Ze Frank is one of the first ever video bloggers. His show, entitled "The Show", was a daily video blog over 2006-2007. It was funny, thoughtful, innovative, and to this day the quality and quantity of content has been rarely matched by any other video blogger. Recently, Ze has started blogging again, in a show entitled "A Show". His new video blog is funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised almost three times his target, at $146,000.

The lasting lesson from this successful campaign is not that more video bloggers should run Kickstarter campaigns.

As the hype winds down, Kickstarter will make less and less money over the next few months, and is unlikely to ever again fetch the absurd quantities of money for creators that it has in the first few months of this year. In principle, I don’t really understand why a video blogger needs to run a Kickstarter, as the overheads are not high, it’s mostly just time consuming - like WheezyWaiter says, the main thing a video blogger needs is patience - start up money doesn’t make a huge amount of difference.

"When I made my 100th video, I had 32 subscribers on YouTube. These things take time. And work." - WheezyWaiter
The lasting lesson from Ze Frank's kickstarter is that online video has an actual monetary value to people, even though that video is freely available for anybody to stream online. Ze's reward packs in the Kickstarter contained not only solid, touchable products with references to his videos, but also download packs with rewatchable versions of his original show videos. Aside from the Kickstarter hype, I think that downloadable versions of video blogs have an actual value to fans. Ze clearly agrees, because you can still buy them from his website.

So here’s my lasting message to video bloggers - sell me downloadable versions of your videos. Even better, sell me DVDs - I would love to give you my money for a DVD in a nice box with everything you have ever made on it, so that I no longer have to wait for YouTube to load every time I want to reminisce. I can’t be the only one who wants to give you my money.