First, I'll note that what you wrote here somewhat contradicts your original post
Straw man argument. The original post was a series of questions. My reply to your comment was the hypothesis I posed to myself. They don't contradict each other as the questions were posed as a result of the hypothesis.
This is an absurdly small and misleading sample, even within your stated target.
This was never intended to be conclusive market research, this is just to see if it warranted further research into the topic. In a short space of time (4 hours) I've received some good feedback and suggestions from both parties and been directed to some resources (eg the zombie comic) that I didn't know existed.
I could have, for all intensive purposes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours conducting extensive research - or I could just build the damn thing and release it for much less than what it would cost to obtain "accurate research".
versus a large, general audience of young viewers who enjoy (and pay for) digital animation content.
You know, this is where your false argument falls down. You don't have to have a customer paying for the actual content, or even advertising to be able to monetise it. They sure help, but it's not the only method.
You specifically stated that you wanted to do this as a low-cost thing
Finally, you got something correct.
thus you can't be making high-quality, specialized content
Oops, spoke too soon.
Just because the big name companies like Pixar and Dreamworks are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at creating this kind of entertainment, doesn't mean that it is the only way.
Think about it for a second, really break it down into its component parts. Your typical animation FILM by those 2 studios is around 90 minutes of entertainment and costs upwards of 100 million dollars each. It's about on par with what Hollywood is spending on films.
Now lets look at your average tv show, 22 minutes of entertainment. So if we used the Hollywood blockbuster model, each episode should cost around $25 million plus right? No, it doesn't work that way.
Lost for example, which is notorious for being expensive to produce cost (in its first year) $44 million for 22 episodes at 43 minutes (approx) running time each.
That's an approximate 10 times the entertainment, for less than half the cost.
So if Film and TV operate at completely different scales, then obviously there is a huge disconnect between the cost of production and the amount that someone can be entertained.
To further back up my concept, I present to you a video called "Big Buck Bunny" - it is essentially a video demo that was created by the Blender Foundation for their open source tool.
This video is 10 minutes of animation, completed in 3 months with (depending on how you look at the team makeup) 7-9 guys from concept to delivery using only open source software
http://www.vimeo.com/1084537
That surely doesn't look like a low quality animation to me. So it's not an impossible task.