Guild creator Felicia Day: Web shows should aim carefully

If you want to launch a successful Web TV show, thinking small may be better than thinking big, said Felicia Day, writer and star of the popular online series The Guild.

Day was one of the keynote speakers at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin this week. She presented a number of contrasts between traditional and online media, but one that she returned to repeatedly was the idea of creating content for a niche audience, rather than trying to make something to suit everyone.

“You aim with a sniper rifle versus a shotgun,” she said.

For example, The Guild is a show about players addicted to an unnamed online roleplaying game, and it was clearly written for an audience of gamers. Knowing that there was a natural fan base for the show, one that would feel passionate about The Guild and promote it online, was key to early growth, Day said. If you create an online show, you need to be able to answer the question, “Who am I talking to?”

“Trying to please everybody, it’s never going to work,” she said.

Day predicted this approach will also pay off with a new project, Dragon Age: Redemption, a Web video series based on the Dragon Age video games from BioWare. Movies based on video games are notoriously bad, even if they’re big-budget productions. Day argued that’s because they suffer from trying to appeal to everyone, rather than just the fans of the game. In the case of Day’s new show, she acknowledged that it’s a challenge to portray a rich fantasy world on a Web TV budget, but she’s a fan of games and did months of research to get the details right.

The Guild’s business model has been pretty unusual too. The first season was paid for by viewer donations, and the subsequent four seasons were funded by Microsoft and Sprint. Day argued that sponsoring Web shows is a better use of advertisers’ money than normal TV advertising. She said that for the $3 million it costs to place a single 30-second ad on television, advertisers could fund an entire season of a Web show, and then their brand name (and no competing brands) would be featured prominently wherever the show is distributed.

Besides Web business models, Day also made time to talk about the value of anonymity on the Web.