I agree that continuity is very pleasant, both for artists and for audiences. In the past few months I've noticed that online entertainment is groping toward a new kind of business model where the artist just keeps working on a single property and never stops, escalating the ambitions and production values as the audience grows.

An example of what I'm talking about is the webcomic Homestuck, which started as some simple panels with text and now evolved to thousands of pages with intricate animations, musical pieces and even videogames spliced into one big narrative. From being written by a single person (who still has full creative control), the comic has gradually grown to have a dedicated art team, music team and gamedev studio.

An almost-example is the videogame Nuclear Throne. It's currently being developed by a two-person studio, and the creators make a point of releasing new updates every single week and interacting with the audience constantly, talking to Redditors and building good relationships with Youtubers. By now it's had 50+ weekly updates and just keeps going. A big part of me wants the game to never be "finished" but just stay in development forever, like a webcomic, becoming more ambitious as money permits. The game's universe is certainly interesting enough to allow that kind of development, you could imagine all kinds of stories set inside the game, etc.

The awesome thing about this model is that you can start very small. Homestuck started with one guy, Nuclear Throne started with two guys. If you can keep growing the audience at every step, who's to say that you can't end up with a billion dollar movie franchise, or even crazier things?