We got a nice shot in the arm this week when TubeMogul published their first monthly list of the Top 40 publishers using TubeMogul, which put Next New Networks at #1 among great company like Tornante / Vuguru (#5), MyDamnChannel (#9), Ford Models (#10), CBS Interactive (#11) and HBO (#12). TubeMogul’s list ranks the performance in viewership of videos uploaded using TubeMogul’s service to super-distribute their content to various participating sites including YouTube, Veoh, Blip.tv, Yahoo, and many others. I’m sure it rewards prodigiousness of output, and certainly the performance of independent producers like Chris Pirillo (#2), iJustine (#7), Nalts (#8), and Rocketboom (#12) are testament to that fact — they’re giving new media companies like us and Tornante and major labels as big as CBS, Warner Brothers (#33), FOX (#34) and Sony (#40) a run for their money with a fraction of the investment.

Today, we also announced that we’ve added three new partnership deals with Yahoo!, Hulu, and Metacafe, making us the leading superdistribution network on the web, with over twenty signed partnership deals (the release includes a nice quote from Brett Wilson at TubeMogul about us having “risen to the top”). It’ll be fun to see how our stuff does on Hulu, where SNL and Family Guy clips are popular, which bodes well for some of our original stuff on Barely Political and Channel Frederator. I recently was on a panel at OMMA with Hulu’s Kevin McGurn and a few others and liked how he talked how they curate and program the site — it was hard not to spill the news we’d be partnering with them right there. And we already have had a few breakout hit episodes and a growing monthly audience on Metacafe and Yahoo, where we’ve been experimenting with distributing for a while — it’ll be exciting to be able to build sponsorship and advertising programs that can incorporate those audiences.

It’ll be interesting to see what the next year holds for superdistribution. We’ve already learned that it’s not enough just to put your content everywhere with syndication and distribution tools like TubeMogul and Blip.tv. There’s a lot more that we do, with the support of our partners: following all kinds of metrics, from video views to commenting and favoring to the ratio of on-site vs. off-site (e.g. embedded player) viewership; building editorial relationships with our partners; doing a lot of outreach to viewers, bloggers, and media to try to build repeat viewership and subscriptions. We’ve also pursued relationships with more specific destinations where our networks’ viewers might be, for example, Streetfire with our automotive networks, and Craft, Etsy and Threadless with ThreadBanger.

The next step, of course, is developing sponsorship and advertising models that put the power of the superdistribution network to good use. One sponsor that’s already along for the ride is Janome, which recently began a six month sponsorship of ThreadBanger, and who sees their sponsor integration ride across ThreadBanger’s many points of viewership across the web, from our website, iTunes and YouTube to our latest partners, with each one that we add increasing the value of their investment in us. We plan to have a lot more good news to share on similar fronts in the coming months.

The advertising business has been increasingly taking notice of Next New Networks. Logical, since our networks have kept launching, kept growing, and gathering up more loyal viewers every day. The latest is Mediaweek, the media buyer’s bible, and Mike Shields’ astute profile of our partner Herb Scannell, and his leadership of our motley crew of nerds and misfits building a media company.

Check it out. How can you resist any article that begins, “To build a proper chain saw arm, start drinking a lot of OJ”?

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It was a great weekend for politics here at NNN. This weekend we were all over the moon to see our very own Amber Lee Ettinger aka Obama Girl make a cameo in the opening of Saturday Night Live’s return episode after the Writer’s Strike. To quote Barely Political’s creator Ben Relles it was ‘beyond exciting’. Great job Amber and Ben.

And as the icing on the cake Noam Cohen in the New York Times did a great piece on Josh Marshall today and his winning of a George Polk Award. As soon as bloggers are considered, we know Josh will be up for a Pulitzer.

Via Business Week:

Where TV Ads Really Resonate

By Ben Levisohn

The screen may be smaller, but the payoff for broadcasters and advertisers is bigger. People who go online to watch a TV show are more engaged with the program—and its ads—than their couch-potato counterparts, says Simmons Market Research Bureau. Simmons surveyed 17,000 people to assess their involvement in the last TV show they viewed—asking, for example, how “inspiring” or interesting it was. The answers showed computer watchers to be 25% more involved than TV set viewers. “People watching online,” says John Fetto, a Simmons product manager, “are going to a Web site to find a specific program.” The online crowd was also 47% more likely to find ads “useful” than TV watchers—and more inclined to make a purchase. Web TV watchers “only click on [an ad] if they’re interested in it,” says Darcy Gerbarg, a senior fellow at the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information. “That’s more valuable to an advertiser.

The sweet scent of victory. Yesterday’s Iowa Caucus was a huge one for the NNN political team. Our boy Obama won the Iowa caucus- and with her video gaining a million views in just over 24 hours, the Obama Girl herself gave her victory address this morning:

We’ll be watching out for our invitation to the inauguration. Meanwhile Veracifier had an unprecedented number of people reporting on the ground in Iowa- surely an internet first. Through our ground hounds partnership with the Uptake we posted multiple reports throughout the day, including most of the major candidate’s pre Caucus rallies:

and stories from across the state, like Hound Chuck Tomlinson’s take on the media blitz itself:

The Uptake itself streamed live video throughout the Caucus, and it was all done by the seat of our pants, with everyone surprised by both the quality and amount of reporting we were getting in from all of Iowa. Bring on New Hampshire!

Well, the official tally is finally in!   Since our official launch in March, NextNewNetworks generated 102,246,637 video views.*  Not a bad accomplishment!

*If we include views from January & February (before NNN officially launched) the tally is 107,191,463 views in 2007!

In celebration of this momentous occasion, let’s take a look back at some of the milestones that we have passed along the way…

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Alan reworked an earlier promo he’d made for Fast Lane Daily to celebrate our imminent milestone of 100 million video views in our first year — you can watch it embedded above on our blog or check it out here.

As of December 23, as you can see from the sidebar on our blog, we’re just over 97 million views, and that’s without a full count yet of some of our podcast downloads or partner views that tend to come in less than real time. I think we’ll make it, so I don’t actually advocate the kinds of shenanigans in this video, but if you’d like to help, blog some of your favorite videos, send them to your friends, and you can help push us over the top!

At this point, I’m not going for 100 million — I want to see how far over 100 million we can get by the end of the year!

Hope everyone had a happy holiday…

Good things are abounding for Next New Networks as 100 million video views are just around the corner!!!

From March to November, Next New Networks has generated 82 million confirmed video views while monthly views keep climbing!

At the current rate of growth, we expect to serve the 100 millionth video view early in the fourth week of December. Who will be out 100 millionth view? Will it be you??

Steve Woolf (the sometimes BTS half of the Epic-FU neé Jetset team) wrote this smart and insightful post on their record breaking 3,000,000+ episode on the smashface productions blog:

A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.

We’re obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It’s gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.

What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.

For one thing, we’ve been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video’s explosive views. But we didn’t have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.

Another possible factor is that we always place a frame strategically in the exact middle of the upload so that when YouTube generates its preview thumbnail, prospective viewers are given a sense of the tone and personality of the show when reviewing the myriad choices for them to watch. However this image is quite small, and some videos that typically experience large view numbers have scantily clad women or mainstream celebrities as their preview image. Our preview image of this video is shown at left.

Then there’s the title of the video: taking no sh1t, internet love song, writer’s guild. A very typical title for us since we cover so much ground in each episode. It’s somewhat provocative, but is definitely less so than many other videos.

Finally we come to the content of the video. We touched on a number of politically charged stories that engendered a great deal of discussion in the comments under the video. In particular we said some things about the Writer’s Guild of America strike that is currently taking place. These statements seemed to provoke a really strong reaction from many viewers on both sides of the issue. Given the timing of the strike and the topical nature of the commentary in our video, this seems to be a strong factor in people watching the video and then passing it along to their friends to see, which is the really important factor in generating huge view numbers.

So without getting more scientific about it, it seems like we had a combination of factors that led to the breakout number of views. Good title, solid preview image, passionate existing fanbase, and provocative content. This is the kind of formula we strive to have in every show so that when the opportunity comes along to be promoted on a place like the YouTube home page, we are able to take maximum advantage of that exposure.

Are there any other major factors that I’ve missed? Why do you think this video has 4X the number of views of any other EPIC-FU video on YouTube?

Super Steve Woolf 

Early last summer, Steve and Zadi from Jetset showed us all at Next New Networks just how easy it was to use Ning to set up a specialized social network. My partner Tim Shey was the only one of us to take the bait and one night in August he delivered on a vision we’d been talking about at Channel Frederator and popped up Channel Frederator RAW, another one of our ‘firsts,’ this time the world’s first social network just for animation.

We quietly started mentioning RAW on our blogs, and eventually asked for a few members, to see whether the thing had any legs. At first I thought I’d send out a wider invitation after 100 members, but things being as busy as they were I never got around to it. Over this past weekend I’d friended my 200th RAW friend and realized it was now or never. So, the previews are over, we’re on Broadway.

At 3pm ET today I sent out a note to a select list of filmmakers, artists, and fans, people in our community we’d been in contact with for years. As of five minutes ago we’d increased the size of our network by almost 50% and the action on the site has perked up 10-fold. More art, more video, and most gratifying of all, more conversation is going on between animation people across five continents.

Thanks Steve, thanks Zadi, thanks Tim. Most of all, thanks to our new members (some cool icons they have above, yes?). I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves.