My Birthday Wishes

My Birthday is this week and friends and family have been asking what I would like. There aren't too many things I really need so I've had to think long and hard about what I want and I've come up with a list.

I don't think I'll get all of these things by my birthday but I do hope that by next year this time all of my birthday wishes have come true.

My Birthday Wish List (in no particular order)

1. Beers on the Diggnation Couch with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.

2. A comedy writing lesson from Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of Ask A Ninja.

3. Cocktails on the set of Tikibar TV with Dr. Tiki, Lala and Johnny Johnny.

4. Discover some new music and a cool new websites with Steve Woolf and Zadi Diaz of Epic FU.

5. A "How To Snowboard Episode" of French Maid TV.

6. A massage after playing paintball with The guys from Big Fantastic.

7. Getting a cool new video gadget the same time as Steve Garfield and having Steve set it up for me and explain to me how to use it.

8. Share a bottle of wine with Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV

9. Being able to watch all of my friends shows on my TV as easily as I can watch Heroes or any other Network or Cable TV Show.

10. Some hugs from my online video friends because we are all making more than a living from online video.

Rides To The Prom

In his blog Ask A Ninja Co-Creator Kent Nichols talks about what goes into the Ask A Ninja videos that he and his creative Ninja partner Douglas Sarine create and own. Kent explains why when the costs are averaged out each episode of Ask A Ninja costs about $6000 per video. Kent does a great job of explaining what has gone into building their business and their brand that will continue to grow but what Kent doesn't talk about are all the videos by Independent producers that are made for $6000 or less for large corporations.

Large companies are calling online video producers that have had viral videos and they are offering money to create new online videos for their major corporations and that's great. When I first started producing I would have loved to received a call from a large corporation who wanted me to produce something for them. Are you kidding? I would have done it for FREE. But times are different now. I'd still take the work but I want something more than money.

Today if you are creative and can produce a viral video that builds and audience you don't need a Fortune 500 company to pay you money. Just look at what Kent and Douglas and other online video producers that have come before them have done as well as what people like Greg Goodfried and Miles Beckett are doing with LG15 and Kate Modern.

What you need to watch out for are the "Rides to the Prom" as I like to call them. "If you give us a ride we will show you a good time later on." What I mean by this is that when a big company says, "Hey, we want you to do this video for us cause we think you are the most creative and wonderful person out there and here's $6000." be very careful.

There are some TV Networks that have been doing this tactic in cable television for years. They get talented kids to work for cheap and instead of giving the kids a raise when they do a good job they just find new talented kids. That's a little bit different. As the kid you are getting experience and you have that TV Network name you can put on your resume and go find work at a network that pays more money for experience. Now you can create your own videos and get experience doing it.

The thing to remember is that now the rules have changed. You don't need a TV Network to get the experience to create something that is watched by millions and you don't need to work for a TV Network to make money. Don't get me wrong it's great if you can get work from a big company and it can be great money but you are not going to be able to build a business on $6000 videos that you don't own. Sure there are wedding video guys that make this kind of money and can shoot four videos in a weekend but that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about pursuing your passion and taking your wacky ideas and turning them into something that you own that pays you a check every month for years to come.

Now if you do get an email from a large company asking you to create a video for $6000 see if you can negotiate ownership. Could you imagine if you used someone else's $6000 to create the first episode of something like Ask A Ninja?

International Day of the Ninja

The very first episode of Ask A Ninja was posted in late 2005 on a blogspot blog for Beatbox Giant. The first question was Matt's questions about when and where ninjas get their uniforms. (I wonder who Matt is? Maybe the bass player for the band that does the theme some but I never asked the Ninja)

In the Question #1: The Ninja-Mart Store episode the Ninja didn't even have a real Ninja uniform because the shows creators Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine couldn't afford one. They shot the show with a broken camera, a good mic and launched with a catchy theme song "I Am Ninja", by the German band The Neu Tickles. Two years later it is the International Day of the Ninja and Kent and Douglas are grossing $100,000 per month in advertising revenues.

That's right $100k per month for a guy dressed in a Ninja suit standing in front of a wall yelling answers to a question that one of their viewers asked via email. But keep in mind their videos do get millions of views.

At the risk of being killed by the Ninja I'm going to give you a little bit of the story on how it all came together.

Kent and Douglas met in an Improvisational acting class in the Los Angeles area. From there they started creating an animated show about Ninjas living in Orange County, California. As they got further and further into developing the show for another production company they realized that animation was really, really hard to pull off so they were ready to throw in the towel and call it quits but Douglas wouldn't let it die. Douglas started asking Kent questions about video production and internet videos and how they could do something - anything - on the cheap. After spending some time watching other popular videos on YouTube they came up with Ask A Ninja.

I first met Kent in the Spring of 2006 at Vloggercon. We were on a panel together about creating characters and I got slammed by the crowd. They hated me but loved the Ninja. At that time Kent and I were both amazed by what Andrew Baron and what he was doing with Rocketboom but then came the big break up. Andrew and Amanda from Rocketbook had a big public falling out.

Later in the Summer I met Douglas for the first time when Kent and I were on another panel together at Comic-con and Kent and Douglas were making changes fast.

At that point because of the big Rocketboom breakup Kent and Douglas realized that no one in this online video space knew what they were doing when it came to monetizing online video. So Kent and Douglas decided they would figure it out for themselves and to do that they knew they would need money, which they borrowed from their family.

They were using Revver to host their videos and Podtrac to get advertisers and both services worked but just not on a big enough scale to make enough money to live on and pay back the money they had borrowed.

The Ninja boys also had a few great little things happen. They were asked by NPR to do a movie review for Pirates of the Caribbean and the Ninja was asked to be the judge of the Yahoo Talent Show. Both events gave Ask A Ninja more visibility and more video views.

Along the way Kent and Douglas picked up UTA as an agent and signed with a high profile Manager and high powered entertainment attorney.

Once they had those pieces in place they started talking with an online video podcasting company, Podtech about taking over advertising for the Ask A Ninja videos but at about the same time they also met with a very smart man by the name of John Battelle from an online advertising agency called Federated Media to talk about handling the advertising inventory for both their website and their videos.


Now keep in mind that Federated Media had never monetized online video before but John Battelle put together a very detailed and well thought out plan of how Federated Media would bring money to the Ask A Ninja Brand and Kent and Douglas liked the man and they liked his plan.

UTA brokered the deal with Federated, it took a few months to get things up and running but now my best guess is that the Ninja boys are taking home around 30-40K each per month and in the scheme of things they are just getting started.

Best of all Kent and Douglas are still nice guys, they are now dept free AND they still own Ask A Ninja. Now that’s something worth creating a special day to celebrate.

Friends vs Fans

How can you have over 1000 Friends? If you did, how often would you talk to each and every one of your friends? How often would you see them? Send them a gift? Have dinner with them? What makes someone your friend vs a fan?

I think a little common sense goes a long way here but beyond that think about your brand vs you. Are you your brand or is your brand your brand and you are you?

If you are building a brand online your online "Friends" need to be treated as fans and feel free to get as many of them as possible. If you are building relationships to help grow your brand be careful about mixing your fans and your friends. It can come back to hurt you.

I hate it when someone I know in real life sends me a SPAM email about their project. "It feels very disingenuous and makes me want to "unfriend" them. I'm sure there are things that I've done and continue to do that rub people the wrong way as well but that's not going to stop me from talking about this.

Last night Chris Brogan (who I really enjoy hanging out with and drinking beers with at new media events - especially cause he's the one usually buying) twittered (or tweeted as some of you like to say) that he had posted over 10,000 times on Twitter. That got me thinking about how many of his postings were of any interest to me. The answer was very few and I removed Chris from my list of people that I follow on Twitter. Eric Rice then Twittered that he had Chris beat by a few hundred posts. I then thought about removing Eric but I realized that some of Eric's posts are informative to me because Eric likes to mix things up and create controversy. Eric also interacts with others way more than Chris. From what I see, Chris is usually Twitter Out" not "Twitter back and forth".

This morning I saw Susan Bratton twittered that she "just crested 1,000 FaceBook friends" and that prompted me to write this post.

Ask A Ninja is a Brand, and serves as a good case study for this. Associated with Ask A Ninja is Digital Filmaker, Beatbox Giant and the shows creators Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine.

On Ning, they have their official Fan Page, with 4802 members (at the time of this posting)on Facebook they have a Ask A Ninja Page and Kent has a page and I don't know if Douglas has a page.

They have kept their fans separate from their friends.

Now comes the gray area. Sometimes as a content creator you will have fans within the Internet video community that want to be friends with you. This makes things very confusing. I think the best way to approach this is to set some standards for yourself and think about what works best for you. Don't just click the "accept" button thinking the more friends you have the more money you will make because in the real world, the more "friends" you have the more you will dilute your relationships. However online the more "fans" you have the more money you have the potential to make.

All that said I'm sure Chris Brogan will still buy me beers because he's that nice of guy but my point here isn't really to ridicule anyone it's to have us all focus on the real power of the social networks and how we can best use them to grow our brands and monetize Internet Video not just have the most posts.

Remember, "Fame without fortune turns you into Joey Buttafocco." and you can't pay your rent with Twitter posts.

I think Chris Pirillo explains the "friends thing" pretty well in the above video and he also talks about how sites not sharing revenue "cheeses" him off.


Lower your head, watch your step and enjoy the rest of your day on the Internet.