More and more comic-book characters are coming to life on the Internet.
Platinum Studios, the Malibu-based company that licenses comic-book properties for other media, has unveiled an Internet video service full of animated offerings.
It’s called Splastk. The network offers comic book-inspired video on 15 separate sites that are favorites of comics fans, including Newsarama, Comics2Film, Keenspot and Comicon.com. Together, the sites have 6 million unique visitors and more than 100 million page-views per month, according to the company.
“We’ve created the equivalent of a broadcast television channel that can be syndicated across the net,” said Platinum President Brian Altounian. “We believe this is where the entire entertainment industry is going.”
Although the major comic-book publishers have moved into video, they don’t tell episodic stories on the Internet. The Marvel site has trailers for its movies, while DC Comics has parent company Warner Bros. to produce animated TV shows.
For now, most of the content on Splastk consists of two- to four-minute episodes that animate an existing Web comic. But to grow the offerings, Platinum has teamed up with L.A.-based Comflix Studios, a company that specializes in adding motion to static print or Web comics. In addition, Platinum wants to license comics from the international marketplace to offer on the channel.
While Splastk has a few successful Web properties such as “Dracula vs. King Arthur” and “The Last Sin of Mark Grimm,” it lacks a household name such as Spider-Man, Batman or Homer Simpson that could drive bigger traffic.
“It sounds like they are finding a middle ground between the studio model, where they control the content but don’t get much traffic, and the YouTube model, where they have traffic but don’t make any money,” said Scott Fox, an L.A.-based Web consultant and author of the book “Internet Riches.” “If they can control the distribution cleverly, maybe they can find the money.”
The Splastk business model serves advertisers who want “the coveted pop-culture core 18-to-34-year-old male demographic,” according to the company. Each video segment contains a 15-second commercial before the entertainment starts. A six-week test of the system featured Sony PlayStation 2 as the sole advertiser and had more page views than had been projected.
Altounian said he would be seeking advertisers across the youth spectrum. “We’re talking gaming, apparel, extreme sports, energy drinks. It’s those categories we’re going after.”
Splastk will give a share of the ad revenue to the creators of the programming and the companies that run the Web sites.
But the startup network faces competition on the user side where “YouTube is obviously the dominant force,” according to Fox and on the advertiser side, where networks already exist for distributing Internet video commercials.
Altounian has superheroic ambitions for Splastk, hoping it can grow to 25 affiliate networks based on genres such as horror, superheroes and even non-comics content. He believes these networks would generate as many as 500 million page-views per month.
“We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars,” Altounian said, “and it’s doable within the next 12 months.”
