MyToons
» see mytoons.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
In 2007 I had TTNet broadband at home and was watching video on the web without having to plan the evening around it first. What I watched was YouTube, the same as everybody else. MyToons launched that March into a market where that sentence was already the entire problem.
The company came out of Austin, founded in 2006 by Paul and Stacey Ford along with Dan Kraus as a spinoff of Bauhaus Software, and it went public at South by Southwest in March 2007. The pitch was deliberately narrow: a video community only for animation, where animators posted work and found each other instead of being buried under a general feed. Three weeks in it had taken over 1.5 million unique visitors, which was enough to make the idea look right.
It kept shipping through 2008. A YouTube channel partnership in February was followed by Adobe Media Player integration in March. That June it became the first animation community anywhere to offer HD upload and playback. The state of Texas had put a $500,000 Emerging Technology Fund grant behind the company.
None of it held against the funding climate. MyToons cut most of its staff in January 2009 and closed completely that April when the venture money stopped. The site had been open for two years and one month.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | March 2007, launched publicly at South by Southwest in Austin |
|---|---|
| Peak | over 1.5 million unique visitors in the first three weeks |
| Killed | April 2009 |
| Lifespan | 2 years, 1 month |
| Made by | Paul and Stacey Ford with Dan Kraus, out of Bauhaus Software |
| Killed by | venture funding that stopped in January 2009 |
~ the vertical video theory ~
Between 2006 and 2009 a lot of money went into the belief that YouTube was too general and that vertical video communities would carve it into pieces. Revver tried it with revenue sharing and Veoh tried it with long form. MyToons tried it with a single creative discipline and had the better claim of the group, because animators genuinely needed to find each other in a way that random uploaders did not.
The theory kept losing to the same arithmetic. A general site with a hundred times the audience delivers more viewers to a niche than the niche site does, even at a much worse match rate, and the animator uploading a graduation short knew that as clearly as the investors did. By 2009 the animation community that counted was a set of channels on YouTube and a set of threads on somebody else's forum.
~ what closed with it ~
Emails went out to the people who had been selling through its store, and the site went dark shortly after. A small video host closing takes the video with it. The archive of student films and independent shorts that lived on MyToons was never mirrored anywhere, because nothing about the design assumed it would need to be. Some of it got reposted to YouTube by the people who made it. Some of it did not.
mytoons.com resolves today to an animation art gallery in California with no connection to any of this. The name was worth more to somebody selling original cels than to anybody trying to rebuild the site, which is a quieter ending than a shutdown page.
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