Or so says Jigar Thakarar, Director, Web Original Content Strategy at CBS Interactive in this clip from Beet.TV. He talks about it about 2 and a half minutes into the clip. Find the original post here.

Back in January, I started experimenting with a more immersive way of telling stories on the web. The week-long experiment involved blogs, Tweets, Delicious bookmarks, video and Facebook activity (all long since removed by Facebook). Here's the video that kicked off the week:

Here's what happened next:

Then Simon posted his next video:

Bill, Denis, Alex and Kay are all talking about the death of TV and the rise of the web, the discussion partly fueled by Wired articles one and two.

If you ask me, TV's obituary is running prematurely. The life cycle of a medium follows usually follows the same patten. First, you'll hear terrified parents and preachers warning kids to stay away from that evil wandering minstrel/comic book/pulp novel/internet. But shortly there after comes adoption by the masses and pretty soon, everyone is hooked. Which is when you start hearing the death knoll. Remember when you got your first invitation to a funeral for the novel? or radio? or pop music?

Maybe TV will change. Maybe some of the players will die. But TV? Not in our lifetime.

What concerns me more are the growing pains of scripted drama on the web. These days everyone can name a web series: Dr Horrible, QuarterLife, Clarke and Michael, Prom Queen. But how many people have actually watched them? More than one episode?

Here are some numbers to consider:

According to Media Week, Prom Queen garnered 200,000 views per day. NewTeeVee tells us that Roommates, pulled in 6.2 million plays over 45 episodes. QuarterLife consistently drew around 100,000 viewers per episode on MySpace and is claiming over 6 million views in total.

On YouTube, The Guild is reflecting 7 million views cumulatively for the ten episodes with individual episodes showing view counts of a high of nearly 2 million views to a low of 200,000. On Crackle, Mr Deity has wracked up over 9 million views with 20 episodes over 2 seasons. Break A Leg seems to be pulling 1.5 million per month on breakaleg.tv.

So let's place an approximate viewership between 2 to 7 million over their runs.

Not bad you say? You must be Canadian. We think a million is a big number, but web serials have a global reach, a potential audience in the hundreds of millions.

Check last week's Nielsen's. Two and a Half Men drew 10 million viewers, Criminal Minds drew 9.1 and CSI Miami 7.9.

That's in one week.

In the middle of the summer.

Up against the Olympics.

For reruns.

The Internet doesn't have a massive break out hit yet let alone anything that can claim to be a serious contender for TV's crown. And I think I know why.

Some of these web series, The Guild and Mr Deity for example, offer viewers a mere 3-6 minutes of content a week which over the ten week run equals what you'd get from an episode of television in one week. lonelygirl15, Prom Queen and QuarterLife gave us more webisodes but for the most part daily installments are in the 2-5 minute range and few web series offer up more than a single episode a week.

In storytelling terms, how much plot and character development can you achieve? How many tricks can you pull out of your writer's toolbox to connect with an audience and addict them to what you're doing? There isn't time to develop fully realized characters or to tell complex, engrossing stories. This means that the audience has little to connect to; almost nothing to engage with emotionally.

The web serial a very casual form of entertainment. It can't possibly offer the audience the full depth of experience that they can get from a television series, movie or novel. If you're going to compare web series to any other current form of entertainment the best choice would be the comic strips in newspapers. And even that isn't a fair comparison because most comic strips run on a daily basis for years making them far more immersive than any web series.

I do think that even five minutes is a little too long to hold a viewers attention on the web. So how to overcome this problem? I'm sure a myriad of answers will emerge. But for now, the web series is still a squalling new born with a bad case of colic. It'll mature, but for now, it's not ready for prime time.

And it's way to early for TV to die on us because I for one need my daily hit of drama.

Check out Mr Deity, a web series about God -- which is a terrific little premise. And the series delivers, simply, but effectively.

Written and directed by Brian Keith Dalton, the series doesn't look like it has much of a budget, but is cleverly constructed not to need one. The writing is tight and funny. The acting is strong. Even the theme music is lovely.

The series is hosted on Crackle where I found eight of the Season 1 episodes (episodes 3 and 10 are mysteriously missing) and all ten Season 2 episodes. The episodes range in length from about three minutes to close to five.

The first season episodes are wildly different in their number of views. The first episode has been watched close to 3 million times, while some others as few as 17,000 times. The second season has been way more popular, with views counts ranging from about 250,000 to 1.3 million.

Mr Deity is a great example of a web serial that provides quick little entertainment hits to brighten up your day or distract you from the other reasons you came to your computer. Check it out.

Romany Malco, who played Helia Jackson's very hot son, Conrad on Weeds is another actor turned web serial creator.

Malco will star as Tijuana Jackson. I'm not sure why the series has the name Still I Rise, when the character and the web site are named Tijuana Jackson… maybe that will change when they get into production.

Based on the trailer, there's a Curb Your Enthusiasm feel to the material, except black, streetwise and more sexual. It looks fresh and funny and seems to have some production values.

No word on when the series will show up on the web, but Tijuana has a channel on YouTube with the following description:

Despite countless run-ins with the law and accusations of having female employees perform sexual favors for higher end clientele, Tijuana Jackson is unquestionably one of America's most distinguished entrepreneurs. An untouchable force, many will argue TJ to be the future of Capitalism.

Tijuana Jackson is a world renowned Motivational Speaker, Author and Entrepreneur. Most revered for the quote that heralds his genius "If you don't share the pussy, it will eventually share itself."

Here's the most recent trailer:

I enjoyed the first episode of The Fold… a lot. It's a funny and very very dirty. The premier hints at a cool sci fi storyline that looks like it's going to be both funny and filthy. Excellent.

The sex scenes are unusually creative. They made me laugh out loud a bunch of times. The villainess uses her panties to bend a man to her will, going so far as to lick them when he tries to resist.

And the sex is edgy too. Talk of anal beads? Cum shots? But that's pretty out there if you ask me.

One of my big complaints with many of the web serials I've watched is how long they take to get going. I think a pilot episode needs to reach out of the screen and grab your interest in the very first moments. The Fold waits almost two minutes to really hook you, but what it hooks you with is a glimpse of an erect penis.

But for all the sexy fun, The Fold is very rough. While it's strong on ideas and the smut gloriously smutty, the casting and direction aren't up to par. Hopefully this work will improve as the series develops.

They could gain a lot by abandoning the master shots, the crowd scenes and the long shots, none of which work on the web. Go for a more intimate, closer shooting style. Also if the Fold were to reduce the number of locations they're using they could do a better job of dressing them so they don't look so fakey fake fake.

Story and writing wise the Fold is uneven. The pilot begins with two people in a space station ravishing each other. We never see them again and it isn't clear how (or if) they relate to what happens next. The bulk of the episode is devoted to three more characters: Stephanie, Cody and his father. None of them are particularly likable. Stephanie and the father both seem to be villains and Cody, simply inept (even though he's the guy who built the time machine). And while the final scene does offer a blanket-covered massive hard on, it doesn't offer much in the way of cliff-hanging tension.

On the other hand, the low production quality and confusing writing didn't stop me from liking the series. You can go a long way on inventive sexual content.

I'm hopeful that the Fold will improve as the series unfolds and the cast, crew, writers and producers get more experience. I'll certainly be watching to find out.

Series Break a Leg Prom Queen Scare City Dr Horrible

Cost $63 $2000 $7-14,000 $5900

Break a Leg, Prom Queen and Scary City are Tubefilter's. Dr Horrible is based on Jeffrey McManus's estimate of 250K budget which Joss has pretty much confirmed. I guestimated the TV number based on 44 minutes at 1.5K.

Put this together with CPM numbers from Tubemogul via New TeeVee today: the average CPM for those monetized videos is $12.39. That's 12 bucks and change for every 1000 viewers you draw.

So if your video is 3 minutes and you've got a middle of the road budget of 2K/min your episode costs you $6,000. At a CPM of 12 bucks you need half a million viewers just to recoup.

I'm going to go dig up some numbers on how many viewers scripted webisodes are typically getting… More math coming soon.

Stay tuned.

The Secret World of Sam King premiered on Bebo this week with an episode that runs two minutes fifty seconds. There's no big bang, nothing to really hook you, except a cameo by Disney TV stars the Jonas Brothers. Most of the rest of the ep involves Sam running around. I have a feeling the series is about a young guy who works for a recording label. But mostly what we have in this first episode is a convention of cute guys -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

Tubefilter has done a fabulous thing. They've created a weekly schedule. of web serials. Now you can find and follow all the scripted web drama out there.

And since this is the web, this does goes beyond TV guide; you can click through to watch the shows that tickle your fancy. Or click another button to read all the latest Tubefilter news about the series. Excellent.

Now let's watch the premiere episode of The Fold (lesbian sex, men in thongs).

The LA Times has an interesting article on web serial production in Hollywood.

It includes a few budget numbers and from this and other reading, it's safe to conclude that the average webisode is coming in around $10,000 these days. So can that afford you union talent?

SAG says more than 600 Web episodes have been produced under the guild's new Internet/Online agreement -- “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” with Neil Patrick Harris among them...

At 10K an ep, these actors can't be making more than a couple of hundred bucks, so what's in it for them?

...the potential creative rewards and professional exposure can, in many performers' minds, make up for the financial sacrifice, particularly because several Web shorts have been developed into television series.

Ads on branded-content websites are more effective than non-branded sites and outpace industry norms in nearly every category.

So says a recent article in Advertising Age about a new study of online advertising conducted by the Online Publishers Association -- perhaps not an entirely impartial organization, but the results are great for anyone who's financing model for web content depends on ad revenue:

The study, "Improving Ad Performance Online: The Impact of Advertising on Branded Content Sites," ultimately determined that ads on content sites have greater impact on the overall purchase process, including customer awareness, brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference and purchase intent, especially among the consumer package goods, financial services, technology, telecommunications and travel sectors, giving credence to the idea that audiences are attracted to websites.

Of the metrics analyzed in the study, OPA notes that branded-content sites make inroads in two of the more notoriously difficult segments: brand favorability and purchase intent. Overall, brand favorability improves 29% over average online advertising. Purchase intent increases 20%. That number spikes further in relation to affluent demographics, to 24% in households with an income of $75,000 or more.

Most notably, "beyond the banner" forms of online advertising -- those that encompass video, sponsorships and rich media -- flourished when placed on branded-content sites, in comparison to traditional destinations. Specifically, sponsorship on branded-content sites were determined to be 42% more effective than the overall MarketNorms average, and 36% more so than on portals.

Some of the larger increases in web traffic are seen in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Results suggested they were 33% more likely to form favorable opinions about advertised brands than when viewing ads on portals. The OPA analysis shows that video advertising on these sites lifted brand awareness 82% over online video advertising averages, brand favorability increased 67%.

Tubefilter has a great interview with Illeana Douglas on the making of Easy to Assemble; a must read. The series is sponsored by IKEA and due to debut this fall. Douglas seems to be really jazzed about the experience. Here are a few quotes:

The show kind of renewed everybody’s faith in everything. The whole show is about how art is where you make it. You don’t have be in a movie, and no one can say “no” to you. If you decide you’re going to do it, if you put two sticks together, and somebody enjoys it, you’re creating art.

Oftentimes, when you’re writing for bosses, the biggest note you get is that “people aren’t going to get that.” And it’s frustrating because you’re fighting for the audience. And there are no real bosses in independent films. And I sort of see this as an extension of independent film. The reward is when people do it, they say they have such a great time. That says to me that it’s working on some level. I feel like I’m able to capture a certain intimacy that maybe other people wouldn’t be able to capture.

Not having any bosses gives you the ability to not edit yourself, and to put things out there that you feel really confident about. Because usually, in TV you have a lot of people telling you what to do, and how to cut it. Working in television can be kind of like making a comedy in a prisoner of war camp; you’ve got people telling you what they think is funny, and you’re like, “Really?” What they always say is to work within the system, and find a way still to express your own voice. With the web you have creative freedom, but the flip side of this is of course that nobody’s making any money.

Greenpeace gets sexy on their YouTube channel:

Felicia Day is all kinds of wonderful. There was that turn in Dr Horrible, but that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her talent. She also wrote, produced and starred in The Guild which is one of the best web serials around.

Here's a video of her on the Dr Horrible panel at ComicCon caught Twittering instead of paying attention. For those of you who don't know Twitter, this is akin to passing high tech notes in class... Only she was on stage at the time.

Felicia Day Twitters from hacksaway on Vimeo.

If you can't get enough of Felicia, you can follow her on FriendFeed.

Scrabulous is dead, but Wordscraper lives. The Agarwalla brothers who brought us Scrabulous are locked in a lawsuit with Hasbro, the copyright holders of Scrabble. Hasbro recently forced the Agarwallas to remove the Scrabulous app from Facebook. Now they're back with a new game: Wordscraper, which has many similarities to Scrabulous, but round tiles.

Hasbro's Scrabble app on Facebook has been plagued with bugs but nonetheless has 64,000 users on Facebook, but a rating of 1.2 out of 5 stars based on 300 reviews.

So far, Wordscraper has less than 4000 users but a rating of 4.8 stars based on 40-odd reviews.

We'll have to wait a few weeks to find out which word game ultimately wins or whether fans have room in their schedules for both.