That Guy with the Glasses

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

~ the last words ~

Doug Walker put the Nostalgia Critic on YouTube in July 2007, got taken down over copyright, and ended up needing somewhere else to put the videos. That somewhere became thatguywiththeglasses.com, launched in April 2008 by Mike Michaud, Mike Ellis and Bhargav Dronamraju, three people who had been laid off from a Circuit City the year before. Within two years it was a full site with a producer roster and a front page of shows, most of them one person talking at a camera about media that had been aimed at them as a child.

The economics are the part worth understanding. YouTube in 2008 paid almost nothing to almost nobody, and it took down exactly the kind of clip-heavy review these shows were made of. Running your own domain meant you controlled the front page and sold your own sponsorships, and the video itself sat on Revver first and then on Blip, which handled the ad roll and the bandwidth. It worked. Nostalgia Critic alone brought in $32,000 in the third quarter of 2009, at a moment when a YouTube channel of the same size was earning pocket money.

On 3 December 2014 the site was closed and relaunched as ChannelAwesome.com. The old address kept redirecting until June 2018 but the brand was gone, and several of the site's longest-running producers left within the following months. Blip shut down in August 2015, which removed the hosting arrangement the whole model had been built on. What was left was a YouTube channel with a website attached to it, which is the opposite of what the site had been for.

The one thing the site could not export was the nostalgia. Its shows were built on a specific American childhood, on cartoons and rental store shelves from a country I have never lived in, while Turkish television in the same years ran a different lineup on a different schedule, dubbed and usually late. Watching a Nostalgia Critic episode from Ankara is watching a very confident man perform memories you do not have. The format traveled better than the canon did.

~ the record ~

~ the model everybody copied ~

Between roughly 2008 and 2013 this was the standard shape for internet video that wanted to be a business: an independent site with its own name and its own roster, and someone else's player doing the actual streaming. Every one of those pieces has since been taken back by the platforms. The domain became a redirect and the roster became individual channels with individual subscriber counts.

~ april 2018 ~

On 2 April 2018 a group of former contributors published a document titled "Not So Awesome," collecting years of allegations about how the company treated the people who made its shows. Nearly every remaining producer cut ties within days. Whatever the site had been as an institution ended that week rather than in 2014. The coverage that followed, including a long piece in Salon that April, was less about the shows than about how the company behind them had been run.

~ where the domain points ~

Both thatguywiththeglasses.com and channelawesome.com now answer with a redirect to a YouTube channel. Doug Walker kept making Nostalgia Critic episodes long after the address stopped resolving, so the show has outlived its own website by more than a decade. The site is what died: the front page, the forum, the roster, the idea that a group of reviewers needed an address of their own.

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