Where are they now? Career sustainability and Australian web-series producers

Over the last decade, several professionalising amateur Australian content creators making popular web series distributed on multiple open platforms broke into the television industry and have since developed promising professional careers. The limited scholarly research into the career trajectories and sustainability of web series creators has typically been conducted as normative critique of the value of web series labour. In contrast, we look processually and empirically at the career trajectories of 26 creators following their first publicly funded web series between 2011 and 2020. The creators’ pathways are varied, but web series facilitated a pathway to career sustainability for roughly three quarters of the cohort. Web series functioned as (1) a calling card for native online creators, (2) a format facilitating career consolidation or acceleration for television professionals and (3) a format enabling career diversification for filmmakers. Overall, they can be a market-tested talent training ground for television, especially broadcaster-video-on-demand or subscription-video-on-demand services.