There are only a handful of web series that I am aware of, can you name one that was marketed regionally? The problem is that the media barrons keep thinking old school and try to apply their DVD region locking and other marketing nonsense to the internet. It doesn’t make sense anymore, at least not online.

My math shows as of this Sunday it just broke 5 million views. Keep in mind other than the Comic Con announcement, there was ZERO promotion for this series outside of Crackle. Just a press release and a few bloggers wrote about it.

So perhaps the 5 million views should not be measured against the USA population but just the Crackle membership. So how many members does Crackle have? By looking at a fresh membership number, it seems to be less than 3 million.

There are many millions of international Xena fans and many of them know Zoe as Lucy’s stuntwoman, heck Lucy is in the series – yet Sony did not try to cross promote to that fan base. It was idiotic.

Well, after reading lots of your reviews of shows that have had success, I’ve only noticed you bag them and not praise them, especially the classic shows without big backing like the It’s All In Your Hands shows and early Big Fantastic works. Regardless of big backing or not, web series are still a new thing to people, and they don’t understand them yet. 100,000 views an episode is pretty good, some cable shows barely get that. As a new media writer, I think you should encourage web series creators more than bash them, which I’d say if you went back and looked you do more than you don’t.

I am sure they are already are in the black as they probably have some deals from MipTV and Cannes to cover the raw production costs.

Dang, dude. I even said Angel of Death “Killed” in the headline. That’s pretty positive.

While I think the industry still needs to develop a standard set of success metrics — I don’t think creating a blanket statement like 100,000 views is the way to go.

AoD features a high-profile writer and a (somewhat) famous person in the lead and the backing of a big studio. I think it’s okay to have higher expectations for that than a homegrown drama series without such perks.

@DP81 It’s hard to sustain an audience on 1 portal, had Crackle proliferated AoD to other platforms they may have had 5 times the views. That being said, I’m sure Sony has planned their release so that they can still send the show out to other formats.

@Chris Albrecht Any web series that can get more than 100,000 views an episode should be considered a success story. To get 200,000+ is fantastic. You should write more about that than the negative like you always do when a web series has any success. I don’t think you’ve ever written a positive review of a series.

So the 5 million views are USA audience only. Plenty of non-USA people are very unhappy with that and it ruins the whole “first series made for online” claims. Could easily be 10 million+ views now.

Also the stats are publicly viewable, email me if you want to know how.

Per monetization discussion, I hope they at least broke even so that more high quality web series like AoD will continue to be made. I watched the entire series at one sitting and for whatever reason, I saw few ads (didnt get one for each episode). It did lead me to check out other Crackle shows though and I was impressed. Sony might have something here if they continue to supply quality content.

That would indeed be good to know (maybe we can get the three of us on a conference call :) ). The ads are just one piece as I believe AoD will also be packaged for sale on DVD, so we’ll need to see those numbers as well if that happens.

In the long run it’s about revenue and profit, not just raw viewer numbers…