Plans & Ops
2022-2027 A.D.
This following serves as an in-depth overview of
Disrupt’s internal company structure & tactics for growth
over the next 5 years.
Executive Summary
Mission
A) Tell the highest quality stories that we are capable of.
B) Disrupt the entertainment industry by creating profitable content with a fraction of the budget used by traditional film studios.
C) Utilize real-time technology to bring film-quality videos, shows, & films to our platforms.
Objectives
Short Term (by end Q4 2022)
- 4 videos per month on YouTube
- 2 videos per month on Disrupt+
- 2 new products per month on Disrupt.sale
- Localized channels: Disrupt_ESP, Disrupt_Brazil, Disrupt_Russia
Mid Term (by end of Q2 2023)
- Launch Disrupt fictional content branch
Long Term (by end of Q4 2027)
- Release a feature-film / mini-series
- 5,000,000 YouTube subscribers
- 5,000 monthly Disrupt+ subscribers
- Launch Disrupt’s Virtual Reality Branch
Measures of Success
1) The release of regular content that cultivates compounding growth in viewership & subscription numbers.
2) Efficient translation pipeline to bring our top performing content to non-english speaking countries.
3) Short-form videos that are generating enough revenue to fund the production of long-form films & series.
4) 2D content that is generating enough revenue to fund the production of VR content.
Revenue
There are currently three revenue branches to our studio;
free content, premium content & merchandising.
Free-content:
This is the “bread & butter” of our current revenue structure. These 7-25 minute YouTube videos act as mechanisms for organically growing our community, brand, & products while continually sharpening our team’s skillset in storytelling. The focus here is to strike a balance between aiming for the highest quality videos on the platform, while uploading consistently (1-2 times a month). We strike this balance by working directly with contracted writers, editors, and animators that exhibit strong tendencies for both creative vision & time efficiency. Additionally, we utilize motion capture & the real-time animation to produce photorealistic visuals. This allows us to quickly reiterate shots, avoid costly render farms, and generally expand our scope for what type of stories we can tell within a short-timeframe. Outside of content created by our in-house team, over 2021 and 2022 we have contracted other YouTubers to create & upload their original videos, on our channel, with a revenue split.
The revenue from our free content comes from YouTube’s automated pre, mid, and post-roll ads. As such, most of the potential profit being generated from this content is seen within the first 90 days of upload. Revenue then gathers over the following 12 months, or, on occasion when a video gets picked up by the algorithm, several months after the initial upload. An extra form of revenue for this branch is the option of working directly with brands to create integrations for their products within our videos. This is usually a one time payment in exchange for 60-90 seconds of promotion. However, over Q1-Q2 2022, we have moved away from 3rd-party brand integrations in favor of advertising our own products (merchandise & Disrupt+). That being said, the option remains open for future growth.
Premium-content:
AKA Disrupt+, is home to indie series, films, & podcasts offered to our audience for $5mo/$55/year. This platform has been designed and developed in-house, which gives us more freedom, ownership & flexibility as opposed to using a pre-existing subscription platform.
Content in this branch takes 3 forms:
- In-house: Produced via the same pipeline & team as our free content.
- Contracted: A hired creator with a clear vision for what they want to create is contracted to produce a 7-25 minute video or series.
- Licensed: Pre-existing short films, shows, and podcasts that we obtain via a non-exclusive, global distribution license.
All subscribers of Disrupt+ are given a Producer credit which lists their username in the credits of our YouTube videos.
Merchandise:
AKA Disrupt.sale, is where we sell branded clothing & accessories. Our primary focus here is to create visually attractive products that are affordable. All products are printed & shipped on-demand with our merchandise partner Spring. The print-on-demand model allows us to quickly launch new products without having to buy up-front inventory or handle shipping logistics.
Audience & Market
Our primary audience is made up of the same demographic that our company is made up of; males, 18-33. We believe this gives us an advantage in that, the content we create is the same content we want to consume.
2022-2027 is primarily focused on growing our presence on YouTube. In 2021, YouTube generated around $28.8 billion in advertising income. Roughly 55% of that revenue goes to creators, making YouTube the primary market for independent content distribution. (source)
Competitive Strategy
In a box-office economy, a customer would have to choose whether to buy a ticket for Content A (or) Content B.
In the YouTube economy, content is free & readily available. A customer is not choosing what to pay for, they are choosing what to do with their time. As such, we are not competing with one specific channel or creator for market-share, instead, we are competing for attention-share.
With this in mind, we do not identify other independent channels as direct competitors that deduct from our value. Rather, we are focusing on creating the highest-quality content that we are capable of, with the intention of elevating our voice above other free content.
In a similar light, our aim for Disrupt+ is not to compete with subscription titans like Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+. Instead, we are focused on uplifting independent creators that know how to tell compelling and cost-efficient stories, outside of traditional Hollywood methods.
Risks
The following categories of risk are what we predict can threaten our current structure over the next 5 years.
Algorithms:
The free content branch of Disrupt is our primary means of revenue. As such, we rely heavily on the YouTube algorithm to promote our content to viewers. As of now, the platform doesn’t specifically tell us what does or doesn’t get promoted by it’s algorithm. This means our primary job aside from creating content, is to constantly look to improve how our content is placed within the content feed; thumbnails, titles, and content structuring all work towards maximizing visibility within the algorithm. We plan to mitigate this risk through thumbnail/title experimentation & seeking council from experienced creators.
Advertisements:
RPM or revenue per mille (thousand) is what YouTube pays the studio per thousand views. Not to be confused with CPM – represents the cost per thousand pre-YouTube’s ad-revenue cut. Please find the statistics for our channel’s RPM below: 2020 – $1.96 2021 – $4.93 2022 (Q1-Q2) – $3.93 As far as we can tell, the number is dependent on how many views an individual video gets + how many views our channel receives as a whole. Outside factors also effect this; economic instability, recession, inflation, etc.
Shifting Content Guidelines:
Between 2016 and 2022, YouTube has changed it’s stance on what type of content is suitable for advertisements. As a whole, Disrupt content tends to be advertiser friendly in that we rarely create content about mature subjects outside of cybercrime. With that being said, the landscape has changed in the past & may change in the future.
In addition to these categories,
we recognize that unforeseen risks are what can wreak the most havoc.
As such, it is imperative our team remains wise, vigilant, and
in constant self assessment.
Tactics
Mission: “Disrupt Overseas”
Goals:
- Expand our audience outside of English-speaking countries.
- Generate additional revenue from content that has already been created.
Execution:
- Contract 1 translator per country to translate an existing video’s script.
- Contract 1 voice actor per country to record that script.
- Contract 1 video editor to place that recording within the translated video.
From here, we’ll repeat this process & begin a scheduled release as new content publishes on our English channel.
Budget:
$700 per video
Timeline:
1 video on each localized channel by the end of Q4 2022.
Brazil: Disrupt_BR
Mexico: Disrupt_ESP
Japan: Disrupt_JP
Russia: Disrupt_RU
Mission: “Regular Merch for Regular Viewers”
Goals:
- Expand the catalog of merchandise we currently have for sale.
- Grow merchandise revenue.
Execution:
- Utilize MidJourney Artificial Intelligence to automatically design a wide variety of stylized graphics with prompts that appeal to our studio’s aesthetic.
- Format the chosen designs onto a product.
- Showcase the new designs beneath our YouTube video’s via YouTube’s merch shelf.
Budget:
$10/month for AI license
$30/month for contractor
Timeline:
2 new products launching per month by the end of Q3 2022.
Mission: “Fictional Pipeline”
Goals:
- Expand Disrupt’s production capabilities to include the creation of cost & time-efficient fictional content.
- A <20 minute piece of fictional content should take no more than 30 days to write, animate, and release.
- Grow the value we offer to Disrupt+ & YouTube subscribers.
Execution:
- Contract writers to produce short film/series scripts.
- Utilize pre-existing 3D sets, characters, and models.
- Leverage motion capture and Unreal Engine to record character movements in real-time.
- Release on YouTube and/or Disrupt+. For example, if there’s a 3-part mini series, we’ll release the first episode on YouTube for free, then direct viewers to the other 2 pay-walled episodes on Disrupt+.
- Optional: Find brand sponsorships to cover production costs
Budget:
$2500 per 20 minutes
Timeline:
- First narrative content released by the end of Q4 2022.
- A singular, narrative piece of content per month over 2023.
Last updated on July 23rd, 2022
