For 24 hours today (starting midnight ET Oct 6), thanks to a promotional commitment from our sponsor, Starburst, our great animated series Nite Fite is being featured on the front page of YouTube in the upper-right spot usually reserved for advertiser videos, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Nite Fite is not a branded entertainment series, like many other videos that have appeared in that space. It’s a fully independently-owned show that has a standalone sponsor integration within each episode, not unlike Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Comedy and its sponsorship by Burger King. The Cavalcade is being distributed by a Google AdSense buy, just as we’re getting a distribution boost from our front page buy (which we fully expect to be effective, as the show is good enough to have viewers then rate it, share it, and forward it along). I think it’s a tremendously innovative way for an advertiser to get their messaging out to the YouTube audience. By embedding a sponsorship in a YouTube partner channel (in this case Channel Frederator) that already has a ton of credibility and love in the YouTube community (with over 20,000 subscribers and 13mm views), Starburst is promoting a great independent show that deserves a wider audience, and getting their sponsorship viewed at the same time.

As of now, the latest episode, “TV is Crap,” has been up for around 1424 hours, been viewed 120,000300,000 times, and is holding steady at a four-star rating, with comments from viewers like, “this is the first ad on youtube that was actually good,” and, “Finally, a sponsored video that’s actually funny.” But my favorite one of all is this one from Trayxx:

I just clicked in to this 45 minutes ago out of curiousity, now after watching all the eps I’m hooked! Great job and keep it up!

One of the smartest people I know in the space, 7 Robot’s Sarah Szalavitz, a programming advisor of ours and, along with Damien Somerset, one of the owner-producers of our hit show Zaproot, has long been saying that companies like ours should spend less on producing and more on promoting content. Today’s trial, the results of which we’ll share here later in the week, could be a great model, not unlike the Seth McFarlane deal, for tying sponsorship and promotion together to get great programming in front of a wider audience.

Today we launched both our latest network and a new kind of programming for Next New Networks with TMI Weekly, our new collaboration with Nonsociety founders Julia Allison, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin.

TMI Weekly is a new kind of talk show for the web – fast-paced, to the point, and funny. Mary, Meghan and Julia talk about style, personal technology, and life, sex and relationships in three segments, which we’ll release Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But it pretty much speaks for itself — check out this week’s episode, Prom for Grownups, above, and there’s already a few weeks’ more of episodes up on the website to check out.

It’s been a lot of fun for our team putting this project together over the past few months, and we’re thankful to the Nonsociety team in how great they’ve been working through a new model with us in developing and launching the network together. The show’s getting a lot of reaction today, and it’s going to be fun to see where it goes. I can tell you, this team’s in it for the long haul, and they’re going to win.

We’re all really happy that Felicia Williams has come to join us as Next New Networks’ new Director of Community Programming, charged with developing new models for programming and entertainment for the communities we serve, and new ways of working with independent and emerging talent. We’ve gotten to know and admire Felicia during her groundbreaking work at The Daily Reel and YouTube, and she’s long been one of the people in the business that we really felt a kinship with in terms of our hopes and vision for online video, so it’s great to have her join our team.

A lot of people who read this blog might already know Felicia from her great work in the space, but here’s some more about her:

Born in the same dusty mill town as Jack Kerouac, Felicia has mirrored the travels of the famous writer for the past decade. Having lived in Lowell, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, she has become rather accustomed to life on the road and holds great pride in the ablity to live out of a single suitcase.

A writer by nature, Felicia’s passion for film and media began in high school, where she volunteered as a news anchor for her local TV station. Reporting on such hard-hitting stories as the local clothing drive and that new diner that just opened outside of town, Felicia realized that alternative media was a lot more fun then stuffy old network news. Continuing on her newfound media path, Felicia attended NYU to study Journalism and Cinema Studies.

After college, Felicia dove right into the world of film and television. Working as a production assistant for film (The Departed, The Gardener of Eden, Pride and Glory) and television (Law and Order: SVU, The Bedford Diaries), she had the opportunity to work at every dirty street corner and abandoned warehouse that New York City had to offer. Bored of the scenery, she moved to LA where she worked on her last major motion picture before finding her home on the Internet.

In 2006, Felicia signed on as the second employee and Assistant Editor of The Daily Reel, an online magazine about online video. Returning to her writing roots, she interviewed such popular web producers as Renetto, Smosh, LisaNova, and Nalts. While writing reviews on undiscovered talent and videos online, Felicia also developed and produced a web show that she scripted and hosted with the help of NNN’s own Michelle Deforest (who was also at The Daily Reel).

Falling more and more in love with online video, Felicia left The Daily Reel in 2007 to work on the Editorial/Content team for YouTube. Specializing in a broad range of topics that included pets, travel, video games, web series, and celebrity news, Felicia programmed the Featured Videos for several YouTube category pages and the homepages of both US and Canada.

Welcome, Felicia — it means great things ahead for everyone who works with us.

Just when you thought the ‘08 election couldn’t get any weirder, today Barely Political has its biggest guest spot yet. Check out our new fall sitcom that dares to imagine what would happen if two real political mavericks — the girl who loves Obama, and the guy who hates lemons — had to share an office?

I think we’ve got to order a full 22 episodes of this one.

The team over at VoteforChange.com is running a campaign to get online video creators to help spread the word about their site, which is simple and easy to use, and could literally help you find out whether you’re registered to vote, where your polling place is, or how to vote absentee in the time it took you to read this sentence.

Here’s a video that our own Derek D and Alan Kaufman made for Fast Lane Daily:

The site was built by Barack Obama’s campaign as a non-partisan effort aimed at making voting easy, so it’s worth using no matter who you’re voting for.

Time is running out — in most states, registration deadlines hit around the end of next week. Blog the link, tell your friends, and if you make a video promoting Vote for Change, let us know — we’ll post them here, and run the best ones in some of our shows.

Who said videoblogging can’t make you a living? In 2006, good friend of Next New Networks and Indy Mogul guest star Bre Pettis was a high school art teacher and all around super guy I met at SXSW, one of a literal handful of us running around with video cameras that year. Two years later, he’s got a great new series pilot, History Hacker, debuting on the History Channel. As Bre says,

The folks at History gave the producer, director, and director of photography permission to take my DIY style of making videos with lots of jump cuts and direct talking to the camera and push it forward into a longer format. It doesn’t look like anything else on TV.

Watch it (or even better, DVR it) this September 26th at 8pm and midnight, and email the History Channel or post in the forums to help make Bre the first videoblogger to get a full TV series.

Go, Bre! This couldn’t happen for a more awesome guy.

This week we’ve been running a video billboard in Times Square, every 13 minutes, to coincide with the Web 2.0 Expo NY and the New York TV Festival. Clear Channel has been giving us a free slot every couple months or so, which is awesome — you might remember the last time, when we used it to Rick Roll Times Square.

Here’s some video, shot by Ian and Alan. Big props to Justin for creating our hugest promo ever (Watch it in HD on Vimeo).

In addition to the speaking engagements we linked yesterday, we’ll also be on a panel Thursday as part of the Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center that looks like a lot of fun. The description’s below — come check it out if you can.

Video 2.0: Filling In Gaps in The Video Content Ecosystem
4:10pm Thursday, Sept 18
Rooms 1A06 &07

• Kenyatta Cheese (Rocketboom.com)
• Timothy Shey (Next New Networks)
• Jim Louderback (Revision3)
• Ricky Van Veen (CollegeHumor.com)

This panel brings together some of the leaders of the professional online video content industry to talk about how and who they source content from, their current distribution strategies, who they think are innovating in this emerging industry, and what opportunities they see for both independent content creators and the networks forming around them.

Hope to see you there - let us know if you need help getting in.

We’ve got a ton of things going on this week with the New York Television Festival, Web 2.0 Expo NY, and OMMA in town. If you’re in NYC this week, we hope you can come out to an event or two and meet some of our team.

Monday Sept 15

Ignite NYC II
NY TV Festival @ New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, 7-10pm

• Come say hi to me, Michelle DeForest, and more NNN peeps at the kickoff of Web 2.0 Expo and the night of NYTVF’s Industry Day.

Tuesday Sept 16

NYTVF Digital Day
New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, 11a-7pm

• 1:15 pm Promoting Your Web Series (with our friends Dina from Blip.tv and Kathleen and Thom of The All-for-Nots)
• 3:30 pm Sponsorship and Monetization of Digital Content (Tim Shey w/ Jim Louderback of Revision3, Peter Hoskins of ManiaTV)
• 4:30 pm Keynote panel: The New Storytellers: What Works on the Web (Fred Seibert w/ speakers from Stage9, MSN, IFC)

Where Internet and Film Collide
7PM at Taj (48 West 21st St NYC) rsvp@indiegogo.com

Join our network Indy Mogul, TubeMogul, and IndieGoGo for a night of drinks and music with independent filmmakers and webheads alike.

Wednesday Sept 17

Web 2.0 Expo New York
Javitz Convention Center

Next New Networks is the exclusive video partner of the first ever Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Come see our videos before each of the keynote sessions on Wednesday through Friday and look out for our crews hanging around the event. Next New Networks viewers get $100 off registration with the code webny08bm21.

Thursday Sept 18

The Next New Networks company cruise around lower Manhattan! This is a private event for our team, but if you really, really want to go, send me an email and we can see if there’s room on the boat…

Friday Sept 19

So you Want to Make a Fortune in Video?
OMMA Global Expo, Marriott Marquis, 1525 Broadway

I’ll be speaking once again on money and online video along with Mike Hudack of Blip.tv and speakers from ON Networks, Beet TV, Vignette, and Revision3.

Current TV put together a really fantastic profile on the origin and growth of Barely Political, embedded below. I have to especially thank the producers for putting up footage of me when Ben talks about the “depth of talent” available at Next New Networks (although he really meant people like Rusty, Tom, Justin, Alan, Lee, Ben, Liam, Diane, Andres, and many more who have played a role). But seriously, it’s a great piece and one of the first Obama Girl stories I’ve seen that shows the Ben and Amber and Leah we’ve gotten to know and love the past year.