Business Week takes a look at Rocketboom, a video blog that “in 10 months has become the most popular site of its kind on the Net.” Rocketboom offers a “three-minute mock news program [that] covers everything from tech trends to pop culture with frank irreverence, sly humor, and a big dollop of unabashed silliness.”
The approach is resonating with viewers. Daily downloads have doubled in the past six weeks, to 50,000. If they stay on that pace, they’ll soon approach the 200,000 viewers of an established cable show, such as CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer.
These are the early days of video blogging. Most of the postings on the Web are rough and tedious — little more than home movies. But the success of Rocketboom and a few sites like it underscore the potential of video blogs…”TV will be transformed,” says Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp. (IBM ) and now an investor in Participatory Culture, an online video startup. “People will look at it as historically quaint that you had to watch something that others chose for you.”
In the fall, [Rocketboom will] experiment with a subscription fee of around $3.50 a month. The three-minute show will remain free, but paying customers will get extras, including longer shows and outtakes…[I]f subscriptions don’t pan out, they’ll turn to ads to fund their ambitious plan of creating a network of shows and hiring writers and hosts.
While Rocketboom looks like an offbeat news show, it’s like a typical blog in how it fosters a community. The site uses videos sent in by viewers and is building up a network of correspondents. The latter include Zadie Diaz in Los Angeles and Chuck Olsen in Minneapolis, who report on local happenings for $50 a piece.
“Once Andrew [Baron, Rocketboom founder] can figure out a business model that other people can copy, we will have a thousand Rocketbooms,” says Jay Dedman, co-founder of the pioneering Videoblogging.info community group.
Mitch Shapiro at 8:19 PM|Comments(0)
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