I’ve pondered this outloud on a few occasions (here, here, here and here) for our loyal followers, and my own benefit, but the task ahead of us at Colony Bay will be to build an audience quickly.  We don’t need a mega-audience, just a steady, blog-and-video-watching crowd of about two or three hundred thousand people.   Yes, we continue to talk, and pitch, places like History Channel, AMC, Hallmark, INSP, Glenn Beck, etc., but those people are busy building their own audience in their own way and we don’t want to be told how to help them build their audience, only to be told, someday, we don’t get the use of their audience anymore.

Because that (the audience) is precisely what they own.    I used to think that Hollywood was dominated be a few people who owned sound stages and Panavision film cameras, but really what they own now, and what they’ve always owned, is an audience.  If you have an audience you can buy all the Red Cameras and 20K Arri-Sun lights you want.  Of course, it’s not like they really “own” the audience in perpetuity.  They have to fight for it, which is a good thing, but if a picture comes out with the words “Produced by Paramount, Starring Natalie Portman” then there are number crunchers who can assign high and low ranges to the size of that audience.

In the end, it works against good story-telling, because when you’re fighting for the world audience, and spending millions of dollars to put a film in 3,000 theaters, you just aren’t going to take many risks.    The very thing that makes the whole thing possible (a large audience) starts to work against itself.  The project gets too large, too expensive, and it eventually implodes.  The glittering talent everyone loves gets channeled into something a focus-group demanded, and before you know it, you’re watching “Cutthroat Island.” This conventional safety associated with expense is another reason why you hear the lament “500 channels and nothing to watch!”

Well, at Colony Bay we want an intelligent, passionate, patriotic, fun-loving audience of people who want a good story every month and the chance to talk about it, here, as we produce it.   That’s the plan, and we have had a few advertising people propose $20K to $120K marketing budgets.   Sometimes that works, but I’ve also bought enough advertising to know it’s not a guarantee.  I think our growth will have to be based on all of you talking, and blogging, and maybe even making money off the deal.

We plan four episodes of Courage next year, but we need a video on demand audience of at least 50,000 people by Christmas.  I know there are smarter heads out there in our assembly who can weigh in, so by all means, help us ponder the challenge.

We’ve produced the best historic drama on or off television in the last five years at least.   How do we find its audience?