Next New Networks

» see nextnewnetworks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the videos got everywhere and the name did not. if you were online in 2007 you saw obama girl, and a few years later you saw the key of awesome without ever going looking for it. neither of them had a company attached to it in your head, which was more or less how they were designed.

next new networks launched in march 2007, founded by fred seibert and emil rensing with three co-founders and eight million dollars from a group that included spark capital. a later round brought in fifteen million more from velocity interactive group and goldman sachs. the new york times covered the launch as a hybrid media approach, which was a careful way of saying nobody yet knew whether this was a television company or an internet company.

the bet was on the word networks. youtube in 2007 was a pile of uploads with a search box on top, and the people who ran television believed that what was missing was programming: a brand you would come back to on a particular day. so next new built channels instead of videos. barely political did political comedy and produced obama girl inside its first year, while channel frederator did cartoons and indy mogul taught people how to make film effects on no money. vsauce started here too, years before it became one of the largest science channels anywhere.

i was a student in 2007 with a ttnet broadband line that finally made video painless, and none of this apparatus was visible from where i sat. you clicked a thing and it played. the entire multi-channel network business was a conversation happening inside the american advertising market, and outside that market it looked like nothing at all, which is exactly what a distribution layer is supposed to look like when it works.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the model got copied before the company got bought. machinima in los angeles and channelflip in the uk built the same structure, and within a few years the multi-channel network was a whole category with its own acquisitions and its own collapse. next new was working with more than sixty independent producers by the end, including the gregory brothers, whose songified news videos are the most durable thing to come out of the entire arrangement.

in november 2010 aol hired them to make a daily original series called the one for the aol homepage. that is worth noting because it is the last thing the company did as itself: a web video studio being paid by a portal to fill a slot, four months before the platform decided it would rather own the studio.

~ what it became ~

youtube announced the acquisition on 7 march 2011 for a figure reported as under a hundred million dollars. it was the first time youtube had bought a company that made videos rather than one that helped serve them, and the reasoning was not subtle: next new knew how to grow an audience on youtube, and youtube wanted that as a service it could hand to everybody else.

the west 21st street offices stayed open and became the youtube next lab and audience development group. lance podell went in as global head of youtube next and vanessa pappas took over audience development. fred seibert stepped away to go back to making cartoons at frederator studios and was signed up as a youtube channel partner himself by november. the next new creators program was renamed youtube next, and nextup, the creator grant competition that ran out of it, is still going.

so nothing was canceled, exactly. the people stayed and the expertise went into the platform, and then the sign came off the door. nextnewnetworks.com does not resolve. the small grey robot from the logo animation survives on a fan wiki for television idents, which is a fittingly obscure afterlife for a company whose whole job was making other people's brands memorable.

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