, a Web site that pays video creators based on how many viewers their work attracts. So far, Mr. Raphaeli has earned more than $13,000 from the site, where his most popular card trick has been seen 1.4 million times.
As video sites look for ways to attract higher-quality content, they are dangling cash, usually offering to cut creators in on the advertising revenue their work generates.
Revver, the Los Angeles company that pioneered the practice, shows a still-frame ad at the end of a video, and funnels money to the creator every time a viewer clicks on the ad to visit the advertiser’s Web site. Metacafe inserts a similar still-frame graphic at the end of a clip; it pays creators $100 when their video has been viewed 20,000 times, and $5 for every 1,000 additional views.
Other sites, like TurnHere and ExpertVillage.com, offer upfront payments for videos on assigned topics, like a tour of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, or an instructional video about skydiving. And in January, Chad Hurley, a YouTube co-founder, announced at the World Economic Forum that his site, now owned by Google, was exploring similar ways to “reward creativity.”
While the sums involved are not yet impressive enough to lure established TV or movie producers into the world of Internet video, they can be significant for people on the fringes of the entertainment industry, or those who see video production as a sideline to their day job, like Mr. Raphaeli.
He had originally planned to sell DVD compilations of his best tricks, before discovering that he could earn more, and reach a larger audience, by posting his videos online.
Kent Nichols, co-creator of Ask a Ninja, a series of comic videos in which a cranky ninja responds to viewer questions, says he managed to earn more than $20,000 last year on Revver. Mr. Nichols now has an agent, who recently helped him negotiate what he says is a more lucrative advertising deal with another company.
Ahree Lee, a graphic designer in San Francisco, earned “a couple of thousand dollars” in 2006 when a short film she had made became a hit on AtomFilms.com. It featured a fast-paced succession of still photographs she had taken of her face over several years, set to music composed by her husband.
More than a dozen sites now offer payments for videos that range from short snippets to full-length feature films. Some, like Revver, Metacafe and Manhattan-based Blip.tv, generate money from advertising; others, like Brightcove, DivX Stage6 and Cruxy, allow a video’s creator to set a price viewers must pay to view it, and exact a small transaction fee.
Most of the sites require that videos be uploaded to them, rather than sent on a DVD or a tape. When a video is viewed enough times to start generating revenue for its creator, the money is typically transferred to a PayPal account set up by the creator.
But the biggest challenge is attracting an audience.
A co-founder of Metacafe, Arik Czerniak, says his site has around 100,000 people who like reviewing new videos. “They’re practically video addicts,” he said. “If a video is interesting or engaging, it will get very high ratings from them.”
Videos that win raves can wind up on the site’s home page, where, Mr. Czerniak said, “a video can get 500,000 views in a single afternoon, all without you really worrying about marketing your video.”
Others say that a little self-promotion can’t hurt. “We have a MySpace page and a Facebook group,” said Matt Wyatt, a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe Invisible Engine, referring to two popular social networking sites where he posts the group’s latest videos. “We also e-mail a link to sites like StupidVideos.com and Transbuddha.com — sites that can help a video take off.”
When these sites choose to “embed” a video, using a bit of HTML code to weave it into one of their pages, the advertising still appears and the view is tallied, which generates revenue for the creator.
Some videos manage to catch fire with little effort. Fritz Grobe, a juggler who lives in Buckfield, Me., still cannot explain why a video he posted last June became so popular. It featured an array of two-liter bottles of Diet Coke that he and his partner, Stephen Voltz, detonated using Mentos candies.
“It sparked an instant reaction,” Mr. Grobe said. “Two days after we’d posted it on Revver, ‘The Late Show With David Letterman’ called.”
The video was eventually seen more than seven million times, earning Mr. Grobe and Mr. Voltz about $35,000. (A second video in the Extreme Mentos and Diet Coke Experiments series, released in partnership with Google last fall, has not managed to surpass that amount.)
Some semiprofessional videographers and independent filmmakers are relying on Web sites to make money between projects. Steve Janas of Belanco, Pa., says he has earned $500 to $2,000 for short videos he has made for the Web site TurnHere.com.
Most of his videos have been tourist guides to cities like Philadelphia, Princeton, N.J., and Reykjavik, Iceland, but Mr. Janas has also produced video tours of multimillion-dollar condos, intended to help sell them. TurnHere pays a flat fee for each video.
But only a few sites offer that kind of upfront payment. More common are sites like Break.com, where videos entertaining enough to win a spot on the home page earn $2,000, or sites like Revver and Metacafe, where the payment is based on the number of views.
Just as Hollywood moguls have yet to find an infallible formula for producing a blockbuster, Internet video producers still don’t know why some clips “go viral,” sent by e-mail from person to person and incorporated into blog entries, and others languish, seen only by the auteur’s dorm mates.
“A video has to grab you by the neck in about five seconds — otherwise people lose interest,” Mr. Czerniak said. “The maximum length is about 90 seconds.”
An acrobatics demonstration in which Joe Eigo, a Canadian martial-arts expert, executes flips and high-kicks like a character from a video game, has chalked up $25,000 worth of views for him.
Several painting demonstrations, using canisters of spray paint, have earned Brandon McConnell, a former zoo groundskeeper, almost $10,000. One element of success, he says, is choosing an intriguing image for the still-frame that represents each video on a site, enticing visitors to play it.
“I try to think about what’s going to cause people to say, ‘What’s that?’ ” Mr. McConnell said.
And he did not want his day job to get in the way. In December, he resigned from the San Diego Zoo to make videos full time. “Lately,” he said, “I’ve been trying to do one video a day, and make that a goal.”
