‘Hacking’ into niche content – launching a web series, with Jill Golick (Part 2)

Welcome back for part two of my interview with Jill Golick on her pay-per-download web series for tween girls, Hailey’s Hacks.  If you missed part one yesterday, you can get caught up here.

Let’s dive right back in.

What are some of the tools you’re using to promote the content?  How have you found the response to date?

Before we launched we built up little presences for Hailey on Facebook (as a Facebook page), on icanhascheezburger, Twitter, YouTube and 12seconds. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Hailey-Hacks/141788650071?ref=ts

http://twitter.com/HaileyHacks/

http://www.youtube.com/user/HaileyHacks/
http://12seconds.tv/channel/haileyhacks/

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/pictures-by-haileyhacks/

As I was building each of these profiles I realized something important; you have to be 13 to sign up for all these sites.  Now I happen to know a ton of 11 year olds who have Facebook profiles, but they all list their ages as 17 or 23 or 48.  In other words, if you’re a pre-teen you’re the equivalent of an illegal immigrant in the social networking world.

So, when it comes to promoting Hailey Hacks, the difficulty in using the social networks is that it’s hard to target our demographic.  The defining characteristic of our niche is their age and they’re lying about their age.  That’s a bit of a hurdle.

We are starting to reach some kids and get feedback from them (I personally have received a number of calls from wakerupper.com which tells me that the kids I know are appreciating the content and learning from it.)  That’s helping us figure out how to continue adding value for them on the web.  We’ll be adding more sharing tools in the near future to help them spread our content which will in turn raise awareness of the series.

In addition to creating material that will appeal to kids, we’ll be reaching out to parents and educators through the social networks, trying to get the message out to them.  That message has a slightly different shape than the content we’re targeting kids with.  An teacher or parent might not see right away the educational value in lolcats, so we’re going to have to tailor a message that will help them get what we’re doing.

It is important to us to build our audience organically and we know it will take time and effort.  We’re also certain Hailey Hacks is a great property and it will catch on.

One of Hailey's LOLCats - get it? Get it???

Really interesting insights into promotion.  But you mentioned outreach to parents – how/through what channels were you hoping to achieve that?

I’m reaching to parents via mommy/daddy bloggers and associated communities.  I may start a new blog (omg, I already have 3 if you count Hailey’s, how will I manage?!?) focused on raising wired daughters.

Great stuff!  As far as monetizing the project, you’re using an interesting strategy offering free trailers with pay-per-download full length episodes.  What led you to establishing this as your model?

Like most of what we’re doing with Hailey Hacks, the business model was a chance to learn.  A lot of people advise you to put something out there, build an audience and monetize later. But we didn’t want to start without any revenue stream at all.

Granted, we’re not exactly going after the big bucks here at $2/download, but it is a chance for us to find out how people respond to this offer.  Maybe they won’t at first, but we think we can be so valuable to kids and parents that eventually they will want to give us the money.

We’ll continue to be open to other business models.  We’d certainly be happy to have some corporate sponsorship and to deliver the Hailey brand in other media, like TV.

At the same time, I like the user pays model because in the long run I think it leads to the cleanest, most creative product and the one that suits the user best.  When the audience is paying, they’re the only ones we have to please.

Do you see this as a model you’ll pursue with other niche content plays?  Any spoilers you could offer up??

We’ve had incredible responses from adults who say they are learning a tremendous amount from Hailey Hacks – how to take a screen shot, for example or what a lolcat is.  We may test out a similar idea for an adult audience at some point.

Right now, the focus is on Hailey Hacks, trying to figure out exactly what useful and innovative content she can contribute to digital world we inhabit and build a community.

So if you know any 8-13 year olds, please send them the link!

I sort of wonder if a 13 year old girl might actually be the perfect teacher for adults – they’re always going on about how much more their kids know about tech than they do.  Is it possible that the appropriate teacher for an adult is a kid when it comes to these matters?  Could it be that your most viable audience for Hailey could be parents themselves?

Hailey might be the perfect teacher for parents.  Or maybe a mom-daughter teaching combo or I’ve been talking about this with an actor friend who isn’t very wired and we’ve been thinking about doing a podcast in which I teach her stuff she wants to learn.  So many ideas, so little time…

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You said it, Jill!  Thanks so much for your time.  We’ll check back in on Jill’s experiments in the fall.  Thanks for following along everyone and please leave your thoughts and comments below and send your tweens to www.haileyhacks.com

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