web series

Ze Frank is back! Back in the day — you know, 2006 — Frank was at the cutting edge of vlogging, a form of web video as old as the late 1990s — like the late Snack Boy of The Sync — but one Frank helped moved forward. YouTube debuted in 2005 and quickly vlogging became [...]

School dances are not fun for everyone. If we’ve learned anything from countless teen movies and TV shows, it’s that. Squaresville opens with our heroines going to a dance, but they’ve sidestepped the whole dancing thing. Instead they show up to do some gardening — guerilla-style — and not very well either. “The only statement we’re making [...]

Readers of this blog might suspect I play favorites. It’s kind of true: I have a soft spot for series by and about historically underserved groups. Anyone But Me is not merely a “lesbian series” (what show is?). The show premiered in 2008 after the Writers Strike and gradually built a large and impassioned fan base. [...]

As YouTube scales up, independent creators are increasingly looking for standards and strategies to increase views and revenue. For years the most successful YouTubers have run their channels like networks, adopting tricks and routines to keep and grow audiences. The audience and potential ad revenue has never been greater, so obviously more people are looking [...]

Any comedic web series is tough. Branded, derivative web series — could anything else sound more corporate? — might be the toughest nut to crack. Viewer expectations are high; the web show premieres with a higher budget counterpart, a comparison it can’t beat. Having to integrate products only makes things harder. Too often they look original-lite, [...]

A few days ago actor Travis Richey, a YouTuber who played Community‘s Doctor Who-spoof Inspector Spacetime in a recent episode of the series, proposed making the show-within-a-show its own fan-driven web series, without Sony and NBC’s involvement. Richey started a Kickstarter campaign, already almost halfway to its modest $20,000 goal — web series are cheap, and Inspector Spacetime [...]

Originally posted at Hacktivision. In This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, economists diagnose an incurable syndrome in finance history: the tendency to believe each crisis is “different” than previous economic collapses. They show how, in fact, most debt crises have a small set of core similarities. This time is not so different. [...]

Originally posted at In Media Res. Comment there! “This is the future,” Sheri Anderson-Thomas once said of “cybersoaps.” Soap opera is arguably America’s most durable audiovisual genre, delivering consistent and engaged audiences for advertisers for decades. No wonder the earliest web programs were “cybersoaps,” expensively produced to replace television and institutionalize online entertainment. The Spot, a text-based show [...]

Click for journal article at Continuum. As video networks become increasingly successful monetizing audiences — through either advertising or subscription — the question arises: what about everyone else? Most Americans are unaware of the rich ecosystem for video online, from smaller omnibus sites like Blip to minority networks like GLO. Yet as dynamic as the space [...]

Originally posted at Hacktivision If YouTube’s massive overhaul – many years in the making – revealed anything, it was our deep investments in the transformative potential of web video. Many observers have criticized the company’s move as selling out, a way to streamline the site’s chaos for the benefit of advertisers. (What else is a [...]