The Gloomers, the animated comedy web series about the unluckiest family in the world who happen to live next door to the luckiest family in the world, may now be headed to TV. Reveille Productions, the production company behind NBC’s The Office and ABC’s Ugly Betty, has entered into a first-look deal with Mechem Media, The Gloomers’ production company, founded by Charles Mechem Jr., a former CEO of Taft Broacasting (which previously owned animation powerhouse Hanna-Barbera).
Online video ad revenues in the US are on track to pass $1.3 billion this year. That’s a big industry, but when compared to the behometh $70 billion business that is traditional television advertising, it’s little more than a rounding error.
There are a number of reasons why online video advertising isn’t as big as its TV counterpart. It’s still new media. It doesn’t yet have the established, reach, infrastructure, and ancillary industries to support such massive expenditures, which 70 years of trial, error, and evolution provide. It’s also lacking in standards. Since 1940, TV has fine-tuned its moneymaking processes with a basic, standardized format involving commercial spots.
It’s only been five years since YouTube hit browser windows and, so far, no one can agree on what an online video commercial looks like. But the heads of major video publishing companies and advertising firms appear to be coming to some semblance of a consensus.
The Ad Selector (ASq) is the favored format among advertising agency, Starcom MediaVest Group and video publishers Hulu, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, CBS, Discovery and BBE. Created by Hulu, The Ad Selector is essentially “pre-roll with benefits,” and gives users the opportunity to select their commercial experience before watching their desired program. The format was chosen after a massive media research project – which lasted 16 months, consisted of 230,000 hours of research, and is dubbed “The Pool” – indicated it was the most successful of the 29 different ad models tested.
Now that The Pool has decided on The Ad Selector, the only thing left is to get the rest of the internet on board.
Meetings will take place with YouTube this week in an attempt to get the largest video site on the web – which accounts for over 40% of all online video views – to adopt the format. Whether or not YouTube jumps in – it’s thought to be “going its own way” testing its own commercial formats – the way we view advertisements online will soon become a little more uniform. That’s a good thing.
A standard ad format is important for both advertisers and ad agencies. There needs to be some basis from which you can measure the efficacy of ad campaigns and define advertising rates. Plus, brands like them.
Bank & Reed sounds like a soldered old New York law firm, but in this case it’s the twosome of Josh Bank and Tripp Reed, the two Alloy Entertainment execs overseeing their newly formed digital division and its first official digital slate of three new original web series coming this summer and fall.
The three series will release back-to-back, with the first up being, First Day, an original comedy series written by Alyssa Embree and Jessica Koosed Etting and starring Tracey Fairaway (Make It or Break It) and Elizabeth McLaughlin (The Clique) that “follows a seventeen-year-old girl who relives her first day at a new school over and over.” Well, original in that 1993’s Groundhog Day pre-dates most of the actors in this one. First Day is set to launch in late August with an 8-episode first season.
Following First Day is the mid-September release of Hollywood is like High School With Money, a web series adaptation of Zoey Dean’s New York Times bestselling novel of the same name. The 10-episode series centers on an “eager but naïve assistant who gets lessons on how to survive the cutthroat world of Hollywood politics from her boss’ queen bee teen daughter.”
The third is a hybrid between a scripted series and a music talent search reality show, dubbed Talent, which will launch its first of three phases later this fall. The narrative portion is another adaptation of a Zoey Dean story, this one about ” a young woman whose dreams of becoming a singer are dashed and rises from that disappointment by helping an unlikely girl become a superstar.” The goal for this one is fairly ambitious, and despite few details about its scale, Alloy says it aims to “discover the next pop music sta
What do you do when your flagship YouTube channel has over 1.1 billion(!) views, and firmly in the top 15 most subscribed channels of all time? Launch more YouTube channels of course.
Cheezburger Network, which runs the juggernaut FAIL Blog channel on YouTube, is doing just that, and trying something new while they’re at it. Today the LOLcat loving network behind meme-riding supersites like I Can Has Cheezburger and FAIL Blog, launched an attempt at some live-action reality FAIL with Bag of Misfits.
It’s the 53rd humor site to launch as part of Cheezburger’s growing list of internet humor sites. Launched with a modest start, just three videos up so far, the site and corresponding web series is Cheezburger Network’s first foray into reality comedy with variations of man-on-the-street sketches, crank calls and musical acts for unsuspecting bystanders.
The network tapped some popular online comedians like Paul Telner, Ed Bassmaster, Peter Coffin and even TV-turned-web star Tom Green. Other regulars will include musicians Stuckey & Murray and Eric Schwartz (aka Smooth-E), cooking guru Nadia G, RAD Girls and Robotic Bees. It’s also, according to Cheezburger, the first time that one of their sites will have “a designated team of full-fledged contributors.”
In 1996, 19-year-old Jennifer Ringley installed a single webcam in her college dorm room. Every three minutes the camera took one picture and uploaded it to the web. Anyone with an internet connection who knew the URL could see Ringley’s uncensored domestic life unfold on screen. As the popularity of her website increased, Ringley installed multiple video cameras in her house, giving fans more material to watch and greater access into her personal life.
Within two years, at the height of its fame, Jennicam.com received three to four million daily viewers. Ever since, online video entrepreneurs have been trying to recreate the experience with an added twist: What if the audience could tell Jenni what to do?
The answer has come in multiple forms. Justin Kan gave viewers 24/7 interactive access to his life (and now the lives of thousands of users) through Justin.TV. Robot Chicken creator Seth Green is busy pitching potential advertisers on Urule, billed as “The Truman Show, except that Truman is a willing volunteer.” And Revision3 just announced its latest web series, Dan 3.0.
dan-brown
Starring Dan Brown (Rubik’s Cube Dan Brown, not Da Vinci Code Dan Brown), Dan 3.0 premieres on August 2, 2010 and ends one year later. During that timeframe, Brown will release one episode per day. Each episode will feature whatever the audience of Dan 3.0 wants it to feature. From the press release:
Dan will solicit opinions from online fans about his daily activities, from what he will wear to his living arrangements. Audiences will vote and submit tasks for Dan to complete using a new and innovative community decision engine on Revision3.com. Users develop ideas and directly interact with each other to determine the content of the show. Dan will execute the most popular ideas on Dan 3.0.
With over 240,000 subscribers, Brown currently occupies the #40 spot on YouTube’s all-time list of most subscribed to directors. That equates to roughly 50,000 views per video released through his main YouTube channel. Not a bad built in audience with which to launch a new web show.
This was one of those web series no one quite knew how to spell correctly—was it Children’s Hospital or Childrens’ Hospital? Growing pains of grammatically ambiguous title. But thankfully, as the web series turned half-hour TV comedy bows on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim this week, we no longer have to fret over that sliding apostrophe. Thank you David Wain, Rob Corddry and Jonathan Stern—the show’s three head writers—for coming up with an convenient request from the hospital’s fictitious backer Arthur Childrens that it be, simply, Childrens Hospital.
While it isn’t the first web series to make the leap to television, it’s one of the first to do so without much meddling at all of the original internet version. In fact last night’s premiere on Adult Swim is really a re-run of the season that aired online on TheWB.com back in 2008. Showtime’s pickup of Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy also employed this stitch-together of the web version.
Two of the web episodes will air at a time, filling the 15-minute time slot that the show gets, until the second season debuts August 22. Even with the new episodes, it’s still just an 11 and-a-half minute TV show, after commercials, making it one of the shortest scripted live action shows on TV.
‘Why mess with what works,’ seems to be the philosophy for the creative team behind one of the web’s most star-studded comedies. It was almost a given that the show would make the move to TV, and its pickup in October by Adult Swim was a savvy move for a network that to date hasn’t had anything close to this kind of star power. Along with Corddry, the full web series cast return for the new season, including former Will and Grace star Megan Mullally, Boston Legal’s Lake Bell, Ken Marino, The Office’s Ed Helms, SNL’s Jason Sudeikis and Human Giant’s Rob Huebel. New additions include Malin Akerman, Henry Winkler and Kurtwood Smith.
This past weekend marked the first annual VidCon. Created by nerdfighters (and as of Saturday, owners of one of the top 100 YouTube channels) Hank and John Green, the weekend was designed to celebrate the awesome that is web video. According to the VidCon program: “We wanted to make VidCon reflect the astonishing diversity of online video itself: While the prevailing opinion within old media is that online video is primarily about sneezing pandas, we know that the true story is much more complicated.” It’s a story that includes men in bikinis who can be the center of a spectacular musical number, a room full of people participating in a live video experiment, a 14 year-old vlogger with the fanciest camera in the room, and a day of programming created entirely through user-generated content. It would be impossible to cover everything that happened over the three-day event, so I decided to narrow it down to my 10 favorite things about the weekend (in no particular order).
While we’re on the topic of funding original web content this Friday, it’s fitting that YouTube today announced a new $5 million grant program for its content partners.
At VidCon today in Los Angeles (Tubefilter is a media partner of VidCon 2010), YouTube’s partner development manager George Strompolos announced the new Partner Grant Program to an exuberant crowd full of YouTube creators/partners.
The goal, Strompolos said to the Partners in the room, is to figure out “what’s holding you back, and help you out with that $5 million.” “The goal of YouTube Partner Grants is to act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation,” he added.
More details of the program were released on the YouTube blog today, and one thing that pops out is that technically the funds act less like pure grants and more as advances on partner ad revenues. “Funds from YouTube Partner Grants will serve as an advance against the partner’s future YouTube revenue share.”
The basic idea is still the same. A creator who has demonstrated an ability to make engaging videos (read: lots of comments and views), can get an upfront payment from YouTube to fund their next video. So take the The Fine Brothers, for example, who are on a tear lately with their pop-topical videos like the “Lindsay Lohan In Court” interactive game, could get funds to shoot something that requires some hard costs to be paid upfront. Like, say, a crane shot of Lindsay’s car leaving court?
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