All The Internet’s A Stage
Roy Raphaeli’s colleagues often ask him to do a magic trick. Usually, he obliges. “I take the opportunity to show people my new stuff and see how they react,� said Mr. Raphaeli, 23, a Brooklynite who works for a mail-order camera retailer.
While Mr. Raphaeli, known professionally as Magic Roy, has been entertaining people with card tricks and sleight-of-hand since he was 5, he does not perform at birthday parties or casino showrooms.
Instead, Mr. Raphaeli’s stage of choice is the Internet, where he has posted 30 short video clips to Metacafe, a Web site that pays video creators based on how many viewers their work attracts. So far, Mr. Raphaeli has earned more than $13,000 from the site, where his most popular card trick has been seen 1.4 million times.
While the sums involved are not yet impressive enough to lure established TV or movie producers into the world of Internet video, they can be significant for people on the fringes of the entertainment industry, or those who see video production as a sideline to their day job, like Mr. Raphaeli.
He had originally planned to sell DVD compilations of his best tricks, before discovering that he could earn more, and reach a larger audience, by posting his videos online.
Photo by Chester Higgins Jr..
Austin of Sundrip Journals on February 17th, 2007 12:43 pm
My concern use to be that in a sea of videos and blogs I’m just going to get lost and anything relevant I might have to say or show would simply be lost in cyberspace. I realized that everyone searching the net isn’t looking for the same thing and that what I have to say may just be what someone is looking for…if not today then perhaps tomorrow or the next day. I hope people don’t become too discouraged by the amount of videos and blogs out there and forget that people searching search for different things and they might just be searching for something you said better than someone else. That’s just my thought.
Austin of Sundrip Journals
(my journal is only worth 11 grand but I’m okay with that. My purpose isn’t to sell.)
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