There's been a lot of guff about 'selling out' over the 13 second advertisement in this week's episode.
13 seconds out of almost 5 minutes.
Or 4.5% of the total episode.
That's versus the 27% of advertising on a TV show. And we put it at the end unlike those annoying preroll video ads on other video sites.
We got paid for it, we're a business and we need to pay our considerable expenses.
Wanna know what happens to free things on the web that don't pay for themselves?
Free is fine if you're trying to do one short video, but when you try and put out videos consistently, you need to pay the bills.
Here's how we're going to pay the bills:
*Advertising -- keep it short and sweet and always at the end of the episode.
*Premium Subscribers -- they get the episode three days early for a low annual fee ($12 to $15 per year) and extra privledges here on AskANinja.com.
*Merchandising -- T-Shirts and DVDs (but make the DVDs not a rip-off, include a DVDROM section with the episodes for downloading, and tons of special features).
*Licensing -- Do special episodes for the fat cat big media companies.
That's it. We're just a couple of funny guys trying to pay our bills. Bills that are in the tens of thousands of dollars. (And we're not looking for charity either, this is a business, and business shouldn't look for handouts. Support us by watching the show, sharing it with friends, buying a t-shirt, or by becoming a Premium subscriber).
We don't want to rip anyone off, and we don't want to go broke doing this either.
