Before this class I only had a vague idea of what web series were. My partner had shown me The Guild years ago, and I watched Bee and Puppycat and Baman Piderman, but I didn’t really know how web series were defined or how many there really were. An article I read a while ago about Bee and Puppycat talked about how when it was originally pitched to the youtube channel that it’s on, the male founder rejected it, until he showed it to his wife. Cartoons are generally targeted towards young teen boys, and an animated show for girls, never mind older teen ones, is something that doesn’t really exist much, and certainly not on TV. Steven Universe, which came out towards the end of 2013, was the first show on Cartoon Network that was created by a woman, although the main character is still a boy. Both Bee and Puppycat and Steven Universe have large fanbases of late teens, early 20s women, and they’re meant to be accessible to anyone. Although a handful of these semi-mainstream cartoons are now being made by women, it’s still entirely white women, though both of these shows include PoC and queer people (many of the characters and voice actors for SU are WoC). But Bee and Puppycat, along with other animated web series, is different from live action ones. Animation is typically more expensive, it takes more time and therefore requires teams of animators to get episodes out quickly. It is possible to have small teams or a single person working on a few minute long animation, but then it takes months between episodes, and even longer if it’s not their job. Both Bee and Puppycat and Baman Piderman are on channels that publish multiple webseries, and are funded through the ad revenue, but I’m not certain about how much of that money goes to creators. These two shows have both run kickstarters, for Bee and Puppycat it was to fund the series after the pilot was successful, and for Baman Piderman it was after 23 episodes over two seasons, when they lost funding before they could finish the last 5. To give you a sense of the cost, Bee and Puppycat asked for $600,000 and got $872,000, and Baman Piderman asked for $50,000 and raised $112,000, and neither of these are huge productions (episodes are around 6 minutes long, Baman Piderman only has 2 people working on it). I’m not aware of any animated web series that have a very small amount of funding the way many live action web series do, but I’m sure they exist. There are some animators on YouTube who release videos on their own periodically, but they’re generally not in series, and most of those people at least have patreons. In general it’s much harder to break into the animated web series scene than it is to get into the live action one, because animation takes so much more time, it’s hard to create videos quickly without getting paid to work on them full time, and you can’t really get paid unless you have a publisher or a preexisting fanbase. So while the barriers are higher, they’re still much lower than mainstream studio productions, and that means a wider range of animated content and creators can make cartoons and get paid for it, which is a great thing.