2.2 million downloads for Dr Horrible !
By fred | July 24, 2008
I’m not sure teaming up with Hulu might have been the best idea ever. We know there were some glitch at first and international viewers weren’t allowed to watch the first act, which rightfully pissed a few people, starting with me. And now, apparently there might have been some lag in Hulu’s stats and the reported numbers might not be the final numbers, it’s all subject to change, pretty much like with Nielsen : feels like they’re guessing.
Anyways, the show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run, and here are the numbers so far for Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog :
Act One: 1 149 846 streams
Act Two: 625 552 streams
Act Three: 427 785 streams
Of course, those numbers would be higher if the server hadn’t crashed for quite a while when the demand was too high, and they don’t include iTunes downloads or people who watched the show after getting the video from friends, etc And Dr Horrible had been topping the iTunes downloads ever since it premiered, and the three “Top TV Shows” on iTunes right now are still no other than the three acts of Dr Horrible!
We have a total of 2 203 183 streams, or about 450 000 a day if you don’t count the day the server was down. Pretty good results for sure, especially for a little show where noting was spend on promotion. To get an idea, currently the most-viewed videos of the week on YouTube are :
College Official Green Band Trailer; Views: 822,271
The X Files I Want to Believe - Together Sport; Views: 727,313
THE DARK KNIGHT - FANS REVIEW; Views: 673,703
So Dr Horrible was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending one dollar on promotion, and again those aren’t the final numbers, nor do they count iTunes downloads or other ways people might have use to watch the show.
How could this work as a new ways to create and provide content online ? Well, recently Jeffrey McManus made some educated guesses, which Whedon felt were not far off. Basically, he said that with one million iTunes downloads “[Harris] does considerably better: $100,230 for (presumably) a few weeks’ work. This is about what the cast of Friends were making per after season 2 of that show, but a fraction of what they were pulling down ($1 million per episode each) during that series’ final season.
(..)
If we assume that Whedon set aside 20% of the profits for cast and crew, as the principal investor in Dr. Horrible, that means Whedon owns 80% of whatever’s left. If the show sells 100,000 units on iTunes, he makes $87,280; if it sells a million copies, he winds up making more than $2.6 million on his original “low six-figure” investment. And that’s before the DVD even comes out.”
Of course, while no money went out on promotion, the fact that Joss Whedon is behind this was promotion enough, but still, this little thing started out as a joke during the writers’ strike turned out to be a real success, and an awesome one at that !
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Shows: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
