I’ve been writing about web video since 2009.

I’m part of a tiny group of writers who have sustained interest in web television over the years, taking time to interview producers and write about their shows. (Liz Shannon Miller, one such critic, recently compiled a list of sites/publications that do it consistently).

Televisual has decent traffic, but it’s mostly a personal blog, and it’s small compared to any site updating multiple times a day. But because the list of web TV critics is so small, I regularly gets pitches to review web series. At this point, it’s at least one a day.

This is wrong.

First, I’m only one person, and now that I’m a professor, I have more demands on my time. I simply can’t write 2-3 posts a week on web series like I did as a PhD student. Second, I research the industry. I rarely have time to review web series, even though I can and have.

Where are the web TV critics?

I’ve heard this complaint from producers and network executives, big and small, every year, for years. Where is the New York Times? The AV Club? New York? Slate? The Los Angeles Times? Variety? In the past, I’d say, “it’s coming!”

But it hasn’t.

Every publication with serious television coverage should have a critic solely focused on reviewing and/or covering independent or corporate web television. Nearly every publication with arts coverage has at least one dedicated film critic. Most employ at least two so they can cover both studio and indie film. The market for television is now as robust as film. Web television is just the indier sector of a medium experiencing an exponential rise in production — through cable operators like DirectTV, cable channels from HBO to Hallmark and corporate and independent Internet distributors from Netflix to Blip.

Covering web television in 2013 — when the first video web series premiered in the late 1990s, and the first major hits came out post-YouTube around 2006 — is just common sense.

This isn’t to say they haven’t tried. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter will write up series that become huge hits on their own — miraculously, with no publicity from traditional media — or are financed by conglomerates. I’ve seen coverage of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Halo 4 and Burning Love across media outlets. For a time, the New York Times had a “Watchlist” for web video, which has since slumped. The New Yorker‘s Emily Nussbaum has dedicated some of her limited space to web series. But the coverage is sporadic, sometimes completely nonsensical. For example, last spring the Times produced a video about a bright Latino web series, East WillyB, one of the few in that niche market to actually receive mainstream coverage. And yet, when the second season premiered this year with longer episodes and higher production value, the Times was nowhere to be seen.

Critical coverage is a gaping void in an industry that now has a regular stream of high-profile deals, a cohort of networks dedicated to distributing original programs (Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo, AOL, College Humor, plus dozens on YouTube), contract norms and disputes, millions of fans, veteran producers, and several award shows, including the Streamy and IAWTV Awards, along with the Webbys and festivals like NYTVF.

In a letter to those digital networks earlier this month, media buyers urged them to create more “hits,” citing, laughably, House of Cards, which of course has no advertising aside from placements.

It’s laughable because hits are all around online. Yes, Netflix’s stock is nearing highs again, and it’s no doubt attributable to stready stream of publicity House of Cards and Arrested Development have received. Hulu is releasing canceled television soap operas, reportedly watched by millions. Machinima Prime churns out hit after hit. Amazon is moving forward.

But if they only focus on corporate web productions, media outlets will get a warped perspective on what web TV is and miss out on potential new readers, who’ve been discovering indie TV through social networks.

In my view, the indie side of web TV is even richer, despite less press. Leading YouTubers now generate millions in revenue a year, and yet few people know them, because there’s no coverage. At less than 1% of TV budgets, web series regularly out-class on-air competitors. I dare anyone to compare The Outs to The New Normal, Broad City to 2 Broke Girls, or Black & Sexy TV to the perennial disappointment that is BET. I’d watch The 3 Bits over Wilfred any day. And indie networks now pick up canceled TV series, as lesbian subscription network tello just did just a few weeks ago for a pilot UPN never aired. This is only the tip of a massive iceberg. Indie TV is already a pipeline to traditional television. It continues to be, as Broad City is headed to Comedy Central next year.

Much is made of the fact that New York Times reviews nearly every movie that screens in New York. Most of those films, God bless ‘em, will only attract audiences of several hundred, perhaps several thousand, people. When the 43-minute finale of The Outs screened in Williamsburg last month, the standing-room-only crowd, among them Alan Cumming and John Cameron Mitchell, filled up Public Assembly‘s 4,000 square feet of event space. The video released the next day on Vimeo has garnered 50,000 plays.

Lack of critical attention is one of the key factors suppressing the value of the expanded television market. There are others, including a messy terrain for analytics and lack of research from media buyers, who seem to prefer learning about programs “upfront” instead of finding the audiences and monetizing them where they are.

I understand the pressures facing journalism. I used to be a journalist. Having interned at The Washington Post and various city dailies and magazines in the early 2000s, I have friends who are now out-of-work, or, more often, just out of journalism.

The only explanation for the shut-out is news companies, facing pressure on profit margins, can’t expand staffs and allow current critics to deal exclusively with the likes of Disney and Viacom, with whom they have established relationships through publicists. Editors don’t know what they’re missing, and TV critics either don’t know or are too overworked covering the tidal wave of TV series to branch out. That’s to be expected. I’m no naïf.

But it’s short-sighted.

Because networks have to sell brands on programs before they reach audiences, most of their shows fail. This is true for traditional and web television. Media buyers funnel the bulk of their campaign funds to broadcast and cable, where decades-old relationships with the networks and Nielsen make it easier to evaluate campaigns for clients. So TV commands the bulk of video advertising through spots, leaving branded entertainment and other experiments to the web. This means traditional TV has enough cash to produce a slate of programs of varying quality and ambition and try them out on audiences. Most of them bomb, every year, but having a broad slate of sitcoms and dramas or small batch of high-concept series assures some will hit and garner favorable press from online and print news outlets.

In short, web TV doesn’t have the cash on the top end, so editors assume there’s no value there, that all the shows are “bad” or “cheap,” which makes it harder for networks to argue for more cash and find new talent in the indie space, and so on.

What the media has never really understood is the web works differently from television, and that’s why it’s better. It flips the script, and the best hits are, for the most part, user-generated, not brand- or network-generated. Hence why YouTube’s original content initiative split a $100 million pot 100 ways.

The breadth and depth of production means it actually takes more work to cover web TV and requires a critic/journalist who focuses exclusively on it: following niche blogs from Tubefilter and New Media Rockstars to Queerty and Indiewire; keeping up with talent studios like Maker, Fullscreen and Big Frame; and maintaining relationships with key producers and writers in the know. I know this because it’s precisely what I needed to do to understand the market for my research. It isn’t hard, but a journalist can’t follow all this and all of television. It’s simply not possible.

If this sounds like a rant, it’s because it’s also an apology to all the creators and publicists sending me emails hoping for some coverage.

For the most part, I can’t do it. As a tenure-track professor I’m teaching classes at Northwestern and working on a pair of books on the web series market. I will always write about indie TV, for this blog and for other sites like Indiewire, but the pace will slow down.

I’ve done as much as I can. Here on Televisual, I’ve given space to producers to write their own stories. I’ve compiled a list of web series festivals and conferences, and tried to write guides for newcomers. I’m proud to have the most complete and (mostly) up-to-date directories of GLBT, black, Latino and Asian/Asian American/Pacific Islander web series, in addition to a (less up-to-date) list of New York web series. This is in addition to covering new shows as often as I can and exploring debates over distribution.

I’ve done all this work with hope that, at some point, editors would find them and realize how much activity and vitality there is in web production. The people making these shows are not the proverbial teenagers in their parent’s basement — although some of them are and they make awesome stuff — they are Hollywood’s current and would-be workers. My “Indie TV Innovation” series included two Emmy nominees (one winner), two WGA Award winners, producers with TV credits above and below the line, legions of fans and hundreds of thousands of dollars raised through crowdfunding, years before Rob Thomas and Zach Braff had even heard of Kickstarter.

In 2013, the media shut-out is galling, at best. At worst it’s an insult to the people who spend untold hours and dollars producing innovative entertainment for Americans at work and at home.

What can you do about this?

If you’ve read this far, you clearly care. So e-mail this article to the arts editor of your favorite online or print publication — subject: Cover Indie TV — and tell them to cover independent television as thoroughly as they do broadcast and cable.

If you’re at a loss, you might as well start — as all media criticism must, it seems — with The New York Times.

Henry Jenkins’ textual poachers have become textual producers. Twenty years ago, audiences struggled to get power in production. Fans orchestrated large, coordinated campaigns to revive shows like Beauty and the Beast. Soon media companies started folding viewers into the story, first with reality television and shows like American Idol, then in games and webisodes tied to shows like Lost and Defiance.

Studios and networks expressed anxiety about the loss of control, with some reason. Competition is stiffer and customers more empowered. HBO, which led the cable unbundling, now has a competitor in Netflix, which has plans to exceed the premium channel’s investments in original programming. And this year fans outsmarted a studio (Warner Brothers), who assumed Veronica Mars was a dead franchise with little value left.

The explosion of original series amid greater choice and control from users makes the digital era thrilling. We believe we are seeing a near-perfect market for TV, where the value fans derive from media texts matches what conglomerates see in shows and viewers alike:

So while I’m giving my money to Warner Bros., I do the same every time I pay my cable bill or buy a ticket to one of their films. But this time I’m getting something more palpable: I’m entering into a commercially-facilitated, serialized one-way relationship with a mass media text [Veronica Mars] and its production crew – which is a pretty good definition of fandom in general.

In Jason Mittell’s pithy description of value exchange in the new television economy, audiences, distributors and producers all get what they want.

Is that true? Certainly the studios and distributors are. As I recently pointed out on Jenkins’ blog, media stocks have multiplied threefold – in some cases, fivefold – since the lows of 2008. After purchasing the Star Wars franchise, Disney’s stock has never been higher. On the creative side, the likes of David Fincher, Rob Thomas, Zach Braff, Jenji Kohan and Anthony Zuiker are all getting the chance to develop new or revive lapsed intellectual property.

All evidence points to a radically changed television industry, one more accountable to its customers and talent.

But we have another television, one that, in my view, better reflects the promise of digital technologies to widen distribution, expand marketplaces and connect producers and users more equitably and efficiently.

It’s not an easy market to understand, because unlike the players above, most of its participants lack robust budgets for marketing and publicity. I’ve spent years trying to grasp the breadth and depth of independent production online, and I only know a sliver.

This April I tried to give voice to a small but vibrant segment of that market. My “Indie TV Innovation” series featured essays from television producers who are satisfying audiences, critics and workers, all while releasing stories we never see on “television.” The series of a dozen essays garnered over 1,000 shares, the most popular cluster of posts on my lil’ ol site.

Many are current or would-be workers for the industry who create “hits” by running successful crowdsourcing campaigns, frequently raising totals upwards of $20,000.

Abbi Jacobson (left) and Ilana Glazer

Among them were producers like Ilana Glazer, whose cult web series, Broad City (co-created with Abbi Jacobson), was fresh enough to attract Amy Poehler to produce their show for Comedy Central, who picked it up for a 2014 release.  Michael Cyril Creighton wrote an honest reflection on how he took his lack of value as an underemployed character actor and turned it into a poignant series, Jack in a Box, which won him accolades from the Writers Guild, New York Television Festival and New York Times. 

Of course mainstream attention is only one way to identify innovation in the indie market. In fact, it’s often the least revealing. Take little-known High Maintenance, produced by a talent agent Russell Gregory, actor Ben Sinclair, and 30 Rock’s Emmy-nominated casting director Katja Blichfeld. An anthology series about a weed dealer, the show presaged mainstream acceptance of marijuana consumption, all while adopting limber production practices and giving character-actors roles that showcased their talents better than on-air TV work. Or consider The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which adapted Jane Austen for the vlog-era and raised half a million dollars on Kickstarter to fund another adaptation, Austen’s unfinished Sanditon.

Hundreds of series and networks target communities under-served by legacy television. This includes tello, a subscription lesbian network that recently raised $50,000 to produce a series based on an unaired pilot at UPN, Nikki & Nora. It also includes Black & Sexy TV, a YouTube-based channel with five scripted series under its belt, showcasing rising writing talent like Issa Rae (who has her own web hit, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl) and Lena Waithe (Dear White People).  I could have solicited the prodigious Freddie Wong, whose Video Game High School crowdsourced $1 million for an action comedy starring an Asian American. The indie TV market is clearly more diverse than Hollywood, whose key storytellers and decision makers remain white, middle-aged and male.

Not featured in the series were the scores of vloggers, comedy podcasters and producers under contract with YouTube’s multichannel networks who are amassing audiences the networks can’t find or don’t care to look for.

This is not a perfect market, not nearly. Labor in indie spaces is underpaid and mostly non-union, though that is changing slowly. Lack of investment from brands and studios also means the “quality” of the shows is lower. And yet, despite lower production value, many shows have built, over years, fan bases larger than art TV hits like Girls, Enlightened and Louie.

Welcome to the paradox of the digital marketplace: wider distribution allows for more opportunities for value creation, explored in recent scholarship on Spreadable Media, Media Franchising and Digital Rights, among others.  Yet conglomerates still hold the keys to industry – the space where marketing raises awareness and delivers massive returns on investments in intellectual property. This power allows them to cover up rising inequality in production– detailed in Vicki Mayer’s Below the Line – and increasing control over user information – chronicled in Joseph Turow’s The Daily You.  Netflix overspends on House of Cards and gives Mitch Hurwitz creative control while we miss it lobbying Congress for a significant privacy exception. 

In response to critical excitement over how the revival of Arrested Development would reinvent the television text and business, I suggested indie TV had already done plenty of innovating.  Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenberg, a consistently incisive critic of the industry, responded these innovations had “limited impact.”

From my desktop, the impact isn’t limited. Hundreds of thousands of shows have been produced for web distribution, igniting the passions of millions and raising millions from those fans who don’t want to see their stories die. Because the industry doesn’t know or want to invest in them, the wider public devalues indie production, ensuring value rests in content conglomerates can more easily distribute. Large companies rarely fish the digital sea, let alone feed it; they’d rather we buy from the farm they can control. Exclusivity increases value. It’s no surprise Netflix, walled off from the web, has been able to generate the most buzz in the digital space. 

But if Warner Brothers went bankrupt tomorrow and the Veronica Mars project died, another would take its place online. This isn’t to diminish the incredible affective connections individuals have with texts – we all have them – but rather to suggest bigger possibilities. Instead of sending thousands of letters or millions of dollars to executives and shareholders, fans and viewers could support a system where they have even closer contact with storytellers, who in turn would have more creative control and whose sponsors would have a stake in maintaining the delicacy of that relationship.

That’s a romantic vision, but, practically speaking, feasible. We have to broaden our preconceptions of what counts as a television series, producer and “hit” – as Lotz’s theory of post-network television argues we should – then advocate lawmakers and conglomerates open and restructure media distribution with workers in mind.

All evidence suggests the new networks aren’t going to do it on our behalf.

This article was originally published on Flow.

Back in 2000, when I originally wrote Ylse as a TV spec, there was absolutely no chance of it being produced. At a conference designed to nurture and support Latino talent, I approached an executive for advice who basically asked me, “Who are you for anyone to produce your show?” Others asked condescendingly, “Who’s going to watch this?” It was a slap in the face, especially from folks who had been invited to encourage us. The worst part was, their comments weren’t based on my writing. They had not read a single word. Their immediate objections were based entirely on the concept of a bicultural, bilingual, Latina-driven dramedy written by someone with no track record. I mean, what an obnoxious punk I was, right? I was clearly a delusional child who had no idea how the business worked. True. They were right. Who was I to think that anyone would take me seriously? Plus, how exactly was I supposed to prove that there was a market for this type of content? So, I filed the script away.

It would be years before things changed. In the meantime, I grew irked and frustrated to see very little on mainstream media that was culturally relevant to me. And, trying to explain to folks that Spanish Language TV was just as irrelevant was a losing battle.

Ruth Livier

I’m part of the demo that Alma DDP defines in its 2011 publication “A Brave New World of Consumidores” as “Fusionistas: English oriented [Hispanics] with dual cultural affinity”. There are millions of us. According to the 2010 Census, 50.5 million or 16% of the US population is Hispanic, and there were 35.3 million of us in 2000. The US Census Bureau and US Consumers in Transition: A HispanTelligence 2003 Special Report stated that, “Hispanics are English dominant. More than 75% of all US Hispanics either speak English exclusively or are bilingual and speak English well or very well”.

But, despite the numbers, television programming failed to reflect the changing reality. We continued to primarily be portrayed as stereotypical, secondary characters…if we appeared on TV at all. The 1999 Screen Actors Guild Report “Missing in Action: Latinos In and Out of Hollywood” found that SAG jobs for Latino members hovered at around 3.5% at a time when we made up 13% of the population. (More than 80% of total SAG jobs went to non-Hispanic whites). This report was followed by the 2000 SAG Report titled “Still Missing…” That should sum it up.

Based on the available programming, it seemed that the powers that be were quite content to continue programming with blinders on. It seemed that as far as they were concerned, a) bicultural was not a market, b) minorities only existed in the background and our voices didn’t matter, and c) our purchasing power wasn’t meaningful enough to create content that spoke to us. Bottom line was, we minorities would not be able to prove our markets as long as the decision makers continued to place their bets on shows that primarily appealed to ‘Middle America.’ Until that changed, there would be no way in.

It didn’t matter. A mixture of willfulness and naiveté convinced me that it was only a matter of time before the buying power of the Hispanic market would suddenly be ‘discovered’. The same 2003 HispanTelligence Report stated that, “The spending power of Hispanic youth totaled $19 billion” and later, in 2009, HOPE (Hispanas Organized for Political Equality) would find that “Latina Spending power was $264 billion for that year alone.” There was going to be a tipping point. All one had to do was look at the data. Heck, all you had to do was step out of your front door and pay attention. Based on the numbers, things had to change. So I kept working on my craft and researching my market. I quietly charged forward with this crazy dream that there would one day be a space for us to create content that was culturally relevant to our demo. Except, of course, I had no clue when or how this would happen.

Then everything changed. Technology advanced. Camera equipment was no longer cost prohibitive. The Internet suddenly put worldwide distribution at our fingertips. It all seemed too good to be true. But, it was true. And it was good. And it changed everything. We suddenly had unprecedented access to create, produce and distribute our content. In this exciting new frontier, anyone could finally tell their stories from their point of view without getting discouraged, derailed or having their vision diluted. This was an empowering opportunity that had to be explored. So, with the encouragement of some amazing and talented friends who jumped in and helped make this production possible, I took that old script out of the files reconceived, rewrote, and produced it for the web.

In early 2008, we produced Ylse (www.Ylse.net). Ylse is a not-so-politically correct dramedy about an ambitious, single, thirty-something American Latina on her bumpy quest up the journalistic ladder and the quirky characters that make up her life. Think Bridget Jones with a bicultural twist. In our show, language is a secondary consideration to cultural relevancy. Ylse features modern progressive Latinos dealing with mainstream issues (like the angst of stumbling to achieve the American dream) while balancing our (very specific) dual identity crisis. There was a lot of diversity in front of and behind the cameras on our Ylse team too. And because we were union signatory, the directors on Ylse earned points towards their DGA membership. There was a market for our content and we were thrilled when the industry began to recognize its validity. In 2010, Ylse won the IMAGEN Award for Best Internet Series; the first in IMAGEN Award history.

Thanks to the open, neutral, non-discriminatory environment of the Internet, we finally had an unobstructed connection to a potential audience base, which meant that we could finally prove our market while encouraging others to follow suit. Some of the most rewarding moments of the entire process came in the form of emails from fans around the globe. Emails, which answered the question that had been asked so condescendingly years before, “Who is going to watch this?” Well as it turns out, lots of people. Our audience was even broader than I had anticipated. We didn’t just speak to Latinos, but to folks around the globe who could relate to having a bicultural experience:

“I hugely enjoyed Ylse yesterday, then read an interview with you, all the while marveling at how it is possible to come from opposite sides of the world and yet to end up so alike. I am a Russian-Jewish immigrant born in the former USSR (Ukraine). My family arrived in the US when I was eight….I now live in France with my family…“

– Julia Kogan/France

It thrilled me to hear we inspired others to find and express their voice:

“… I LOVE the show! It was perfect. As a Latina it just makes me so proud to know that something like Ylse not only exists, but is possible. You’ve inspired me to do write my own story about finding and using my voice.”

– Icess Fernandez /Blogger

We filled a gap:

“Just watched the show. Super funny and super impressive stuff! Thank god there’s something out there for the Spanglish speaking community. It’s like Sex and the City and Ugly Betty had a baby! Amazed!”

–Rudy Roque/Los Angeles

The press and celebrity friends were very encouraging. And further proved the scope of our potential audience:

“Ylse is a smart, funny show, and a powerful example of what independent series creators can accomplish in a new era of entertainment.”

-Eric Mortensen, Director of Content Development, Blip.tv

“…jumping between English and Spanish with an ease so well-written, English only audience members won’t even notice….Ylse’s dilemmas will strike a chord, with most young, cute, smart single girls.”

–Tubefilter

“ (Ylse)…goes beyond stereotypical boundaries.”

-Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development, The Larry Sanders Show)

It was all very rewarding. In November 2009, I was featured on the cover of the Writers Guild of America’s Written By magazine for being the first person to join that union via work in New Media. It was a personal honor, but it was significant in essence because it meant that the industry was acknowledging that New Media was in fact a viable alternative way in for the rest of us. It meant that programming on the web was not up to the same few decision makers who control traditional media. No longer would low-budgets, no track-record or no connections mean there is no way in.

The experience has been exhausting, rewarding, empowering and eye-opening. (At one point, I even found myself in DC testifying at the FCC! But, that’s another story.) As an artist, a woman, a Latina, an immigrant and an entrepreneur, the web has afforded me unprecedented opportunities to participate in content creation and distribution. Hopefully our work will empower the next generation to follow suit. I hope that, to them, having a platform where they can express themselves on an equal playing field with anyone else is nothing out of the ordinary. Because for us, it has been nothing short of revolutionary:

-The open Internet has given the rest of us an opportunity to work on and improve our crafts.

-It has given us the opportunity to provide jobs and creative outlets for a more diverse workforce.

-It has allowed us to define ourselves by telling stories from our points of view.

-It has allowed us to create more varied, complex and positive portrayals of our demos.

-It has given us the ability to connect directly with our audience and prove our markets.

-It has given us the ability to connect with like-minded people around the globe.

-It has empowered and motivated us to create content, knowing there is a distribution outlet for it. (Plug: Stay tuned for my next show, Cousins).

The bottom line is, as long as the digital space remains neutral and does not go the way of traditional media (where a handful of gatekeepers decide what is viable entertainment), we will never again be disregarded by someone who essentially asks, “Who are you to have your story be told?” We all deserve to have our stories told. We all deserve to be heard, to be acknowledged, and to not have to sit in the shadows until someone else decides that our lives are worthy of being reflected in the media. The web is the great equalizer. It is a revolutionary platform of hope and opportunity where diverse voices can finally partake in the national conversation at all levels. Ylse was made possible only because of the neutral Internet.

–Ruth Livier

Ruth Livier is the creator and star of Ylse. As an actor, Livier has worked in theater (Theater of the Ear’s 2012 Grammy-nominated The Mark of Zorro, Kirk Douglas Theatre’s A Perfect Wedding), television (Resurrection Blvd., King of the Hill) and film (Drag Me To Hell). She has been featured by Written By, TV Guide, Emmy, People en Espanol, among other publications.  Livier has been a keynote speaker at the Latin Youth Conference, SAG, WGA, NALIP and Digital Hollywood. She is currently working on Cousins, a one-hour dramedy about three very different Latina cousins who end up having to live under one roof and somehow manage to keep it all together even though they drive each other up the wall. 

At literally every panel, mixer or meet and greet that has ever been or ever will be, someone is asking the question, “What would you tell yourself if you were starting out?” You’ve probably been asked it yourself, and the typical (and totally legit) answer is, “Don’t wait. Just do it.” But the other, slightly more brutal answer is: you’re going to do stuff out of your comfort zone, and you better like it. The “learn to like it” mentality is the important part.

We’ve all probably figured out the first part of that sentiment. Filmmaking is an adventure. You’re going to be solving a big logistical, artistic puzzle, and that’s gonna be a challenge. But I’m talking about all the business-school-y stuff. Stuff I never thought I would have to deal with, never wanted to deal with, and frankly, never thought I would be good at.

But it’s hard to tell those bright eyed panel goers, or those old friends, or your friend’s cousin who’s really excited about web series the truth, because it’s embarrassing. I like that marketing stuff. I don’t like it as much as writing, or directing or being on set. But I do like it, because I learned to like it. Theres a rush in anything that clicks. Once you’ve figured out how to do something well, it gets fun, it gets exciting.

There’s this idea among artistic communities that marketing is crass, boorish, boring and anti-art. I think those attitudes aren’t always wrong, but I also can’t afford to care. The success of your web show is going to be thanks to countless people, your crew, your cast, your support system of family and friends, but its failure is exclusively yours.

Matt Enlow with stars Mary Kate Wiles (left) and Kylie Sparks

I’ve been lucky enough to find some success with Squaresville, but it took years, and multiple shows before I found something that landed the way this show has. I want to support people, and encourage creativity and freedom, and I genuinely believe in the promise that the DIY internet ethos that web series promises… You have to know it, and own it, and keep up on changing trends and strategies. Because even the guys who are cranking out videos every week and are getting millions of views, know that they have to play to the strategy of the medium. There isn’t a single person, no matter how relaxed or “coincidental” their success is, who isn’t hustling to gain more exposure. If they’re making it look cool, it’s because that’s part of their brand in the first place.

There’s a misconception that seems prevalent, that just because web is a great place to get started, we can ignore the nature of the medium. Just because you have television or film aspirations, doesn’t mean you should make a tv show and put it on the web. You wouldn’t expect a person who knows how to read and write, but has never read a novel to write well.

Think of 5 TV shows or movies you LOVE. Easy, right?

Now think of 5 web series you LOVE.

Now imagine me handing you a book of computer gobbedly-gook. In that book are ways for you to show people your art, but it is the driest thing you’ve ever read. Would you read it immediately, or would you throw it in the corner, eye it guiltily for a few weeks, then shelve it?

There aren’t going to be people to do the hard stuff for you, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s important to hire the right people for the job, but if you’re not making any cash, the right person is you. Go buy some books on web marketing. I used to joke about all the classes I should’ve taken at school in addition to “The Outsider in German Literature and Film” (which you should totally take if you get the chance) and how helpful they would be. Sure, at a certain point you need to bring on experts to help out with the bigger picture – don’t try designing, printing and fulfilling T-shirt orders yourself (like I did), but you still have to have a passion for every part of your enterprise. Because you’re starting a business, not making a short film.

Marketing is just another way for you to repurpose your work for a new audience. Heck, it’s already a web series. Marketing is content and content is marketing, right? It’s all part of how people are consuming your work, so who better to shape that messaging? I know it can get a little nerdy, a little time consuming and at worst, kind of boring. There will be late nights reading up on SEO and tagging strategies. But once you’ve sparked an audience, once you’ve found your super fans, and they’re working with you as a community, the experience becomes that much richer.

–Matt Enlow

Matt Enlow is the creator of Squaresville. His earlier series include: Engaged, MyJobESearchOnlinester.com and Mountain Man, for which he earned three Streamy nominations. He works as an editor at Comedy Central and previous helped found Strike TV.

The internet is a perfect example of yin and yang. To me, as repulsive and damaging the World Wide Web has been — check out the Deep Web of child sex trafficking, web-purchased slaves and real-time confirmation of murder…murder!!! — it is equally informative, enlightening and richly advantageous.

I’ve been fortunate enough to benefit artistically from the infinitely growing platform that is YouTube. Fucking fuck yeah, YouTube! But also, equally: fuck yeah, human race.

I’m the co-creator/-producer/-writer and -star (all co- with Abbi Jacobson!) of the web-to-TV series, Broad City. It’s a single-camera sitcom about two early twenty-somethings struggling internally and externally in New York City, the sexiest city on Earth (I’ve traveled very little, full disclosure).

Ilana Glazer (left) and Abbi Jacobson

When Abbi and I started Broad City, the freedom to do anything we want, try any process, any plot line that struck us as funny, because the internet is one big free-for-all, was the spark for the project.

But the fuel that kept the fire going was the feedback. While YouTube is notorious for having degrading, sexist and racist comments, Abbi and I found the response to our work to be quite the opposite — warm, embracing, and encouraging. It prodded us with this hunger, hunger for more love from our friends and, eventually, one-person-removed from our friends. Then, two-people-removed from the original friend, and so on and so on. We got to see and feel (and taste and smell and hear, of course) the exact rate at which our show became increasingly popular.

We were able to experience and understand how, exactly, the way in which our show was popular. Broad City is not the type of project that produces viral videos – I almost said “there isn’t titty-poppin’” and then realized: there absolutely is. Okay, so there IS, indeed, titty-poppin,’ but it’s blurred out, and we don’t have puppies snuggling, or turtles fucking, or skinny dudes being sexually “squashed” by obese women. That’s viral shit! We don’t got that. We got quality, one-step-at-a-time character development and universal-yet-specific situations inside of a cinematic-yet-casual aesthetic space. Again: this. ain’t. viral. shit.

Amy Poehler in ‘Broad City’

But what Broad City discovered is possible on the web is a quality-over-quantity cult following. We learned that, with this specific product, whoever watched one episode – if they didn’t immediately X out because we were two young women talking with our shirts on – that person would watch all episodes. And if one watched all episodes, they shared it every week as it came out.

While the web – and all media – is flooded with two-dimensional images that demean peoples and cultures, it’s also, I believe, the most democratic platform for art. It is for the people, by the people, providing instantaneous feedback. It speaks for what’s happening right now.

–Ilana Glazer

Ilana Glazer is the co-creator, writer, producer and star of Broad City. She is an alum of the Upright Citizens Brigade and was nominated for an ECNY Award (Emerging Comic New York) for best female standup in 2011. She has performed stand-up at UCB, the PIT, Union Hall, Happy Ending, and Parkside Lounge, among others.

Black&Sexy.

Some gravitate to the title with excitement. Others are more shy and quiet about it.

Our digital network is making the simple statement that black culture is modern, progressive and every day – all day – sexy.

Our approach is realism.

Founders Dennis Dortch and Brian Ali-Harding have been carving out this niche since their college days.  Jeanine Daniels and myself – also founders – line up with that sensibility and bring the woman’s touch to the brand.  It’s a great balance of four creatives, and we are relentlessly straightforward with each other doing whatever it takes to serve the brand which is ultimately our people – our audience.

Numa Perrier

Our Tone.

The sense of humor we promote is a mix of wryness and mischief – we like to be playful, and we infuse that into all of our series.  If we’re laughing you will be too.  We are constantly asking ourselves – what would really happen or what has really happened…imagining and re-creating realities provides more emotional or hilarious moments.

Our Tasks.

We are on our 5^th episodic series. The structural mechanics of running a network are challenging and sometimes daunting.  We suffer from sleep deprivation and stress to turn out our weekly Black&Sexy releases, but our vision of becoming a household name keeps us on target as we take a deep breath and deal with the weekly priorities.  Those include managing everything from script development, to production, post-production, internal and external PR, merchandising, other sales opportunities, and packaging for possible network placements.  Black&Busy Baby.

Our Sound.

Music is a strong component of our brand as we collaborate with indie soul artists for every series to bring the nuanced emotional tone through the story.   We will be expanding on this relationship we have with the indie music community in the near future.

Our Cast.

Our actors are handpicked through referrals and auditions.  Many have remarked on our focusing on black women with natural hair, and we feel we are a visual representation of the new tide of black women that don’t feel bound to always wear a straightened hairstyle.  We aren’t limited to this, but we definitely speak to that variety.  With our actors we look for subtlety and honesty in performance, as well as the ability to improv and stay flexible with our ever-changing scripts and storylines.

Our Audience.

We are most successful when we combine our instincts with the energy of our viewers. Our audience is smart, very astute and not afraid to speak up for what they want. We lean eighty percent women with a median age of 24-35.  US, UK, Canada, France and Germany. Ultimately, we are here for the long term – building our community worldwide to tune in and interact with our content as often as we deliver it.

–Numa Perrier

Numa Perrier is co-founder and head of development at BLACK&SEXYTV. She heads development and creative production for the BLACK&SEXY.TV network at large, ushering projects from script to screen. She is co-creator of the breakout YouTube series RoomieLoverFriends, distributed on the Issa Rae Channel. Numa also co-stars in The Couple, BLACK&SEXY.TV’s most watched series.  

Somehow I became a part of the first generation of web series creators.

In 2009, I had spent a few years overworking myself at the non-entertainment survival corporate gig. I worked into the nights, and weekends, and took late night cell phone calls from my supervisor. If I had foresight, I would say this was time spent “undercover,” observing the behavior within a different corporate species. But truth be told, I just appreciated a steady paycheck and a savings account with a + before the balance.

Then the economic crisis hit and people began acting especially nuts. For some the recession led to desperation and depression. For me it led to inspiration because people are pretty funny to watch when they’re doing stupid crap out of paranoia.

So, I wrote a few scenes, venting all my frustrations about how the economic crisis affected the middle and working classes in this country. The scenes ultimately became a web series called Downsized, and it was a bit drama, a bit comedy, a series of interconnected vignettes with multiple characters facing issues that were real and sad and absurd.

Daryn Strauss

One common trait you find amongst early web series—authenticity. We made content that felt authentic not packaged for ROI, which made our series both successful from a critical or audience appreciation standpoint but also challenging to sell when we were ready to do so. Even the user-generated home videos have this trait, which is why people shared them. So many authentic voices have emerged from web series in the past 4 years—Michael Cyril Creighton, Tina Cesa Ward, Susan Miller, Issa Rae, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, Julie Ann Emery, Steve Silverman, Erin Gould, Julia Ahumada Grob, Bernie Su, Matt Enlow, Jason Leaver, Al Thompson, Blake Calhoun, Felicia Day, Lena Dunham, who made two micro-budget web series before Girls and Tiny Furniture, and so many more—I wish I could name them all! But the point is these voices are fresh, and that’s why their web series worked…and that’s also why many of those mentioned above have raised hundreds of thousands in crowd-source funding.

We took scrappy to a new level. We used whatever we had and made it look better. A Google search was sometimes the only education we needed. We could make good content and barely spend any money.

To make Downsized, I rented a camera at the cheapest rate possible, the weekend rate, which gave me two and a half days of equipment for basically the price of one. During our first shoot, we packed in scenes in six different locations from six different episodes, starting at 6:30 PM on Friday and ending at 10 PM Sunday. My cameraman, soundman and I were driven from location to location by my parents, as the three of us held lighting kits, a camera, props, and a boom on our laps. In the very last scene of that first shoot, an attorney has an encounter with his emotional office cleaning lady who can’t communicate in English, and he has an awakening of sorts about how he has completely been disregarding her as a human being. As Esra Gaffin and Chris Henry Coffey performed the scene gorgeously, I stood behind the immensely talented Chris Shimojima on camera, watching the monitor, and felt like I was having an out of body experience. How did we just make this?

Being a part of a new industry during its coming of age has been quite interesting. When I released Downsized, I didn’t have any expectations that it would have any resonance outside of my family and whoever was saved in my Gmail. I was just searching for a way to burn creative energy and experiment. When I received my very first review ever for Downsized and it was a lovely one, I cried. It was weird. I barely even got my required annual review at my job, let alone anything in the press. When I was nominated for a Writers Guild Award in 2012, I prayed I wouldn’t win because I was freaked out enough by the idea that anyone would recognize my work. I made a web series because nobody could tell me not to, and then it turned out that being the boss was my natural state. Who knew? The web series industry embraced me early, valued my contributions, listened to what I had to say, believed I could and should do more, recognized and awarded me, and for that, I feel very lucky.

I began my career in web series in 2009. It is 2013, and I’ve now worked on the indiest of indiest web shows and the networkiest of networkiest web shows. I’ve witnessed online agencies be built and then dissipate, distribution portals launch and then be abandoned, million dollar web series be made then considered successful if they broke even, a vigilant pursuit to get dollars from “branded” video. The concept of revenue splits seemed exciting until you never saw one check. It was cool to be unknown until it was better to be a celebrity.

We’ve now reached a time when people are comfortable with the fact that online content can be viewed anywhere, on any device including television, and the web is now being used not only as a platform for fresh ideas but as an alternative distribution channel to television and theaters. Monetization is now happening—through subscription, commercials, overlays, display, sponsorship, and crowd-source funding.

Still, the web can also be used in its purest form to distribute content that is meant to be shared because that content is fresh and authentic, from user uploads to interactive series to shows that speak to a specific community to content that is created specifically to fuel conversation.

As the web becomes more and more of a content marketplace as opposed to a content experimentation lab, just remember—there is an art to the share.

–Daryn Strauss

Daryn Strauss is a writer, producer, and director who earned a 2012 Writers Guild Award nomination for Downsized. In 2010, she created the popular blog Digital Chick TV to highlight women’s contributions in online video. She’s written guest episodes of hit series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Game Room, guest starred in Then We Got Help, served as a writer/producer of the 2012 Digitas NewFront and the Programming Director for the groundbreaking multi-platform series MAKERS from AOL and PBS, creating an online media strategy which led #MAKERSchat to be a US trend on Twitter for 6 hours with over 38,000 tweets during the “MAKERS: Women Who Make America” TV premiere in February, the largest social activation in AOL history.

Soon after the Kickstarter campaign for Veronica Mars sparked a ton of conversations and debates, another woman-led project took the crowdfunding site by storm, raising over $60,000 soon after it launched.

The team behind The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a YouTube-based adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, have already raised over $400,000 with three days to go by selling a DVD of the complete series. Funds from the sales will go toward a new Austen adaptation, Welcome to Sanditon, based on the author’s unfinished Sanditon.

Where did Lizzie Bennet come from? Out of view of the mainstream media, the web series has racked up an impressive 180,000 YouTube subscribers, enough so that, right before DECA came in to take part-ownership of the show, it was self-sustaining (revenue paid for production).

Of course, nothing could be more mainstream than Jane Austen. How did they do it? By telling a traditional story untraditionally. Like 2006′s lonelygirl15, Lizzie Bennet started slow, taking its time with key plot points . This built up anticipation for how the series would handle plot points Austen fans knew were coming, like keeping William Darcy offscreen until #darcyday and hyping their first encounter with aplomb. The writer, Bernie Su (Compulsions), also modernized some story lines, like making Collins ask Lizzie to join a startup, rather than his hand in marriage. The result is one of the most fan-driven web series since its predecessor in lonelygirl15.

I decided it was time to assess the range of representations of women online. Most of these shows are as shockingly (or jarringly) groundbreaking as HBO’s Girls, which has already done a lot of expand televisual images of sex, including rape. Even broadcast TV, with shows like The Mindy Project and New Girl, has been trying out quirkier ways to reach young women.

Online stories about women are quite rich and have been for years. A year after lonelygirl15 rose to fame by giving geek boys their ultimate cam girl, Felicia Day’s The Guild delivered a counter-punch: a serious awkward, geek girl, a trend that persists today. Major networks put women at the center of genre stories, as NBC did with Gemini Division and MTV did with Valemont. Indie creators build out niches: Anyone But Me’s told the story of serious teen girls who were very seriously in love. Awkward Black Girl gave black women a complicated lead before Scandal, and with natural hair to boot.

I decided to take a look the range of representations of women (Latina and white, young and middle-aged, cis- and trans) are being produced by indie creators.

Check out my list over at Indiewire!

As I write this I just finished shooting tello’s newest project called Roomies, starring Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard.  It was one of those magical shoots that had the combination of an amazing crew that worked like a beautiful machine and actors who were pitching jokes and making the written words funnier.  After the shoot was done I had creative withdraw, I was exhausted but also missing the process and collaboration.

It is in times like these that I realize how lucky I am to have a platform where I can bring talented people together to make content for the lesbian community.  I am also so lucky to be able to tell stories that are important to our community and stories that make us laugh.  This is what tello means to me.  I am able to support lesbian content for creatives and for viewers.  I have had so many amazing e-mails from people who view our content as a way to connect to who they are or to escape an unsupportive community.  For our content providers it is a way for them to make a little money for the creative work they put into their projects.  It is very difficult for niche programming to make any money via free video platforms because you need so many views.  With tello we have projects making, for thousands of views, what it would take them to make with half-a-million views on free platforms.

How we do this is a revenue share.  Our content sits behind a pay wall.  We have Premium Content subscribers who pay $3.99 a month for our content.  We have anywhere from 800-1,200 subscribers a month.  We distribute 80% of the net subscription funds back to the content providers based on their percentage of views.  So if we have $1,000 in net subscription fees $800 of that is distributed among the content providers.  If a project receives 20% of the views they will receive a check for $160 for that month.  We have a passionate and active base of subscribers and that will only grow as we have merged with OneMoreLesbian.com which is the premier site for lesbian video content.  Together we bring our resources that make our ability to make content for the community even greater.

We work to support the community on all levels- and that is what tello, LLC means to me.  One project I’d like to highlight, one I think is the future of the web, is our most recent project The N&N Files.  This web series is a reboot of the unaired, yet widely seen, network pilot Nikki & Nora.  This pilot has a lesbian fan fiction following, and now we are able to take this story to the web.  Because of the size of the project and the level of talent we are engaging, we are crowdfunding for $50,000 using Indiegogo.  Here is the link should folks want to know more and/or donate: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-n-n-files.

As a side note:

I often read about how women are underrepresented in front of and behind the camera — that does not happen on a tello project.  Our cast and crew are primarily female, and our stories always have a female lead and are mostly female cast.  I love being able to support women and lesbian stories.

–Christin Mell

Christin Mell is co-founder, executive producer and chief executive officer of tello, LLC. With 7 original tello produced projects under her belt and as many in pre-production, Mell provides the lesbian community with the quality entertainment they deserve and the stories they crave, including the Western comedy, Cowgirl Up, teen homelessness drama, The Throwaways, and young adult love story, I Hate Tommy Finch. You can follow Mell on Twitter @christintello and tello on Facebook.

It all started with a vision: to create a series that spoke to the next Generation Latino. For those of you who hear “Latino” and think Spanish-speaking immigrant, East WillyB is not your grandmother or housekeeper or nanny’s telenovela. We wanted to create a fresh, hip series for the new American — that hybrid culture-maker, part-urban, part-old country, part hip-hop, part-Salsa, part-Spanglish. Did you know that every month 50,000 Latino Youth turn 18? Well, we do, and that’s why we saw a huge market opportunity: to create content for a population whose existence the networks have failed to acknowledge.

Our inspiration came from the veterans — Felicia Day built an empire on gaming geeks, our friends at Anyone But Me spoke to teens claiming their sexuality — look how well they did! If they could build it so the fans kept growing, so could we. And so began the dream, and the belief that miracles do happen, but only if you work your ass off and keep believing.

Step 1: Start Small

You can only make a big miracle happen if you believe in the small ones. When we started East WillyB, it was with a crew of four, some of whom were former students that we were training to operate sound. We wrote scripts and shot based on availability of cast, we practiced guerilla filmmaking at it’s best, each of us playing multiple roles — an actor on break became a traffic director, our director was often holding a boom, our producer got a sunburn shielding actors prevent glare on screen. But we believed in what we were doing and where we were going, and we always ran the production like a business, knowing that someday soon, we’d be running a crew of 100!

Step 2: Dream Big

Armed with a well shot “pilot season,” created on a shoestring budget, we knocked down the doors of Hollywood because that’s where we thought we belonged! We shared our dream of creating a digital series that lived on multiple screens, and while we made a lot of friends, we were still two “no-names,” who came off “green,” (their words not mine.) But it didn’t phase us, why? Cause we believed in miracles and we had a vision that was only growing in success. We didn’t need the industry to believe, because we were now a part of a different industry (digital) that was born believing.

Step 3: Dream Bigger

When you believe in miracles, you keep setting the bar higher for yourself cause anything is possible. When we told people we planned to raise $50,000 in 50 Days, most people asked what our plan was for when we did not reach the goal. We simply smiled, “Don’t worry, we got this.” And we did. East WillyB is now bigger than our hopes and fears. It’s a business. It’s a brand. It has a fan page (pretty rad). It is a miracle that keeps growing!

Step 5: Celebrate the Victories

So what if you don’t have 100,000 views yet. That takes time (and often money!). Keep building and celebrating your tribe. Keep learning what’s working with your series, and explore what isn’t. Make small goals you can reach and celebrate. And then keep reaching higher.

Step 4: Don’t Stop Believing

Three years later and there are times when we doubt. We get scared. We wonder about the future of East WillyB. We worry about our finances and how we can continue to sustain ourselves and our business. We worry. But we are surrounded by evidence of miracles. The beauty of being on the vanguard of the digital is that it is an industry of miracle believers. We don’t do it for the money. We don’t do it for the fame. We do it because we believe that our stories deserve to be told. We do it because we believe in the transformative power of seeing yourself in media, especially if you’ve never been seen there before. That is the miracle. That is why we keep believing.

–Julia Ahumada Grob and Yamin Segal

Julia Ahumada Grob is the co-creator and lead actor of East WillyB. She is an actor, writer, and creative producer of Chilean and Jewish heritage. Named one of 25 emerging theater artists by Kevin Spacey, she is a 2011 Fellow of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) Latino Producers Academy and Latino Artist Mentoring Program. Julia holds a BA from Brown University and has studied acting with the Labyrinth Theater Company, Steppenwolf Theater Company and at Upright Citizen’s Brigade. www.juliagrob.com

Yamin Segal is a co-creator and co-writer of East WillyB. He holds a BA in Film Production from Emerson College and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His screenplay Three Latin Girls was honored as a finalist at the 2006 Slamdance Screenplay Competition, while his MFA thesis Que Lindo Es Bailar was a finalist at the Sundance Producers’ Lab, and one of four screenplays selected to participate at the 2008 Nantucket Screenwriters Colony. His directorial debut, the 2009 short film El Ladroncito (The Little Thief) – which was filmed in his native Nicaragua — successfully toured the international festival circuit garnering various awards including Best Short Narrative at the Arizona International Film Festival and Special Committee Prize at the Miami Short Film Festival.