The Model That Breaks the TV Mold

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a very entertaining 45-minute musical that could have happened on TV, but didn’t. Instead, it was released online, where it was a huge, profitable hit, perhaps proving that great content can not only find an audience online, but make money for both its creators and advertisers. “Dr. Horrible” is a struggling super-villain with a crush on the girl at the laundromat, a video blog, and a tendency to break out in song. It is a quirky tale of love and super-heroes starring Neil Patrick Harris, that became a phenomenon online and proved that audiences would embrace content on the Web if it was done well, even if it meant sitting through commercials. The final cost of the production was estimated at $200,000. The creators, Jed, Zach and Joss Whedon convinced the cast and some of the crew to participate with the understanding that they might never get paid—not a business model one can expect to replicate with any regularity. But soon after “Dr. Horrible” hit the Web in three parts, at no charge and without advertising, money was no longer an issue. The series was later placed on Hulu with a single commercial break at the start of each act, and the soundtrack was sold for $9.99 on iTunes. The Whedons also produced T-shirts and other merchandise and spun off the series into a comic book for Dark Horse. Within months the cast and crew were paid in full, and the production has since made back more than twice its original cost. The lesson here is that if you produce good content for portable distribution, multiplatform distribution, people will pay for it, but not until you let them know what they are paying for. Douglas Quenqua, writer for Media says that this model could blossom into an enterprise that could truly be a source of inexpensive and profitable content made exclusively for the Web, further siphoning TV’s increasingly distracted audience.