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Wayne’s World, it’s not. The Web TV series Diggnation draws hundreds of thousands of viewers. It has Fortune 500 corporate sponsors, and its two young stars are among the brightest in the tech firmament. Still, the production values are more in line with Wayne and Garth than they are with, say, The Daily Show …
“Hello, and welcome to Diggnation, episode No. 80! I’m Kevin Rose!”
“And I’m Alex Albrecht! Diggnation covers some of the hottest user-submitted stories on the social news website Digg.com!!”
This sort of show would seem painfully banal to millions, yet it constitutes prime-time-worthy entertainment for one of Madison Avenue’s hottest target audiences. Just a year and a half out of the gate, Diggnation draws about 250,000 viewers a week and is among the most popular free video podcasts on Apple’s iTunes service – alongside offerings from ABC, the BBC, and CNN (which, along with Business 2.0 and CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner (Charts)).
It’s also making some decent coin: The show has had 15 sponsors thus far, each paying as much as $10,000 per episode. Rose and Digg CEO Jay Adelson are so bullish on the concept that they’ve launched an angel-backed startup called Revision3 that produces Diggnation and a dozen other Web-only offerings.
At the same time, major media companies, TV networks, and production studios are starting to migrate shows and movies to iTunes, their own websites, and other places online. “You will see an increase in consumption,” says Disney-ABC TV’s executive VP for digital media, Albert Cheng, “because you are opening the pipe by which consumers can get their shows.”
Call it TV 2.0, Net TV, or whatever you like: The building blocks of a new Web video industry are falling into place.
Photo by YouTube.
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