We launched www.MaddyGTV.com last September, only 2 months ago. We’ve been trying to get “Inside Marie’s Play Place” and “Regarding Jenny” on Pay Cable for a year now. These two shows are the most expensive property’s the company has.
These shows are expensive, because of the size of the productions, the locations involved and the amount of cast involved. Working with a RealDoll is not all the glamour that’s been reported.
“Inside Marie’s Play Place” was budgeted to make it to cable television by Series 3. It still hasn’t been picked up. We’ve now done 4 Series, a ‘Thanksgiving Special’ and 3 Spin-Off’s. It’s gone on longer than we' can afford, because it’s got a lot of fans around the world, and well… it’s hard for all of us here at Maddy G to let them down.
Well… a full year went by between the first episodes of “Play Place” and “Regarding Jenny” and we’ve done (literally) everything we can to get the attention of the cable programmers. “The show’s too weird”, or “Who’s gonna watch a RealDoll?” to simply “I don’t get it.” We’ve heard all of it.
But over this last year, the audience has grown beyond what we expected. It’s everywhere, so it’s hard to get an actual number, but our best estimates put the total viewership at around 500,000 from more than half the world. We’re tracking 102 Different Countries who have tuned in. So… no matter what the cable programmers are saying, this ‘show’ has an audience.
We decided, as a last ditch attempt, before we fold the whole hand and move these two shows into the history books, we’d start our own Internet TV Channel and start running the show.
And www.MaddyGTV.com was born. We set a budget of 200 gigs a month in Bandwidth. Zero advertising budget, so we’d have to get the word out thru the site network and social networking. The whole point is to get people to watch the show and decide for themselves if they want to see more of it.
Correction. To get as many viewers as we can, within budget, so we don’t go broke in the process.
We launched September 1st, 2010 with the ‘Pilot Episode’ of all our shows, plus “Fury” as the ‘Free Movie of the Week’. By the end of that month, we ran the entire “Play Place Series” as well as all of Maddy’s ‘mainstream movies’ and we had 11,000 viewers tuning in mostly from the United States, Canada and Europe. (No surprise there, that’s Maddy’s core audience). We used like 50gigs of bandwidth.
The network was built to accommodate 200 viewers simultaneously, and during September, we had a couple of nights where we had 400 – 500 viewers, and no real complaints and no real problems with the functionality of the network. Month one – handled.
Month Two: October. The official 1 year anniversary of “Regarding Jenny” being released, so we featured the series running a new episode a week, for four weeks, opposite the first four episodes of “Inside Marie’s Play Place”. Plus, we featured a few new movies from our friends at other studio’s. “Day of The Ax” from Brain Damage and “Tear” from Bobby Jones Films.
The first week of October had 13,000 viewers. More than the entire Month of September. And it just kept growing. By the end of October, we had tracked 58,000 viewers from 99 different countries. We exceeded our bandwidth budget half way thru the 3rd week.
Now, we’re having some problems. Some viewers are experiencing long buffering times, and some are having connection problems all together. There’s simply too many viewers accessing the files at once during peak times. The solution to this problem is an upgrade to the system that would utilize a ‘CDN’ or ‘Content Delivery Network’ much like the network news sites use. The upgrade would cost about $1,000 to implement and raise our monthly bandwidth budget from $200 to $500, the monthly cost of maintaining the CDN.
Since MaddyGTV is free, we just don’t have the cash.
So, here’s our conundrum. We have yet to achieve the traffic levels required to lure paying advertisers, but the traffic we are getting, we can’t afford on Affiliate Advertising alone. And our affiliate advertising is doing exceptionally well. We’re converting 1:3 to Amazon.com, and in fact sold out of the “Day of the Ax” DVD over the Halloween weekend. We’re converting 1:15 to HotMovies. The rub in affiliate advertising, is the commissions are small. From a $20 DVD sale at Amazon, we get like $.80. We get like $0.03 per minute at Hotmovies. All combined, we earned like $40 in affiliate advertising during October.
Between September and October, we more than quadrupled our viewership. If we grow at all, yet alone double or triple the viewership, then www.MaddyGTV.com will become a financial liability, and will be in real danger of closing.
Weird, because having that many viewers should be a good thing, right? It seems that way to me too.
However… ‘Tube Sites’ and ‘Torrents’ have made pretty much everyone think content is free. It’s really hard to get someone to pay for what they believe is, or should be – free.
We have ‘donate’ buttons, and we have a DVD store, and all the proceeds go directly towards our bandwidth costs, but it’s not really working. No one’s really buying, and no one’s donating, and so all of us here at Maddy G Productions are trying to figure out what to do.
“90 Days” was our agreed upon test window. If the idea wasn’t working, we’d know for sure in 3 months. The problem, is we were expecting a clearer indicator. If no one was watching, that would be easy to pull the plug. But a lot of people are watching, and those numbers are growing. The fact that they aren’t spending any money there, can be attributed to many factors. Including that the World Economy is crushed, and in most parts of the world total bullshit.
So… we’re going to run full speed ahead in November and see where we end up.
If you have any thoughts on it, or possible solutions… e-mail me.
- Mark
Mark Audess
Maddy G Productions
www.MaddyGTV.com
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