Study finds Web series audiences are unreliable

Here’s an interesting story over at AdAge that shows how hard it is to make a Web series stick. Ad Age asked TubeMogul to do a survey of the top 50 Web-only series and found that the series lost 64% of their audiences, on aggregate, from the first to the second episode. Most series don’t make it to ten episodes, and by then, there aren’t many viewers left. The survey doesn’t include Hulu and iTunes, where big money shows are repurposed using the Web only as another distribution platform, but it does hit most of the big indie and citizen video sites. Big production doesn’t make as much as a difference as one might think. Michael Eisner’s Web series “Prom Queen,” for one instance, dove from 405,000 views for episode one to 38,000 for episode two.