Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times calls Next New Networks’s shows “midtail miscellany.”
This "midtail" is delivering more than 25 million views per month for the online studio and deals with more than a dozen Fortune 500 advertisers, including Verizon Wireless, Cotton, Starburst, Unilever and Universal Pictures, Next New told Beet.TV.
During a chat with Beet.TV at the OMMA Video conference in New York in June, the company’s co-founder Fred Seibert likened Next New Networks' approach to the early days of broadcast and especially cable, which became successful through carving out niches.
“The challenge of companies like ours is to capture the long and midtail and make it viable for advertisers," he said. "Our model is to partner with brands and advertisers in a way that makes sense to the brands and the audience.”
With its high monthly view count and brand loyalty to Web stars like Obama Girl, Next New Networks has the luxury of having an audience and being able to listen to viewers for feedback. At the Digitas New Front earlier this month, Next New announced a new programming development slate for the next six months. It’s now talking to advertisers about sponsoring those shows.
More on the rise of midtail video in a story in today's New York Times by Brian Stelter.
Daisy Whitney, Senior Producer
Video Transcript
Fred Seibert: New content is created every hour for the internet. And that can be new content that is real news content that people are shooting, you know the plane going down in the Hudson River, or comedic content or nonfiction content. People are creating it on their own every day and the challenge of companies like ours is to capture the long and midtail and make it viable for advertisers and for audiences, and I think that that continues to plug along like in any new, exciting moment, people are gonna go up, some people are gonna go down, and we're going to continue to struggle our way through. But for me, having been around for thirty years in this game, the same thing is true, was true about the cable business, and, by the way, the same thing was true about the broadcast television business. Very few of us remember the DuMont Network, which was one of the ones that was very exciting back in the day.
Our model is to partner with brands and advertisers in any which way that makes sense to them and to our audiences. If our audiences are excited, engaged, in love with the products that we make, the video products that we make, the television products that we make, our advertisers will be very very happy. And what we have found over, now, the years is that every week more and more advertisters are excited about our approach to distribution, promotion, marketing, and production.
Andy Plesser: That's fantastic and how's the Obama girl doing?
Fred Seibert: She's doing great. She's a fantastic woman and the fictional product that is put out of Barely Digital is just as popular and exciting as it was three years ago.
Andy Plesser: That's great and what's next for you guys or for the industry in terms of original programming? Is it humor, is it news, is it real life, what do you think?
Fred Seibert: You know, I don't ever, even when I was in the television business, think about what's next. What I think about is the audiences and communities that we serve and what will make them happy and fall in love. And for us, we are on a constant, 24-hour a day search for those audiences and talking with them to figure out a way, you know, to engage them in a way that they enjoy.
