LOS ANGELES — Voice-over work in Indianapolis wasn't too lucrative, so Daniel Geduld made a classic actor's move: He headed for L.A. And like most Hollywood dreamers, Geduld didn't get hired for much.

So Geduld combined his creative talents with his abundance of free time. He took footage from the 1980s "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" cartoons, re-edited it and redubbed it to make the evil Skeletor and his cronies into a bumbling gang of losers. Geduld added incongruously peppy jazz by Django Reinhardt, called his farce "The Skeletor Show" and posted episodes on YouTube.

Geduld added his e-mail address, along with this line: "Please give me a job. I'm talented."

Actually, that was a joke. Geduld didn't think much could come of it.

But the Internet has broadened the ways people get discovered today, often for jobs in the entertainment industry that didn't exist until a few years ago.

Enough people liked "The Skeletor Show" that it got mentioned on some popular blogs. Before long, several Web sites were paying Geduld to do similar comedic "mash-ups" for them. Video portal http://Heavy.com hired Geduld to be a voice for its new horror channel.

When he got the first e-mail inquiring about his services, Geduld, 30, was startled. "Oh, my God, this actually worked!" he thought. The first few gigs paid only around $500. But now he's making "enough to support myself," and offers keep coming. A tech company asked if he'd do promotional material. He got invited to a sci-fi convention.

"It just gets better and better," Geduld says. "I'm thinking of getting an agent."

One of Hollywood's legends is the story of the ingenue who got discovered by a studio honcho while she sipped a soda in a drugstore. The myth spoke to the lightning-strike luck that making it big generally took in a system controlled by a few big studios.

Now the Web has blown things open. It is easier than ever to get discovered. Web sites trying to develop into entertainment hubs are hungry for people to write, shoot or star in new content, so its representatives scan for talent in the piles of homemade videos on MySpace, YouTube, Revver and blogs.

The Web already has its tales of regular Janes who made it big, like Lisa Donovan, who leapt from YouTube to the cast of Fox's "MadTV," and Brooke Brodack, a Net video character signed to a TV production deal by Carson Daly.

But the lesser-known story is of non-stars like Geduld, riding the Web's radical openness to find new kinds of online entertainment work.

Often these jobs are with sites that may be a step above the user-generated schlock of YouTube, but still are sorting out the economics of attracting advertising. So discovery sometimes comes with modest trappings. And it often extends to people who wouldn't have made it through Hollywood's old-school gatekeepers — or even tried.

Consider Jessica Hagy, a 29-year-old freelance advertising copywriter in Ohio. Last fall she started a blog that comments on the world through diagrams. (You have to see it to get it, check out http://indexed.blogspot.com.) When brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis encountered the blog in L.A., they e-mailed Hagy and eventually asked her to produce diagrams this fall on their comedy site, http://JibJab.com. There aren't big bucks involved, maybe a few thousand, depending on how much advertising the segments attract.

"It just seems to be the new modus operandi for creative people," says Hagy, who has yet to meet the Spiridellis brothers in person. "There are so many more people out there than you could find before. ... I was just a random kid in Columbus, Ohio. How was I supposed to find anybody under the old way?"

This is not to say everyone who airs dumb stunts or lip-synchs on YouTube has a chance of landing real work. Those scouting through user-generated videos see more rough than diamonds. When there are decent finds, competition can be intense.

Jason Marks, a former MTV executive who oversees programming for Heavy.com, says that he came across a YouTube video of some young guys "in their dorm room, flicking boogers on their wall." Marks was only mildly amused, but sensed there might be something in these kids. Marks says he left a message for them — and that his call was returned by someone in a very prominent talent agency.

"They refer us to their agent!" Marks says. "I'm not even kidding, man."