Web Video: How to Actually (Maybe) Make Money
Business Week, January 14, 2009
Startup EQAL has a hit on its résumé, a big-name client, and a four-pronged business plan.
The two thirtyish founders of Web video production company EQAL, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, are too media-savvy to boast they’ve cracked the code for minting big hits from serialized short online videos. Nevertheless, this is what their business (say “equal”) is based on, and it’s why CBS (CBS) is paying them to create a Web series offshoot of the network’s upcoming mystery show Harper’s Island. (EQAL’s Web series, called Harper’s Globe, will make its debut on Mar. 18, about a month before the show hits the airwaves.)
Along with screenwriter friend Mesh Flinders, Beckett, then an urgent-care physician, and Goodfried, then a lawyer, made a loud Web debut in the summer of 2006 with Lonelygirl15. In that, a young female diarist narrating her life in a series of YouTube (GOOG) videos dragged legions of fans (myself included) down a rabbit hole, trying to answer a simple question: Was she real, or was it scripted?
