In the world of original web content, the content that most often tops a million views is shareable content that grows virally with audiences.

So says Geoff Lapaire, co-creator of web series Pure Pwnage and Space Janitors, ahead of his panel, “Like TV, Only Cheaper? Showrunning Series for the Web and Beyond” panel at VIFF’s Film and TV Forum.

Shareable content is at the crux of finding a big audience. The creators who see immediate and sustainable success on YouTube are the ones that can pump out three of four videos per week to their one million-plus subscribers at a miniscule budget, he says.

But even though there’s a huge audience online to be tapped, it’s a challenge to monetize high-quality episodic series made for the internet, says Lapaire.

An an example, Lapaire explains the how he worked to find Space Janitors a big audience,  partnering with  online portal Escapist magazine (currently with over 240,000 subscribers) for its April 2012 launch. For its second season, his team took a different tack by partnering with Felicia Day’s YouTube channel Geek and Sundry. The online channel is a YouTube premium content partner, one of the channels that received part of a $100 million investment to create original online content for the platform.

Space Janitors launched alongside The Guild, the channel’s flagship series, and hit a minimum of 100,000 views per episode. The IPF- and OMDC-funded Space Janitors doesn’t participate in revenue share with Geek and Sundry, and instead received a licence fee from the channel up front as part of its budget.

Despite the boost from Geek and Sundry’s more than 700,000 subscribers, the revenue hasn’t caught up with the potential audience numbers, and Lapaire says its because YouTube’s revenue model isn’t a sustainable one for TV-style series with budgets higher than viral videos featuring elaborate pranks or ranting tweens.

“The kind of content we’re making is more TV-like than the average YouTube-style show, and the economics of the situation is [that] we’re pretty far from making back our money,” Lapaire admits, adding that even if they launched on their own as a YouTube channel, the revenue from ads and views would only be a drop in the bucket compared to the $250,000 season budget.

What would significantly change the economics of web series creation in Canada is more broadcaster support, he says.

Lapaire says the Canadian web series landscape could change for the better with broadcaster support, and a system that’s set up to reach global audiences.  Half of the Space Janitors audience, he says, is based in the U.S. With Pure Pwnage, fans were based far and wide, including the U.S. and Europe. And following the series’ cancellation on Showcase, an Indiegogo campaign for a Pure Pwnage movie raised $211,000 – almost three times the targeted $75,000 goal – indicating that the international audience appetite was still there.

He says he would like to see more incentives for broadcasters to support homegrown web content, even through their proprietary social channels, for example, hosting videos on their own YouTube channels. This would support Canadian-created content and allow it to find a wider audience without the traditional – sizable – investment that a broadcast deal would incur.

“What better way to export Canadian culture than online?” he says.

In the interim, Lapaire and Space Janitors co-creator Davin Lengyel are producing the series a demonstration for television, to increase their chances of working in TV, either selling the show to a broadcaster or repackaging it.

Lapaire says in working on the web, there’s a greater opportunity to build an international profile for their cast and crew. It’s also a way to make something that looks like conventional TV that can garner an audience at a lower budget.

“There’s ways to produce content that isn’t the same amount of dollars per minute as television. As more projects are greenlit and more risky decisions are being made on lower-budget projects, I think it might even change the way people produce media in Canada quite a bit; it might give rise to leaner methods of production,” Lapaire says.