I’m happy for Joss Whedon, after hearing the announcement he’ll write and direct Avengers 2. I like to see a geek inherit the Earth.
But I worry about the franchise in general. Whedon has a tendency to make his villains too comfortable around the heroes. Considering he worked with vampires so long, I’m surprised how quickly he removes his villains’ teeth and makes them just ordinary guys and gals. Perhaps he just likes villains better, like Dr. Horrible. But I’m afraid that, in Avengers 2, Loki will be joining the heroes for a shawarma dinner.
Which one is better?
In the beginning…
Later on…
Spike from Buffy
Dangerous. You never knew what side he was on.
Just kind of hung around because he had nothing else to do.
Danger from X-Men
Living embodiment of the Danger Room. Coolest and most deadly new villain in the mutant titles.
Just kind of hung around and poked fun of the heroes because she had nothing else to do.
Also:
“The Avengers” fixed the problems of the Marvel prequels
I’ve been fortunate enough to start making money off of my YouTube videos. Small ads pop up on the bottom from Google AdSense. Mind you, it’s very little money. I’m up to $3.41. (Edit: There’s some potential for much more-check out Entire Channel at the bottom) The reason for this is that my videos shoot up in popularity, then drop into obscurity. It’ll get a few hundred or a few thousand views in one day and then nothing the next.
This is the chronology of events that takes place over the course of a few days:
The video gets popular (a few hundred to a few thousand views)
YouTube sends an e-mail asking if I want to sell ads
I apply for the program
Ads go up
I wanted to share how this happens, and hopefully help people make some money from their videos.
First, here’s a video detailing how to make a video suitable for ads, and then how to publicize it.
How to promote
I have a word file where I write the name of the video, the date it’s uploaded, it’s address and embed code.
Then, there’s a chart with all the different places I tend to send them: Stumbleupon, Tosh, etc. I don’t send every video to every place. There are some sites, like www.iheartchaos.com, that are monitored by human beings and they probably won’t appreciate me spam submitting things every week. There are some videos that work on their site, and some that don’t. I only submit the ones that do. When it comes to someplace like Reddit or Digg, no human has to approve it going up. It just goes up. So I send everything to these places.
Here’s some videos of mine that have started to make money, and how it happened (Some of them have really inappropriate humor):
Smooth Randy and The Socky Show
Smooth Randy and The Socky Show: This was my first video that I started making money off of. It was uploaded 3/4/11. It got 2,700 views in one day! Most of them were from Reddit. 2,700 views is a drop in the bucket in YouTube terms, but still, it got the ball rolling on making money back.
Later in the week, I got an offer from YouTube to start selling ads on it. But by this time, it was already too late. Nobody was watching the video anymore, so no one was watching the ads anymore.
I wound up making 19 cents on Smooth Randy. This post was almost called “How to make 19 cents off YouTube,” but then I got a few other small successes:
Really Big Hole
Really Big Hole was uploaded 6/20/11. It got an invite June 23 after 2,200 views. It received 1,700 views from IheartChaos.com on June 21. About 500 more views on June 22.
I’m not sure when it got the invite. Maybe it was just after the first day’s views of 1,700 on June 21.Who knows?
Parenting: Making Sacrifices
Parenting: Making Sacrifices got an invite at midnight on June 24, after 487 views, 250 of them on June 21, and 150 on June 22. Of these, 420 came from www.buzzfed.com
This is pretty strange because I uploaded it 12/2/10. So this was a case where someone else came upon it – probably from watching Really Big Hole – posted it to buzzfed and it just took off.
A Good Transformer Movie Should Be Easy
A Good Transformer Movie Should Be Easy. This one is safe for work and not offensive. I was very excited that this got chosen so quickly. I put a lot of time and effort into the Transformers movies. The first one is almost up to 10,000 views right now, but it never got invited in. This one did, though. This leads me to believe that after a little bit of success in advertising on other videos, you get invited quicker.
It was uploaded on 7/7/11. I got the e-mail 7/9/11 after 275 views. The views came from all over (because I promoted it all over), but the largest referrer was www.tfw2005.com.
Another video of mine received 270 views in one day a few months earlier, but it was not enough for YouTube to consider ads. So, back then, I figured the magic number must be somewhere between those two. Until the above Transformer movie got an invite after 275. So, either there really is no rhyme or reason or the invites flow more freely if you’ve already got ads on other videos.
Parenting: Testing Boundaries
Parenting: Testing Boundaries. This one was really strange. This video was uploaded June 5, 2011. It got 6,000 views on June 22. It was invited into the AdSense system on 7/10/11. (5,000 views were from I-am-bored, and 1,200 views were from buzzfed.com. I remember logging into my YouTube page and seeing 6,000 views suddenly there and thinking there must have been a mistake.)
I got a big boost on several videos on June 22 and 23. Back then I counted 10 total videos that could get invited into the adsense program. And I waited impatiently for the invites. This is the only straggler. So, maybe they just take a while. I don’t know.
I posted a question to YouTube’s forum about what process YouTube uses to decide what gets invited and what doesn’t. The responses were that there didn’t seem to be any real rules. It just happens.
Elmo Demands Executive Producer Credit On Sesame Street
By way of comparison, this video, “Elmo Demands Executive Producer Credit,” received 900 views in one day after Katy Perry was cut from Sesame Street, (and later the Grover Old Spice ad parody aired), and I was sent an offer from YouTube for advertising. However, this was made before I really understood the copyright rules, so I can’t have ads on it.
Entire Channel
Seemingly out of nowhere, the entire channel gets the invite for ads July 27, 2011. This was after 60,000 lifetime views, about 150 a day for two weeks. And about a month after that big hit where I got 20,000 views at the end of June.
Now, I was able to go through every video I had and enter it into the monetization program to get ads.
Even more importantly, I can enable ads the second I upload a video. Therefore, if the video takes off, there will already be ads on it.
Partner Program
YouTube has a partner program that allows for far more money to be made. I don’t qualify for this yet.
Firstly, all your videos have to have no copyright problems. About 8 or so of mine are still made of pictures I didn’t take. I’m working on reshooting these, though.
Secondly, every video has to have thousands of views. I’m nowhere near that yet.
Hopefully, this helps you make some money off your videos. Let me know if it works.
This article says monthly comics are dead, turning over to online and graphic novels.
This is something I said about newspapers and I’ll say it again for comic books: They didn’t stop making books when movies were invented. They didn’t stop making movies when TV was invented. They didn’t stop making TV shows when the Internet was invented. All of these things have existed simultaneously. You just have to be smarter about your project, and you have to work harder, and your expectations can’t be as high.
When articles say that not as many people are buying movie tickets anymore, they’re comparing billions of dollars in sales. They’re still doing OK. Just not as many people are getting rich. Or, they’re merely getting rich, and not filthy rich.
You have to be smarter. You have to work harder. And the chances of being wildly successful are slimmer. But people think that if you have to be smart and industrious in order to get a small benefit, that it’s just not worth it.
I have to thank those people. Leave the business now. I don’t need the competition.
It’s going to be a near-impossibility to get a Justice League movie together. So, this is even a longer longshot. But it would be a hell of a ride.
This would only focus on the supervillain incarnation of Suicide Squad.
Take Amanda Waller from the Green Lantern movies and expand her role. She’s going to be Nick Fury, but for evil. (Although Waller always thinks she’s doing good.)
She recruits Sinestro, Cheetah, and Scarecrow from the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman (see my other post), and Batman movies. And maybe a Rogue from a Flash movie. She also grabs some new villains like Deadshot (because you can’t have Suicide Squad without him.)
They are up against a villain more powerful than all of them combined. And more evil, too. I’m thinking Omac. In this version, Omac is created by the government, but it has become uncontrollable. So they form the squad – a group of expendables – to clean up their mess. Throughout this they learn that they are being used. They go to rebel against the big, bad government. However, Sinestro is really playing them as pawns, too. Building up the fight between the government and the Squad so that they’ll be too distracted to use stop him until it’s too late.
The villains react very strangely. They never worked as a team before, so they have to learn that. At least one villain actually likes playing the hero. Deadshot doesn’t care who’s paying his bills as long as he’s got someone to fight.
Sinestro is too power-hungry; he’s biding his time and might be the main villain after the Squad defeats the enemy.
At the end, the Squad manages to destroy all documents relating to their incarceration or the existence of Suicide Squad. The last thing you see is one of the members, one who serves as a voice for the others, meeting with someone who will hire them as mercenaries. Perhaps this person could be Lex Luthor or someone that leaves a hint of a future story.
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