After a few bumps along the way, Hollywood is finally in love with YouTube. Last year, DreamWorks Animation paid US$33m for YouTube channel AwesomenessTV. This year, Warner Bros invested US$18m in the YouTube channel Machinima, Disney purchased Maker Studios for US$500m and now The Chernin Group and AT&T are said to be buying Fullscreen for up to US$300m.

At this point, many other studios are, probably, negotiating acquisitions of these so-called multi-channel networks (MCN).

The main reason for this frenzy is clear: these channels and the content webcast on them generate audiences bigger than any TV network, especially in a target that proves hard to reach with TV. It’s a fact that new generations spend more time on YouTube than they do watching traditional linear broadcasting. This success has prompted some internet-based web series or YouTube celebrities to cross to TV.

Since 2008, when NBC experimented with transferring online drama Quarterlife from MySpace to the 20.00 TV slot, hundreds of producers and creators have been trying to find the secret formula for creating a successful TV show out of a popular YouTube star or web series. Many have tried and most have failed. The explanation is simple: not all successful entertainment brands translate well to other formats, and what makes them unique on one platform may not work in other media.

Battleship is probably one of the most popular board games around the globe, but that was not enough to make it a successful film. Before that, many other popular properties, including books, toys or even a Twitter account like CBS’s $#*! My Dad Says, tried to find gold on TV. In a world where there’s more and more content available each minute and fewer loyal eyeballs to follow it, of course adapting an established brand (with a huge following) increases the chances of success in the competitive TV market. But unfortunately, most of these adaptations fail.

An existing fanbase and a recognisable brand or face is not enough to create a winning, long-running TV show or format. A successful web series or a YouTube star may seem shortcuts to TV ratings heaven, but in reality, without the proper development work, they are just short cuts to a minefield. To get a hit show, producers and executives still need to develop the TV concept, adapted to the medium, to meet the expectations of a broader audience.

In the case of scripted content, more and more engaging characters need to be added, while plot and backstory need to be extended. Then it’s necessary to think about the format: the length, the rhythm and the pace of TV, the ad breaks and the cliffhangers. TV is another beast entirely and although successful on YouTube, TV shows based on these properties will still need to be piloted for TV audiences. Thinking that YouTube can substitute for a proper TV development process is just nonsense.

A three- or five-minute piece to camera with a teenager shouting into the microphone, showing something ‘cool,’ with a lot of jump cuts and text on the screen, is not what TV audiences expect. That is not appealing even to young audiences, when they finally decide to look at TV!

In 2003, I created my first web series, a simple teen diary about a girl-next-door, called Sofia. The story become an internet sensation and the blogs, the video blogs and the text messages that pushed the audience to our website were popular in that target audience. This success on the internet started to be noticed by mainstream media and in one year I was facing the biggest challenge of my career: to cross my beloved internet character to the TV screen.

In the past decade I’ve been working hard to bring our web-originated characters and series to TV worldwide. It’s still a very demanding task and we can’t just count on the existing internet fanbases to give us success. We still need to redevelop almost every single aspect of it to make it work for TV audiences. We still need to pilot it. In this process we learnt that although it seems very tempting to rush into crossing from the internet and YouTube to TV, the reality taught us that developing a successful TV show or format out of an internet success is hard, if not harder, than developing a show from scratch.