How Extreme Birdwatching on YouTube could redefine Hollywood.

0:28This episode is brought to you by Netflix. relationship between YouTube and Hollywood. And this relationship can be summed up by this quote from Jimmy Kimmel. I'm very conscious of the fact that ABC pays for the show and YouTube pays nothing and YouTube gets to sell it and keep half the money. And that's quite a deal for them. It really is. And this is a problem not just for Kimmel and ABC, but this is a problem for everyone. From studios like Lionsgate trying to justify their massive budgets to independent filmmakers, searching for a way to make a living off their art. So today we're highlighting an unlikely YouTube video that might just show us the solution to this problem.

1:08Now you may have seen it, but if you haven't, I'm going to let the main character explain the premise of this movie to you. One day I got high and found the family's bird guidebook and I thought about how crazy it would be if you knew all the birds in that book. That's Quentin Reiser. and this moment inspired his brother Owen to spend years of his life making a two-hour-long documentary about birdwatching. Listers follows their journey as they try and see more birds in one year in the U.S. than anyone else. Now, it was recommended to us multiple times by creator friends of ours who just said you have to stop everything and watch this film.

1:51Yeah, I mean, in the past, this would be a movie that I would watch on Netflix and talk about. I truly haven't seen a movie like this in a long time. And what's amazing is not only did we watch it on YouTube, two million people have watched this. You know, one in 400 and something Americans have seen it, which is pretty wild. So Lister's created way more questions than answers for us. And we desperately wanted to speak to Owen and learn more about it, especially because of the way he chose to monetize the documentary. It's one of the strangest ways that, frankly, we have never seen before. We asked Owen about if his model worked.

2:27How much did it cost for him to make this movie? How much has he made so far? We also talked to him about the success of this film and what that means for his career, as well as people like him. People who aren't stereotypical YouTubers, but people who have a bit of higher budgets without a following and decide to make a movie and post it to the platform. After the conversation, we'll debrief what we learned from Owen and tell you what this means for independent filmmakers, and Hollywood studios who are looking to make money and see if this model will actually work for them as well. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Owen Reiser.

3:09Owen, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. This doc, it is so phenomenal. I imagine it was so much hard work. It performed really well. And yet you are not like a stereotypical YouTuber. There aren't really YouTube videos on your channel my assumption is this one youtube video changed your life is that true yeah yeah that would be that would be the case you nailed that one on the head uh yeah i've had like so many people reached out saying like do you have representation like but from all the big hollywood agencies and i'm like dude i have a used minivan and like a one youtube account you know it's like i don't have representation i don't have an agent or anything you know uh but yeah it's been it's been incredible uh just like seeing something connect with so many people and the analytics are like 70 it's like 70 percent have seen it on a tv and the average watch time is like over an hour so it's like you know one in 400 and something americans have seen it which is which is pretty wild yeah that's crazy can you just bring us back to what the idea for this was Because as I watch it, it's hard for me to rationalize you committing time, as much time as I think this took you to make.

4:27And I just want to know the story of like, what is the story of Lister's? yeah it's pretty much how it is in the film right my brother got high one day and found out about bird watching i really did come out on the patio there and see a bong sitting on the bird book and i knew there was a problem immediately and uh but yes that's really how it came to be i was working as a camera op for like high budget nature documentaries and that work was drying up because they stopped commissioning. I guess it just wasn't profitable. So I just wanted to make my own thing that connected with more people. And that's what we did.

5:08And we did it with$16 ,000. That's how much it costs to make. How did you financially support yourself during this time? It costs you$16 ,000 to make, but two years of work, are you doing other work on the side? How are you supporting yourself? Yeah. So I licensed a good amount of footage from just stuff I've shot previously, just like nature stuff. So I was scrapping by on that. And then we had a Patreon. You know, Patreon was really helping us out. We maybe got, I don't know, most of that was paid for. That 16 grand, I think all came from Patreon. How did you market the Patreon? Because like from my vantage point, you've only uploaded four videos to your channel.

5:52Yeah, Instagram. Short form content on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Was there ever any thought of why don't we pitch this to a streamer? Why don't we try and get some money before we just upload this to YouTube and take all that risk that it could go nowhere that no one could see it? Yeah, yeah, I thought about that. And then I and then I just quickly brushed that aside. Because I don't know, it meant so much to us. I just figured it's so share YouTube so shareable. Any other streamers. It's not. It's just not gonna get the views, right? That's the most important thing to me is for it to connect to people and get as many eyes on it as possible.

6:29When it was on YouTube, it hit like 100 ,000 or 200 ,000 views. And I started getting a bunch of emails and calls from people high up, producer people, wanting to come on as EPs and then pitch to a streamer and sell it. And I was pretty stressful because they were tossing out the words like$500 ,000 and a million dollars. And then I got into the nitty gritty of it. and it was going to be the case if it went for$500 ,000, Quentin and I, after taxes, are going to get like 45 grand each. Right. You know? Yeah. Right. And it's like, that's two years of hard-ass work. And so, and they're going to want to cut stuff out, right?

7:09They're going to want to kind of get some fingers in the pot to say the model just didn't make sense for this. You know, it can't, I'm not opposed to doing that in the future. I want to make that clear. if somebody wants to fund a future project. Let's not close any doors here. Yeah. And I already have some stuff in the works with like some production companies for future projects. But like, yeah, if it's like a self-funded thing, it's two years of our lives. Like it just meant so much to us that we wanted it to be our movie. And I agree that changes would get made that you wouldn't want to make.

7:45And I was laughing with Samir this morning, something we were talking about. And if you haven't seen it, it's a bit of a spoiler but at the end you know the fact that the the resolution is that you just didn't have the drive you just gave up is i think one of the most wonderful it's like the most satiating ending that i did not expect to be satiating but it's like so rare that you were like yeah no we just didn't have it in us yeah and i i don't know if like tribeca's or like streamers would let you have that no i don't think they would either i tried to find some switch in the story to be like the moment that we decided to give up you know the moment but that would have been lying this is authentic this is like it was just kind of a gradual like you know we're done we've been eating rice and beans in the van for 300 days i don't know if 65 is is you know i don't know if we have 65 more in us that's just kind of how like we just kind of gave up.

8:45That's just honest. I think it speaks to where YouTube is today that, like you said, 70 % of people watched on their TVs. You know, five years ago, that's not the case with YouTube. People are watching on their phones and their computers and they're in a headspace that's not sitting on a couch ready to watch something where they would watch a Netflix or an HBO. And now we're at a place where you can see things like Lister's where this is a channel that's not super active that all of a sudden drops a movie with a movie poster style thumbnail and it works. And part of why Samir and I find that so interesting is because we think it represents a lot of new opportunity for filmmakers, that potentially there's a new model.

9:24In a world where documentary and unscripted departments are getting shut down, maybe here there is a model for unscripted documentaries to actually make money. But I would flip the question to you because I saw on Lister's, you pinned the top comment and just said, if you want to throw me a few bucks on Venmo and support the project, do it here. And you kept ads turned off. Is that a model that works? Like, did you make your money back and more? Could you and your brother do this again? 100%. Yeah, it's like the value for value model, right? And I'm not a businessman, but no, it worked. It worked.

10:05I just didn't want people being turned away by ads in the mid-roll ads, you know? And so I figured, let's try the value for value model. And it worked. It's been way better. Samir, I'm curious if you could predict the answer to this. So around 2 million views on a video that's two hours long that a lot of people watched on their TVs. If ads were left on, how much do you think that video does from YouTube? It's a good question. we probably have a comp that we could pull pretty easily. I would guess anywhere from, and this is a massive range I'm about to say, but anywhere from 10 ,000 to like$30 ,000 would be my guess.

10:45And that would be if it did exceptionally well. And it's a new channel, so that would be a little bit harder to prove out. But just so that people understand what the opportunity is. And I'll pull up an actual example of like a 45 minute documentary we made that came out at the end of last year. That I think would be a really good example. So this is 2.1 million views. It's 48 minutes and it made$14 ,000 in ad revenue. Okay. So just to kind of quell your mind, you probably, you know, maybe would have made the money back. Maybe not. Yeah. Yeah. The 16. And just to give everyone an understanding of like, what does 2 million views mean in terms of AdSense?

11:30Right. What if I said we made 75 so far? I mean, it sounds like you're a businessman. Yeah. Sounds like you're like, we made the business. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. One of the things that I think is challenging for me to look at is like, how quickly can you do the next one? Because like, obviously the world of YouTube is like, cool. Everyone likes this. they're waiting for your next piece. Uh, right. They would love your next piece. Documentaries are about access and good stories and investing your time into it. Like it's not easy to do another one. Is there any part of you that's like, can I make a simpler form of content for this YouTube channel?

12:12Or are you like, I'm chasing my next story? Do you guys know who Bo miles is of course yeah yeah okay so he may i love his stuff too he's uh he makes great short form stuff that feel like feel like films you know he just makes these awesome quirky little films about trying to find adventure in your backyard that's how i describe his favorite of mine is him eating something like for 40 days he eats only cans of beans and then he sees how his body feels during an ultra marathon at the end. Yeah. He's, he's got a great model for short pieces like that. And I'm sure that's better money wise. Um, but I don't, I don't know if I could, the way I want to make movies, I don't know if I could make a film once a month, you know?

13:00Yeah. Yeah. I think you, uh, and Bo now that you've brought up, uh, represent this sort of, wholesome feel-good side of YouTube and specifically of unscripted docs. You know, Samir and I have had calls with some of these different streamers and it's almost hilarious that we'll get on the call and they're like, you got any murder? Anybody die? Oh my, dude. You know that we can talk about? And you're like, I'm sorry. Like, I don't know anybody who died, you know, from murder or homicide. I'm sorry. And they're like, all right, it's not going to work then. Like truly, like almost verbatim. I'm like, we've been told we are too positive and friendly.

13:39Like our stories are too uplifting. Dude, the true crime stuff in like Netflix is, this is how I imagine Netflix is. They sit in the lab and they're just like, I think they might be killing people. Just so they can make it.

13:58But that's kind of. You heard it here first. Somebody needs to look into it. Let's follow that story. But Netflix is just like disaster and murder right now. And that's what works. Can you imagine if we pitched, how about, okay, two idiot brothers, we have an old camcorder, we're going to go look at birds. Like, that's going to be a two second meeting. Yeah. I think that's what's amazing is that the day you uploaded Listers, nobody at YouTube knows that their platform is about to put out a two hour bird watching documentary that two million people are going to watch. They have no idea. And I think that's one of the most incredible things about the competition in streaming right now.

14:39And the fact that YouTube is a competitor in streaming is the fact that we don't know what's going to get uploaded to YouTube tomorrow. And it could be a feature length movie. It could be a new scripted series. It could be like, it could be anything. because what you did is completely irrational yeah no one sits in an office making business decisions and makes the decision you made yeah but that's what led to great creative and to samir's point like the competitive advantage of youtube against some of these other streaming platforms right right so the only the only negative to putting a film on youtube is you know if you're the type of guy that really needs the ego boost of like a film festival circuit or whatever and uh like we've had a bunch of programmers for big film festivals reach out and they're like man you should have you should have waited you should have done the film festival circuit and like you know try back i'm a programmer at tribeca i think this could have done you know i think this could have done been selected at tribeca and i was like i all that i care is that people see it and I don't care where they see it.

15:48I don't care if they see it in a New York theater. Is that where Tribeca is at? New York? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or in their living room. It's this, it's pixels on a screen, you know? Well, I love it, man. I mean, I just wanted to meet you. Cause I was like, I don't, I don't understand who this person is who made this, but like, it's a, it's a real gift to the platform. And I like, I'm excited that you've found, uh, you know, the, one of the beautiful things about youtube is you can find your community like people who feel invested in your success now and i think that's like that's crazy as a creative person to get that gift to have people be like no i want you to win like i want you to to make another one and i want i want to support you i think that's like one of the coolest things about youtube and i don't think that happens on streamers no no i don't think so either it's it's incredible i'm like beyond grateful for everything like i'm not much of a crier but i've i've caught myself you know several times over the last couple of months, just, you know, with some allergies.

16:47I'll call them allergies. Yeah. Well, cool, dude. Thank you, Owen. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. I can't wait to see what you do next. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. All right. First of all, I would say that we talk to a lot of people on the show that are very strategy forward, that like, here's how the media business is going to work. Here's what my strategy is in the creator economy. I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to just talk to a filmmaker. I mean, Owen is not that strategy guy, but he may have stumbled on some pretty incredible strategy. Yeah. And, and I think also it's just like, sometimes good art just happens.

17:24Like the weird mix of realities and things and time is just like, boom, there it is. And I just had the time and energy to make this and like, here's the story. And there's a lot of focus on the algorithms. How do you make a piece of content that works for the algorithm that works for the platform. But at the end of the day, the algorithm is full of people. And if something is really good, it will get shared. Yeah. So, okay, let's talk about the economics. Let's talk about this concept of the value for value model. Like how did this actually work? Like obviously you have to be willing to commit years of your life to make a movie for this to make any sense.

18:03But it cost him in hard costs,$16 ,000. And what the value for value model is, or like, you know the pay what's fair model essentially is hey i'm gonna put something up and then you can decide how much you want to contribute to this we did this one time making a documentary with our friends at yes theory and when we did that we made a doc we decided for the first four weeks i think it was it was going to be available exclusively through a platform called gum road the way to get access to the movie was pay what's fair you could pay anything above 99 to watch the movie. And there was a level of patronage.

18:41It's like, I like these guys. I want to see their movie. I want to support their movie. Here it is. The average donation was$5 to watch that movie. And I don't know if I can share, but it was like wildly successful. I mean, these guys have an audience of over almost 10 million subscribers, very dedicated, loyal community. And that was a very successful model. And what we found back then is that certain patrons, certain people who wanted to pay for the film had a different financial situation, right? So like what's 99 cents for someone, whatever their version of that is, if you make a certain amount of money, that could be in the thousands, right?

19:19There were people who donated in the thousands, yes. Yeah, so there are people who want to be patrons of the art. And it's a different situation than if you have a Patreon where you say it's$5 a month. This is open-ended. So whatever you feel is right for you and whatever you want to contribute. And that's what I think is really interesting. You know, this episode could come out. Someone could watch the film. Right. And decide, you know what? This is worth 20 grand for me. I want to support this guy. Yeah. And maybe start a relationship with him. Here, here you go, Owen. Here's 20K. I don't even know if you can process that much.

19:54I don't know if you can do that in Venmo. Yeah, you may need a different processing. There is something so, again, beautiful about the fact that it's a Venmo link. It's not like, and when I asked him, like, why not just have it be to the Patreon? He was like, that would have been a good idea. It's like, it's, it's so beautifully, you know, just art. Um, but I, you know, I think the other thing to bring up here is like, okay, Owen's probably stoked with this situation. He owns a hundred percent of the film. He's generated$75 ,000. The one thing we didn't ask him was that question of like, what was the average Venmo size?

20:26It would have been really interesting to know that. Um, you know, anyone else in the film business would be like, why are the ads off? The ads should be on. But I think actually it's, again, he knows that it's a better viewing experience. Value for value. Value for value there. And I think what's interesting is that, you know, this film is only two months old. Right. And it's already on the good side of the YouTube algorithm. And just conversationally, people are talking about it. So a year from now, it could be sitting at 10 million views. Five years from now, it could be sitting at 20 million views.

21:01And if that Venmo link is still there and working, and that's how people feel about it, he could make a lot of money over time. Way more than I think he would have made from the studios, as you hear, when he says, if we had done it for 500K after taxes, someone takes a cut of it, then after taxes, we're both making, what,$45 ,000 each? Yeah, this is a, you know, one of the issues here, if you work in Hollywood or you've been in the film business, you're probably like, yeah, cool, but like, this is so speculative. Like, how can you, how does this apply to the broader industry? And I think actually the reality of how this applies is that independent filmmakers with passions to tell stories should just remain independent and tell them on YouTube.

21:44Because this story makes no sense in any other context. So now when you are a studio executive trying to make a call and like, God, we need eyeballs on our thing. You know, it is challenging to navigate. Like, why would I? There's no way you can make your money back as a studio posting stuff on YouTube. So as an example, we didn't include this in the conversation, but he mentioned to us that a friend of his in the industry reached out afterwards and said, I have a documentary that cost me$5 million, and I'm considering posting it to YouTube. Yeah. And what we told him is, oh, well, then that, I don't know what, like, there's, I don't know what the economics are there.

22:28It does not seem good. No, I don't. I mean, unless you are pulling, like, let's just be clear for people who aren't, you know, understanding, like, I mean, I shared it in our conversation with Owen, but like$14 ,000 we made for an episode that did 2 million views, you would have to be in like the hundreds of millions of views to even get anywhere near, like anywhere near something that would be like, okay, yeah, you can spend 5 million bucks. Yeah, and if you think about that doc that we made about Mr. Beast and the Amazon show, it cost us money to do that, to fly out there, to edit that. I could confidently say we did not make our money back on that.

23:10Exactly. Yeah, from the cost of going out there to the cost of just our team to the cost of post and all that, like, it costs more than that. But the thing is, the reason why this all makes sense for creators is because like Mark Rober said when we sat down with him recently or last year, he said he'll spend north of$4 million on one video. Not regularly, but there was a video he was making that was, I think, in the$3 or$4 million range. The thing is, that makes sense for Mark because he's a product company with a media arm. He's Crunch Labs, his subscription toy box, makes so much money that he can finance media as a way to build the top of funnel for the rest of his business.

23:48Same with Mr. Beast, right? Jimmy tweeted recently that he was going to spend $30 million in a month on main channel videos. He can do that. That makes sense because he's building a top of funnel to sell chocolate and to sell software. So now when you're in a pure model of like the$5 million on a movie, or even if you're a studio and you're saying, can I spend a million dollars an episode on YouTube? You would have to have other ways to monetize it. And maybe there are other ways, whether that's through merchandise. Euphoria, great example. Euphoria comes out, huge success. Euphoria launches a makeup line that goes alongside the show.

24:26That's interesting. That's the model, right? That is the model. But the pure play, like, can we spend this much on the movie and see if that movie makes enough money in ad revenue? Like, no, absolutely not. Yeah. For me, I look at this from the perspective of who we are, which is creators and creators who have to go through the challenge of coming up with titles and thumbnails that we feel work and will resonate and will find audience. And I look at what he did with a title that is not optimized for YouTube, with a thumbnail that is not optimized for YouTube. It looks like a movie poster. It's blurry.

25:05It's kind of hard to see. And yet the contents were so good. And we are at a place where YouTube is different than it was before. We talk about it a little bit in the conversation with him, But people are now on their sofas with their friends deciding, okay, here's YouTube, here's Netflix. My assumption is I'm going to watch one of these two for maybe an hour. And so now YouTube, where people are uploading independently, is a home for these types of projects that are like true labors of love. So I do want to acknowledge though, like what you're saying about people watching, sitting on their couch and watching YouTube has pushed Lionsgate to upload full movies on their YouTube channel.

25:53So right now I'm on the Lionsgate movies, YouTube channel is 2.8 million subscribers. The last two uploads are full movies, winning season, full movie. Remember me, full movie. These are all full movies. And then the next two are trailers. One trailer for Kill Bill, one trailer for the new Michael Jackson movie. And then you go down a little bit and go, yeah, there's Held Up, a Jamie Foxx movie. Hour and 28 minutes, full movie. Paper Heart with Michael Cera, full movie. Wow. These are uploaded fully to YouTube. Do you think though that these are just old movies that they feel like they've monetized everywhere else that they possibly could?

26:34I think so. I think so. But I think what's happening here, if you actually look at what's going on, I think yes, but these are being used as assets to see how big the audience is for full movies. I think the one thing is they're probably not fully wrapping their head around how these should be distributed and how you can build a catalog here, but the fact that they are releasing hour 30 minute long movies with full movie in there, there's a bet that's happening. There's some R &D happening that, hey, in five years, is this a place where you could release a studio movie because the cost of production goes down and the audience goes up and the market here goes up.

27:19I think they're saying, can we build an audience of full length movie lovers? Let's be prepared when cost of production really goes down so much that we have an audience in a place. They're betting on the future. Yeah, I think what's interesting to think about now is you're Owen Reiser and you release this movie and it does 2 million views or you're Lionsgate and you make a new movie and put it out on YouTube and in the first two months it does 2 million views. Right. Successful, but not necessarily financially. Is there anything you can do, whether you're Owen or you're Lionsgate, to make it more financially reasonable and successful?

27:56Like, if you're Owen and you own 100 % of the film, can you invest back in the film in any way and make more money off of it outside of this venmo link can you is there a reason to market the film now with billboards and do something in theaters okay so then we can talk about creator camp i think the guys max and the team at creator camp they just did a theatrical run for their film two sleepy people um you know they spent 100k making that film and they sold out theaters all over in austin san francisco la like i'm really i'm really impressed with those guys. Their, you know, vantage point on this is that the theater is where you can monetize, where people paying 25 or 30 bucks, or maybe even like you look at our event, it was a$400 event to come to Press Publish NYC.