To paraphrase an old blues, “it’s been a good year, but a long year.”

15 networks launched, YouTube’s #1 content partner, 100+ video views. Colleagues in New York and across the country, viewers and friend across the globe. Whew!

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of a number of once-in-a-lifetime experiences during my life. All year I’ve known Next New Networks is one of them.

It’s hard for any of us here at Next New Networks to figure that it’s only been a year since we ‘officially’ opened. Sure, for the founders we’ve been at work getting the company together for twice as long, but we started bringing on our colleagues last January and I, for one (though I know we all heartily agree), have to marvel at what they’ve all accomplished. Like any start up everyone here came into an office space that was literally being built while the work was trying to make sense of itself, and we were trying to explain exactly what the company was up to and what a specific job would entail (we’re still working on that). And even as the paint was going on the walls and the computers were being debugged, we were launching networks and cajoling communities of viewers to come take a look.

We couldn’t have even begun without an incredible group of investors and board members who’ve become Next New Networks’ friends, advertisers who’ve kicked the tires and bought a ride, and a large audience of loyal viewers who’ve spread the word in every way now known to humankind.

More’s coming, good stuff too, I assure you.

Thanks everyone –our colleagues, our investors and board members, and our audiences– for an awesome first year. Here’s to hundreds more.

After getting suggestions from everyone in the office over the last couple of weeks, here’s a list of Next New Network’s must-see moments of 2007. Everyone had a lot of favorite episodes, so this particular top 10 is as arbitrary as any — but it at least gives an idea of the kind of fun we had this year.

2007 was a great year for us. We passed 100 million views, learned a lot, and made a lot of new friends — by any count, millions of people have seen the little white robot on the end of a video they loved this year. Thanks to everyone who’s been watching and reading this blog, and we can’t wait to entertain you more in 2008.

Without futher ado, here’s the list…

(more…)

[originally posted by Marc Boxser on the Veracifier blog]

We at Veracifier.com are excited to announce that we are launching a strategic partnership with TheUpTake.org to recruit, train, and showcase independent video journalists from around the country during the 2008 election year.

Community driven journalism, whether through tips, comments or independent reports, has always been a permanent part of Veracifier’s programming. (more…)

Michael’s post from the other day inspired me. 100 million of anything’s not too shabby, I think. Especially in less than a year (nine months to be exact).

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 

As if being written up in the Sunday Times wasn’t enough world media domination for Rob and Corinne, today we had a ThreadBanger episode rocking Yahoo’s front page.

That’s right, the most trafficked single page on the internet today featured a segment from Thread Heads which we recently ran on ViroPop, our budding green network.

When Yahoo reached out and said they’d like to feature the video, it was a little confusing for us, or me at least — what would it mean to have a mashup of two of our networks getting featured on Yahoo rather than a more typically “pure” episode of ViroPop or ThreadBanger? But in the end, after realizing how the video was going to be featured and the course of events that led to it happening, we realized we could make the most of it — it gives a nice lift to one of our newest networks while exposing more of the world to one of our first. Sharing is good!

I’m trying to refrain myself from flogging Channel Frederator’s The Meth Minute 39. But Dan Meth made this one is so funny I can’t help myself.

Wow! Awesome… Juxtapoz, THE magazine for hi-brow lowbrow artwork, has posted “Nite Fite” on the site.

I remember discovering an issue of their magazine for the first time when I was a college sophomore and thinking “If I could someday be in this magazine then that would be cool as hell”
And today I can finally say… this is cool as hell.

Special thanks to Jeaux for helping to get it in front of the right eyeballs. You are hard-rockin’ Jeaux.

–Dan Meth

As if “Internet People” wasn’t cool enough.

The first episode of Channel Frederator’s first original cartoon series, The Meth Minute 39, was an instant smash hit, seen more than 4,000,000 times with over 10,000 comments in our super-distribution (courtesy of Next New Networks).

On the heels of CF’s 100th episode, I’m extremely proud announce the official debut of our weekly series, The Meth Minute 39. Starting today, and every Thursday into next July, the original vision of New York filmmaker Dan Meth explodes, with a cartoon featuring James Brown crossed with “The Matrix.”
(And check out some of the internet love already coming Dan’s way on his blog.)

Bookmark the page, set your RSS feed, or hit ‘Subscribe’ on your iTunes or YouTube.

You’re going to enjoy it. Everyone else is.

(Originally posted on Bleacher Bloggers)

It’s All About the N.L.
By: Dave Aizer

Wow! What a weekend of National League Baseball this is going to be! Unless of course you’re a Mets fan.

With three games to play, check out these races:
* In the NL East, the Mets and the Phillies are tied
* In the NL Central, the Cubs lead the Brewers by 2 games
* In the NL West, the Diamondbacks lead the Padres by one and the Rockies by 2.

* And in the wildcard, the Padres lead the Mets, Phillies and Rockies by one precious little game.

This is INSANE! First of all, in the east, what’s the deal with the Mets? They blew a 7 game lead in the last two weeks. How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how. Inconsistent starting pitching, lousy relief pitching and no clutch hitting. Talk about a choke job in the making. If they blow this, say goodbye to Willie Randolph. As for this weekend, the Mets host the Marlins and the Phillies host the Nationals. Advantage Mets, just barely. But with Cole Hamels pitching tonight, and all the momentum, Philly’s got to feel good right now.

Over in the central, the Cubs and the Brewers are both limping toward the finish line and neither is inspiring much confidence right now. The Cubs have lost three in a row and the Brew Crew’s lost two. This weekend, the Cubs travel to Cincy while the Brewers host the Padres. Advantage Cubs … you would think. But the Brewers are an excellent home team and the Cubbies are only 500 on the road. Plus, like I said, they’re both playing poorly, so who knows.

And in the west, what’s up with the Colorado Rockies? Two weeks ago, they were left for dead. But they’ve reeled off 11 wins in a row and are now in the thick of this thing. Talk about peaking at the right time. And they host the first place D’Backs in a HUGE three game series this weekend. Meanwhile, the team in the middle, the Padres, are hoping they can sweep the Brewers while Colorado and Arizona beat each other up.

So, three of these teams will win their divisions. One more will secure the wildcard. And as for the other three, they’ll have plenty of time to reflect on what might have been. And just for the heck of it, here are my predictions. The Phillies win the East, the Cubs win the Central and the D’Backs barely hang on in the West. And the wildcard goes to … drumroll please … the hottest team in baseball, the Colorado Rockies! … Oh, and the Mets fire everybody.

Now let’s sit back and watch it all unfold.