Yesterday, I needed to distract myself from the fact that so many people were enjoying themselves at mergingmedia10 without me (she said trying to keep the bitter disappointment out of her voice). I ended up in a long tweet session with @_creeboy @wcdixon @garryoakgirl and @RobboMills about online rollout.

Will kind of started it all by asking me why I was rolling Ruby Skye P.I. one episode at a time instead of putting all the episodes up at once.  He says that every example of a web series he’s studied, there has been a big spike in viewership at launch and a drop off after that.

A lot of smart things were said in the thread and it really made me re-examine my thinking about roll-out… or lack of thinking about it.  It’s an area I probably haven’t put enough thought into.  Will may be right, I’m still locked in the TV model.  For the web, rollout needs some shaking up and turning on its head.

The roll out for Ruby Skye P.I. is a very traditional TV approach.  And I mean that in the worst possible way.

One of the things that bugs me most about TV?   They’ll only allow me to watch on episode at a time.  Appointment viewing is possibly the most annoying part of TV.

But there is some part of me that keeps saying narrative is linear and should emerge in a linear fashion.  If I give them the whole thing at once, they might see it out of order. They might meet up with a spoiler that will ruin the whole thing for them.On the other hand, storytellers in other media hand over the whole story at once — on a dvd or in a book — and people manage to enjoy them.  People don’t consume it all at once and still the endings to films and books have an impact.  People don’t all peek at the last page — and if they do?  It’s their choice.

People who don’t want to know, protect themselves from hearing and seeing parts of the story they aren’t ready for.  I know tons of people who won’t go online if they missed their favourite TV show or put their fingers in their ears when the dinner party conversation rolls around to a film they haven’t seen.  People don’t blurt endings in public to spoil stories for their friends (certain company excluded).  And sometimes, the skip the descriptions of distant sunsets or fast forward through the icky bits and still enjoy the story.

So rolling out morsel by morsel doesn’t just annoy the audience, it shows a complete lack of faith in their ability to consume the story in the way that suits them.

And where does audience building fall in all of this?  If you’re doling out the series episode by episode, you   certainly have something new to promote once — or twice — a week.

The downside of that plan is that we’re in week 1 and I’m already exhausted.  I’m probably going to alienate everyone I know on Facebook and Twitter in the next 6 weeks with my incessant jabbering on about what amounts to less than 10 minutes of video weekly.

The other thing is, that in my head I’ve seen the rollout period — the six weeks during which we’re doling out episodes at a rate of two a week — as our opportunity to build on audience.  How incredibly old-think of me.  Once all the episodes are up and the story is there for the consuming, promotion and audience building can continue for… ever.

Which all adds up to me looking at the rollout in a whole new way.  Not that we can suddenly put all the episodes up on the web next week.  They’re not ready.  They’re rolling out of post at a rate of two a week — just in time to be posted. And that’s why we’re rolling out two a week. That’s what we have. That’s what was can manage.

Promoting the series is a different story.

On Monday, we made a bit of noise on Twitter and Fb about the first episode and the website going up, but we haven’t made our really big promotional play yet.   That was just “our friends and family launch”.

We’ve been holding off making a really big to do — calling in the old media and sending the link to friends we haven’t seen in 30 years — until we had a little more content.  We’ve been toying with doing it after Chapter 3: Break-In.  We won’t quite have the 25 minutes that Will thinks is enough to really engage with, but we will have upwards of 15.  We’ll have more than 20 if we wait till after Chapter 4: A Real Green Dress.

Is that too soon?  Maybe we should wait to do our biggest promotion till after all the episodes are up.  Then people could watch the whole thing as they see fit.  It’s probably less than an hour’s entertainment in total.  Quite a few people will find time for that in one sitting  — and we don’t have to worry about them ever remembering to come back to the site to see more.  Most of the kids I know are on the computer for hours after school.  Just a guess, but I don’t think it’s all spent doing homework.

We could do several small pushes.  We could lay on a promo blast — a little less intense that what we did at launch and each of the teasers — every 2 weeks, when there’s a new meaty sized chunk of story on the table.

But save the big promotion till everything is up on the web.

I like the idea, but also hate it.  I like it because it gives us forever to build the audience.  I hate it because I was looking forward to sleeping again in about 5 weeks.

This model makes the rollout of the additional material very different.  If I know we’re still in audience building mode for quite a while, I won’t bring out additional features that reflect on plot points.  I have tons of pictures and videos that are great but have spoilers in them.  Our plan was to get them out there as soon as the episodes in question aired.  But if we start to visualize the audience building phase as longer, we can hold them for longer and put them out in two, three or six months.

Or we could put some things out on limited release.  “Watch it in the next two days because we’re pulling it off the net after that.”

A world of possibilities is opening up.

For more on this topic, check out Scott Alberts’ In Defense of Slow Roll Out