But I also agree with Tim that there is a fairly massive general audience that doesn’t know about or can’t find new shows as they launch. Whether VH’s arguments or solid or not, the fact that she is making at all them is a bit of a canary in the coal mine.

The worst case scenario is that the massive wave of talent that is currently producing for the web exhausts itself before enough of them can make enough to pay their rent, and we lose their creativity to some other endeavor.

We live in an online video bubble and we need to change the way people like Virginia Heffernan think and they way they discover our shows.

If she hasn’t heard of shows like Prom Queen, Abigail’s Teen Diaries or The Guild then we along with Mr. Michael Eisner have failed to launch.

People outside our echo chamber have heard of YouTube but they haven’t discovered story based Internet shows yet and it’s our task to not just preach to the choir but to find new ways of promoting our shows in traditional media and at live events that will convert them to the truth the way and the light of online video.

40 Million plus homes in the US might have broadband but are they using it to watch emotionally engaging content that we create?

My guess is, not yet.

Her main point: “one day, another serial — not called a serial, maybe, and certainly not webisodes — will exploit the eccentricity of the virals and manage to make new and serious jokes about the truth-illusion-truth-illusion of cinéma vérité, which is what “lonelygirl15” once did.”

she thinks this will be what is successful. i don’t know.

its perhaps a difficult article to understand mostly because she is viewing the whole web series world thru a very different lens than most who are writing about it.

she knows much about many things, and maybe less about a few facts here and there, but her insights are usually worthwhile.

she asks, “Are there really any hit Web serials?”

its a good question.

The irony of Old Media “reporting” on New Media is that often they’re the least qualified to do so. I’ve seen similar Old Media coverage where the reporter will pose as someone “in the know” so he/she can let the masses in on what’s going on in New Media – but the truth of the matter is far more likely to be that the audience is probably just as knowledgeable if not more so than the reporter.

The Emperor has no twitter account (or at least doesn’t use it).