I think even you could star in this production

Filed in archive Internet TV on September 26, 2006

I have been commenting in many of my articles about how people can become producers themselves for very little money. Here is another story from the NY Times about two people who are doing just that but in a big way.

Jay Adelson, 36, and Kevin rose, 29, are parallel entrepreneurs - starting a second company just as the first one is taking off. In 2004, the two started Digg, a Web site that allows users to play editor by submitting links to news accounts and collectively deciding which deserve top billing.

Now, ... they have turned the Revision3 Corporation, an Internet video production firm they have been running on the side, into a full-fledged company.

Revision3 has close to $1 million in financing from a group of investors. ... It is trying to capitalize on the rapid growth of Internet video [with] a hybrid of the polished shows created for the networks and the amateur videos that populate sites like YouTube.

The company is built around a series of Internet television shows, or video podcasts, aimed at a young, technologically savvy audience. The most popular show so far is "Diggnation," which is already in its 64th weekly episode. Each installment features Mr. Rose and a co-host sitting on a couch, drinking beer and talking about some of the most popular stories that have turned up on Digg.com that week.

The core audience for "Diggnation" consists of users of Digg, which has more than half a million members and attracted 8.5 million visitors last month, up from 2.3 million in August 2005, according to Mr. Adelson. (That is much higher than the 1.2 million visitors reported for August by comScore Media Metrix, a widely used source of Web traffic data, but it shows a similar growth rate. Mr. Adelson argues that the service does not properly measure the site's niche audience.)

The show is not for everyone, but Digg fans appear to be loyal. Mr. Adelson said that each episode of "Diggnation" was downloaded about 250,000 times, and that all Revision3 shows, including one about hacker culture and a cooking program called "Ctrl-Alt-Chicken," were downloaded a total of about 1.5 million times each month.