The New York Times’ Miguel Helft casts a spotlight today on Diggnation, the geek-oriented web video show produced by Revision3, an Internet video start-up founded by Digg’s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. Although Revision3’s biggest product is Diggnation, a niche video show (two geeks, one of whom is Kevin Rose, sitting around drinking beer and waxing forth on top Digg stories), it apparently has big ideas and $1 million in venture capital with which to pursue them.
It is trying to capitalize on the rapid growth of Internet video, and its founders hope that their programming formula, a hybrid of the polished shows created for the networks and the amateur videos that populate sites like YouTube, will be the path to commercial success in this medium.
Revision3’s Adelson claims that each episode of Diggnation is downloaded 250,000 times and that all Revision3 shows are downloaded 1.5 million times per month. That’s downloads and not necessarily number of times viewed, but that’s not bad particularly given what must be incredibly low costs of producing the show — the main studio is Rose’s San Francisco walk-up apartment.
Even the commercials shown on Diggnation are cheap. Rose and his co-host Alex Albrecht basically get around to mentioning sponsors in their bull sessions and sponsors seem to be lining up. Diggnation is generating revenue of $50,000 to $100,000 per month and most of that’s got to be profit.
The article suggests that Diggnation and other successful niche shows won’t be able to take on the big guys because of their narrow markets. But, who cares? Revision3 is already profitable. If it sticks to its low-cost and high-value appeal (young, smart and probably soon-to-be-rich techies), it’s bound to grow and make even more money.
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:15 AM|Comments(0)
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