Building A Billion-Dollar Enterprise, 25: An ugly milestone; a way forward; a huge question.

A couple of my Facebook friends shared links today to an article in the New Pittsburgh Courier about the disappearance of black-owned television stations in the U.S. (not "reduction," not "decimation" - disappearance. There are now none.)

In the article's comments section, reader Rob Wilson, after acknowledging "the power and influence of the mass media," says:

"My suggestion would be to quit lamenting the fact that we don't own old technology and instead leverage new technologies that have no barriers to entry."

In so saying, Mr. Wilson is preaching what he practices as the owner of a blog (like me!) and a YouTube channel (like me!). For him, the death of Black-owned televisions stations marks not a dead end, but a change in direction.

His comments led me to think about how to make best use of Homewood Nation's YouTube channel.

I decided to see what the most popular YouTube channels do.

The first response to my Google search for "most popular YouTube channels" was a list of the top 100 most subscribed channels, at vidstatsx.com.

According to that list, here are the top 10:

One Hundred Most Subscribed Channel Rankings List by Subscribers

Video Producer	Sub Rank	Subscribers	24 Hour Sub +/-	7 Day Sub +/-	Videos	Views
Video Producer	Sub Rank	Subscribers	24 Hour Sub +/-	7 Day Sub +/-	Videos	Views
PewDiePie	1	19,230,846	2,453,631	2,453,631	1.6K	3.19 B
YouTube Spotlight	2	19,035,715	2,258,500	2,258,500	187	384.3 M
Movies	3	15,966,415	38,988	247,302	0	0
Smosh	4	15,038,347	30,038	217,959	337	2.87 B
HolaSoyGerman	5	14,255,691	30,286	205,617	95	949.2 M
JennaMarbles	6	11,943,560	17,390	106,135	175	1.33 B
RihannaVEVO	7	11,913,795	14,950	121,570	83	4.54 B
nigahiga	8	11,278,526	14,345	96,604	173	1.67 B
TV Shows	9	11,139,532	3,544	28,040	0	0
OneDirectionVEVO	10	11,007,255	17,799	142,322	83	2.34 B

Quick observations:

1 - The #1 channel, PewDiePie, is listed as having just under 19,231,000 subscribers. As of this writing, there are 19,242,643.

2 - During the week of Dec. 9, according to Nielsen, the most-viewed series on primetime network TV, NCIS, drew 19,297,000 viewers.

3 - Three of the top 10 channels are YouTube-branded channels - Spotlight, Movies, and TV Shows.

4 - Two channels, Rihanna and OneDirection, belong to celebrities.

5 - Half of the top 10 channels - five of 10 - belong to seemingly ordinary people who set out to make people laugh. Comedy is big. Very big.

I have always envied people who can make people laugh.

Hm. Could Homewood Nation produce satire?

For some time, I have envisioned a weekly video series (working title, "Homewood Nation Week in Review") - perhaps one segment of that, which could stand on its own, would be a 3-5 minute clip satirizing some aspect of the week's news.

Or maybe not: the 14th ranked YouTube channel, Epic Rap Battles of History, does not seem overly dependent on the news for its content, which I will not even attempt to describe. Just watch.



In any case, the idea is there: short, funny, topical videos could provide value.

Another thing worth noting. ERBH posts new episodes every two weeks. YouTube producers have flexibility in when to broadcast their content. I like the idea of a weekly broadcast, but not everything has to follow that schedule.

There's lots more to think about - the differences between stations and networks, the opportunities afforded (or not) by new digital networks, the increasing ability to watch YouTube on TVs, the possibility of a channel hosting subscriber-created content - but I don't want spend ALL of 2013's final hours on this. I will end with just one question of gigantic importance to my 2014 - and maybe Homewood's:

What type of content would you like to see on Homewood Nation's YouTube channel?

(AN HOUR LATER) - WOW. I just realized that I should ask a second question, which may be more powerful than the first: Would you like to provide content for Homewood Nation's YouTube channel, and if so, what kind?

(GOTTA get past that do-it-all mentality; it's not about me, it's about the work, and the work includes releasing/unveiling the potential of other people.)

#HashtagThis!

When I saw this skit on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," I got a good laugh out of its portrayal of how ridiculous it would sound if some people spoke in real life the same way that they do online:

Of course, the ending, which comes just when you feel like telling those guys to do just what Questlove tells them to do, caps the whole thing very nicely, and hints that even online, some people overdo the use of hashtags big-time. So doing it in real life would be, you know, stupid.

But tonight I saw this, this....thing...from JC Penney...which seems to assume that people really do speak this way in real life...



...and I barely made it through its 20 seconds without losing my lunch. And my dinner.

I can only echo what a YouTube viewer with the username SigandGibbs wrote: "This is quite possibly the most poorly acted, edited, and mixed video from a big company I've ever seen."

And, I might add, from the beginning, "the most poorly written." Maybe even the most poorly conceived. As in, it was a really bad idea from the get-go. The good news is that the creators appear to have sensed that anything more than 20 seconds of it would be unbearable.

The JC Penney ad's appearance today evokes the horrible speculation that someone there may have been perversely inspired by the Jimmy Fallon skit, which ran last week.

If so, their YouTube views suggest that they might have done better to just pay Jimmy Fallon to sneak "hashtag JC Penney" into his script - as of now, their commercial has gained 17,717 views on YouTube, while the Jimmy Fallon skit has racked up 14,807,732.

But hello, what's this? When the JC Penney's ad appeared in my news feed on Facebook, a friendly fellow whose name is now lost to me posted a link to this ad for Subway now running at irregular intervals on your nearest viddy screen:



Although longer, I find this commercial less annoying than the JC Penney's monstrosity. First, because the person having the hashtag orgasm is at least doing it online as opposed to in a real-life conversation; second, because his lunch partner's focus on real life neatly makes the point that Hashtag Guy is being an idiot.

Sorry to say, this commercial, while much smarter than the JC Penney one, has only 307 YouTube views so far.

Somebody, somewhere, is surely getting paid six figures to figure out how important YouTube viewings of TV commercials are, or should be, so I won't try to do that here.

But I will ask, did Jimmy Fallon's writers deliberately, um, borrow an idea from the Irish comedy trio Foil Arms and Hog, or is the resemblance to this piece, uploaded to YouTube back in December, purely coincidental (thanks to YouTube commenter Raman K for the heads up)?



My real question about all this is, "Has the use of hashtags degenerated into a degree of overuse/abuse that makes them less useful since their implementation by Facebook?" Or to put it another way, have we reached "peak hashtag"?

#IdontthinkhashtagabusewasnearlysobadonTwitter.

#subtextdoesFacebookmakeeverythingworse

#IJS....

Building a billion-dollar enterprise, 19: Brick by brick

Today (i.e., Tuesday, 6/4) I worked mostly online.

I enrolled in the eService program for Legal Shield associates, snagging my associate website. I then went back to yesterday's post and inserted a link to the website there. I also rewrote my Google Plus profile, which appears here to the right, to link to it, as well as to Luminaria Productions' YouTube channel. You may have noticed that I also added a Chatroll chat window - I'm not sure why, except as a whim. I am more likely to use a chat window on Homewood Nation than here.

On Homewood Nation, I added an ad for Legal Shield that links to my Legal Shield website. And I created a sidebar module that links to both this blog and to Quick Flicks, my site for selling my short scripts to aspiring filmmakers.

Homewood Nation, which has so far generated only $50 in a one-time donation, now contains these channels for potential revenue:

• the Homewood Nation Cafe Press shop
• a sidebar link to my Amazon shop
• a sidebar link to Quick Flicks
• a sidebar ad for Legal Shield
• a donation button

It just occurred to me that, besides the having the sidebar link that invites people to search for books on Amazon, and besides inserting a link to my Amazon shop when I mention books in my Homewood Nation posts (something I should do more often), I may be able to create a "Recommended reading" sidebar module that highlights a particular book, such as my most recent favorite, Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, (the link is for the 2d edition; I read the original.)

While reviewing my stats for this blog, I noticed that my May 17th post, "Internet journalism and the Black Church's $420 billion," was receiving comments from people saying not only that they appreciated it, but that they were sharing it with others. Bad effect: I became overly preoccupied with checking to see how many times that post had been viewed. Good effect: I redistributed the link to it via G+, Twitter and Facebook.

Result - the numbers went up yet further. Yay!

Also today, I reviewed +Rob Jones'  piece for Homewood Nation, about coaching a community. That will go in tomorrow.

I am writing this because I want to post something here every evening for the remainder of this month. I don't think I've done that here for such an extended stretch, and I believe that doing so could produce dramatic results - with my definition of dramatic being something like, "having 50 readers daily" or "starting to make ANY money with this."

Wow; I've forgotten what may be the most important thing I did today. I posted a LinkedIn status linking to last night's post. I think it was the first time I've promoted a blog post on LinkedIn, despite having more 1st-degree contacts there (619) than I have Facebook friends (450).

But not only did I post the link on LinkedIn. I posted it ONLY on LinkedIn and on G+. Not on Facebook, not on Twitter. As an experiment.

I think I'll keep the experiment going, with these parameters: 1) write a BBDE post every evening for the remainder of the month, reviewing that day's activity; 2) promote it only on LinkedIn and G+.

I can write non-BBDE posts at will, and promote them everywhere EXCEPT LinkedIn.

On a separate note: I've tried to use AdSense here, but have never gotten it to work. Gotta get that going.

Building a billion-dollar enterprise, 12 - Prototype QF2013Q1A

I felt like giving it a research lab-sounding name. But to put it more simply, "Quick Flicks" - at least in its initial iteration - is done.

Yesterday, I decided to just buckle down and get it done. I had gotten myself bogged down in questions about whether or not to publish through Kindle, of how to sell downloadable PDFs...I seriously confused myself. Yesterday, I decided to forget Kindle for now, to sell PDFs with PayPal as the transaction mechanism, and to just go ahead and get it done.

Last night, at six minutes past midnight, I quietly celebrated the completion of the mini-website containing PDFs of five short scripts, together with licenses granting people the right to produce them, which they can download upon purchase.

The scripts are:

    "Message, Not in a Bottle" – A young man leaves a very unusual phone message for his twin sister.
    "I Will Love You Always" – A priest abandons his ministry to marry one of his congregants.
    "coda" – A black man. A white woman. A carefully-planned sexual assault. A twist.
    "No Dessert" – A restaurant patron observers two lovers at dinner before carrying out his assignment as a hit man.
    "End Run" – A political candidate's campaign ends with his assassination - which he himself helped to plan.

Today I did a bunch of revisions. Perhaps best of all, I created a front end that is easily accessible and more attractive than a plain old webpage: I uploaded "I Will Love You Always," my first short film, to YouTube, and put a paragraph in the description offering the script to other filmmakers, with a link to QuickFlicks. (actually, just a link to the page for the IWLYA script, but now that I think of it, I think I'll replace it with a link to the Quick Flicks intro page, which I will tweak).

The rationale for Quick Flicks goes something like this: a lot of people want to make short films, but they don't want to write them - their hearts are set on directing, not writing. Some of them would gladly pay for a short script if they knew how to find a writer. Some might pay to use an existing script, especially if the price is in line for a No/Lo-budget project (the Quick Flick scripts are priced at $4.99/$9.99). (UPDATE: This pricing will expire at midnight, Jan. 31, 2013. See this blog post about recipes, teachability and wealth.)

The uploading of "I Will Love You Always" is in itself a breakthrough. When I shot IWLYA in April 2005, YouTube was in its infancy. I knew that I wanted to make short films, and I knew that I wanted to distribute them via the Internet. I envisioned a website where people would pay .99 to view a movie (maybe .47 for a short). I didn't have the resources to build such a site, so it became my dream to have my films appear on iFilm, which was the go-to site for short films online. But while I was laboring over IWLYA with my editor, Andy Fenlock - a process that took wayyy too long - iFilm was bought by Viacom and ultimately vanished into SpikeTV (a story which still saddens me - to my knowledge, it has never truly been replaced as an online showcase for short films). Meanwhile, YouTube grew to become the Godzilla of online video.

And in all of this time, I never learned how to get my short film from DVD to YouTube. Until today, when I Googled "upload DVDs to YouTube" (duh!), and found VidCorder, a dandy little program for ripping DVDs. Some five minutes after installing the program, my video was ready for upload. So I am pleased to present, "I Will Love You Always," an AC Earing/Elwin Green production, written and directed by Elwin Green.


So today, for the first time, I have products in the marketplace, I have the transaction machinery in place for selling those products automatically, with no work on my part, and I have a marketing piece in place to lead people toward the transaction machinery - a marketing piece that doesn't look like a marketing piece, because it's not - it's a short film :)

The very idea of Quick Flicks - making screenplays that I wrote for my own use available for other filmmakers who may not want to be writers - was inspired by Timothy Ferriss' "muse" concept, as described in his book "The 4-Hour Workweek:"

"Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time. That's it. I will call this vehicle a 'muse' whenever possible to separate it from the ambiguous term 'business,' which can refer to a lemonade stand or a Fortune 10 oil conglomerate - our objective is more limited and thus requires a more precise label."

Thanks, Tim!

Finally having such machinery in place is exciting. What's even more exciting is that scaling those elements - products, transaction machinery and marketing - can go a long way in growing Luminaria into a billion-dollar enterprise.

MY 100TH POST: Surveying my empire

When I sat down to write this, I didn't realize that it would be my 100th post here. But my topic seems appropriate for that sort of milestone - namely, that I've come up with a system to help me do a better job of managing my digital empire.

Maybe "system" isn't the best word; maybe I want the word "construct," or "schematic" - i.e., a way of thinking about my digital assets that connects them.

The key word of the construct is tiers. I have until kept my digital assets separate enough so that a person engaging with one might never know about the others. My rationale was that someone who is in interested in the primary topic of one wouldn't necessarily be interested in the primary topics of the others.

I still believe that, but the qualifier is "necessarily." What strikes me now is that they might be, and that I ought not to deny them the chance to be. I should give people who follow me in one context the opportunity to decide whether or not follow me in another.

So, I will now work at connecting the dots, by having assets in one tier refer to assets in one or more other tiers.

Here's the list, with links so you can take a look at things and bookmark or follow whatever you like. I'm just learning about RSS feeds, and hope to begin using them soon.

[The following has been updated. The original version had ReVisions listed as the only item in the second tier, and all the following items one tier higher. Doing this exercise helped me recognize ReVisions as one of my core digital assets.]

The first tier consists of four core digital assets. My current thinking says that each of them should link to all of the others, even if they don't all refer to each other:

• The Dumasani Network - a website dedicated to liberating the ecclesia among the pan-African diaspora.
• Homewood Nation - news from Homewood and reflections on journalism. There is also a Homewood Nation YouTube channel, which for now I will include here.
• PeaceBuilder: Homewood - an online game based on Homewood.
• ReVisions - this thang raht hyar. It refers to the other three core assets.

Second tier:

• Twitter:

1. @elwin15208 - refers to Dumasani, ReVisions, Homewood Nation
2. @HomewoodNation - refers to Homewood Nation

• Facebook:

1. Elwin Green - refers to Dumasani, ReVisions, Homewood Nation
2. Homewood Nation (page) - refers to Homewood Nation

Third tier:

• Elwin Green Online - an overview of all my projects (it needs updating) - refers to Dumasani, ReVisions, Homewood Nation; invites people to partnership
• Google+: Elwin Green - I haven't figured out what to do with Google+ yet, but I'll say for now that it will refer to Dumasani, ReVisions, Homewood Nation and Peacebuilder: Homewood.

Fourth tier:

• LinkedIn - refers to Homewood Nation, Elwin Green Online
• Email lists - I have a bunch. Most of them are internal, for communications within/among a group, and are Homewood-based. Therefore, they refer only to Homewood Nation.

1. Save Race Street Committee - internal, refers to Homewood Nation
2. Race Street 2020 - internal, refers to Homewood Nation
3. Race Street residents - internal, refers to Homewood Nation
4. Block Watch Plus - internal, refers to Homewood Nation
5. Citizens Leadership Initiative - internal, refers to Homewood Nation
6. Issue Based Team - internal, refers to Homewood Nation
7. Homewood residents - combines all of the above lists except Race Street 2020 - refers to  Homewood Nation
8. Homewood Nation - for members of the website - refers to Homewood Nation, Elwin Green Online
9. Personal opt-in list - Homewood Nation, Elwin Green Online

And that's it - I'm going to try this out for at least a month, and see how much life I can pump into everything.  The primary strategy for pumping life into everything is doing systematic updates of everything. The primary prerequisite of doing systematic updates is writing like a fiend.

Fortunately, there's a lot about which to write. For updates of all my projects, email me at elwin@elwingreen.com, with "9" in the subject line. Thanks, and I welcome your input!