It’s Not Too Late to Start a Web Series [Star Trek Meets The Office]

1Tim Street profiled a new bit of sci-fi entering the web video space under the auspices of wondering aloud whether or not it’s too late to launch a web series given the very serious economic climate.

I don’t mind, since the series looks pretty cool and very original.  As the title indicates, it’s a sort of cross between The Office and Star Trek, called The Crew.

As to the question Tim asks, I think the answer is clear, particularly in light of a couple bits of news that have popped across the wire today.

Firstly, taking a look at some stats today released by most online portfolio companies and online publishers show an incredible increase in online revenues. Techcrunch has the profile and the telling bar graphs to go along with it.

More interestingly, though, are the stats that Elisabeth Lewin discussed yesterday over at Podcasting News. December set a record for video viewership (as most months do). Comscore recorded increases from Google, Fox, Yahoo, Viacom and Hulu.

From the post:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

In terms of viewership, now is the time to be launching a new series.  The media landscape continues to expand in terms of well traveled destination sites and channels for distribution. Many of those sites are looking to license content for their site, and certainly the online world is seeing a bounce-back in terms of the return of their sponsors (something I’ve verified with a number of large-volume publishers including the recently repositioned Federated Media).

I don’t want to go so far as to say we’ve hit the bottom and started to return upward because my narrow field of vision doesn’t necessarily reflect the economy at large.  Within my narrow field of vision, though, a lot of indicators are starting to show signs of rebound for content producers.