Disney’s Choice
I wonder if assumptions about horizontal vs vertical content hold. Disney put the first episodes of their Ducktales reboot on youtube, and a week later it has... 1.6m views. On youtube? That doesn&#x27;t pay <i>one</i> hobbyist minimum wage for the month much less a best in class animation studio.<p>On one hand, yeah, its targeted at kids. They probably aren&#x27;t savvy at online content discovery. They almost certainly aren&#x27;t subscribed to the Disney XD Youtube channel when there are Spiderman vs Pregnant Elsa videos to watch.<p>On the other hand, they put it out for free, to anyone in the US with an Internet connection, and they got 1.6m hits.<p>I don&#x27;t think horizontal works as a business strategy. It relies entirely on memetic effects to propagate your content because the advertising budget required to reach an entire demographic to get ubiquity is magnitudes larger than the cost of actually making the thing. There is too much content inundating people - <i>especially children</i>. It makes your success completely random. Did your &quot;meme&quot; scenes go viral? Did your intricately designed quotable character take off? Did you have those, and just get overshadowed by some other meme at the time?<p>We won&#x27;t see the consequences for a while. It will be 10 years before the cablecutters who dropped Disney have children at a critical enough mass to dramatically limit the number of young faces in front of non-interactive screens. But when that comes, it will have consequences none of these companies traditionally built on tv viewership are ready for. And I don&#x27;t even know if they can prepare.<p>I feel like the only real end-game solution is to cultivate a fanbase, and use them as your revenue stream - much like how music has become today. Artists don&#x27;t make anything off trying to sell their music anymore, because not being on spotify and pandora is a death sentence to your relevance. You need the audience, even if they aren&#x27;t paying you anything, to attract fans that want mech you can profit from.<p>It would be really weird to see Ducktales as a Patreon project that is getting paid by 100k supporters several millions a month, but it seems to me that is the endgame for original creative media in the long run.