My Damn Channel is one of the premier web tv studios. Their shows, celebrity packed and not, are all over the web show awards and glean major sponsorships. The site itself has received major accolades. Here’s a phone interview I did with the creator, Rob Barnett on November 21st, 2011.
Elizabeth Ellis: You’ve had a very interesting career and, it seems to me, you’ve been able to capitalize on the freshest, most democratic medium emerging at the time, and I’m wondering what you set out to do when you got into entertainment and how that led you to web television.
Rob Barnett: I guess ever since I was a kid I was always fascinated by, you know, artistic people, at first as a fan, but then really, really early on I just decided I wanted to find out what made ‘em tick and I got obsessed with the idea of mass communication and I also got somewhat obsessed with the idea of mass consciousness, you know? I was lucky enough to have all these great jobs along the way and for a time I was working at MTV when they were playing almost all exclusively music video and it used to just blow my mind that somebody could come in there with a 3 or 4 minute video, like say, Madonna, and have everyone, pretty much, in the conscious world aware of it? That just always blew my mind and I figured, I’m never gonna be one of those people. But I guess I decided that my career would center on working with as many of those people as I could, to not only find out how they did that, but then maybe become a person who helped them do that. And then even more deeply, I got on this train of, wouldn’t it be great to let them do as close to what they want to do as possible without the meddling that I saw take place in almost all the companies that exist in what I would call old showbiz, where I’d say, Liz, great idea, but how about we change it fifteen ways?
EE: Right.
RB: Let’s make it how I want to make it!
EE: Art by committee.
RB: Right! I’m gonna tell you what your project is about. And I saw that happen so many times and then sometimes it would happen to me while I was working with artists that I loved and respected, you know? I worked for a while with Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, and that guy changed the fucking world. No two ways about it. But I saw what people put him through every time he wanted to put a new project out there and at some point I thought, well, why doesn’t somebody just trust him? I mean, any time you just walk down the street and see somebody with hair spiked up in the weirdest way, it’s very possible that it’s because of that one individual on the planet. And how much influence some people have on the culture makes me think that they actually deserve a hell of a lot more freedom than they normally are getting, you know. So, those are some of the original ideas of My Damn Channel.
The My Damn Channel Logo/Banner
EE: Do you think that having web television as a medium where people can put some of what they actually want to be doing out there, do you think that turns back around and affects mainstream television? Does it drive the corporations to make better art?
RB: I don’t know. That’s a pretty major premise for a question. I guess my quickie answer is probably not. It makes me think, though, when I was working at MTV we were accused of destroying society on a lot of levels, but one of them was that we were creating some sort of ADD nation and if that had some truth to it in the 80’s, I think it’s fair to say that in the online video era, the short attention spans are getting even shorter and the opportunities that people have to consume a variety of different media types grows by the minute. And therefore, online video, when it’s done the best, has to tell stories in a way that’s very efficient and usually very brief, so you may be right in the premise of your question, that maybe there might be some television executives today who are, um, you know, tweaking their own beliefs about the way their stories are told based on the way people are consuming online video. It’s possible.
EE: Well, I think, you know, it gives people a voice, certainly, that offers them a chance to break into mainstream television. Like, the Derrick Comedy guys all got to write for 30 Rock and Donald Glover is on Community. Do you think the leap to broadcast is one of the major goals of people are doing this kind of work?
RB: Uh, I think it’s a trap! I think if you set out to make an original online video with the prime intention of segwaying to television you’re doing something similar to buying a lottery ticket. Um, it could happen, and it has happened. We believe that it should happen from time to time, but I also think it’s really important to make sure that if you set out to be an online creator you’re creating for the online audience and not just stuffing a failed television project onto the web. I think there’s really two different audiences that consume content in different ways.
EE: So, do you—
RB: I sound like a professor on this, don’t I?
EE: Yeah, I think you’ve got something.
RB: I think it might be the premise of the conversation. Way too professorial!
EE: Yeah, I think that might be my fault.
RB: It’s all your fault.
EE: But, so, when I watch—
RB: But you have bananas on your head, so I can tone it back now. I just saw that.
EE: When I watch… Oh, no. Where are you!? Oh my god! You found me!
The Image in Question
RB: You have bananas on your head on Twitter.
EE: It’s a lemon, actually.
RB: It’s a lemon!?
EE: Yeah, they’re like these massive structures.
RB: What the hell…?! That’s not a lemon!
EE: That’s why I picked it up and took a picture of it on my head.
RB: Wow, that’s very Star-Trekky.
EE: Yeah. So, one of the reasons I first got interested in this was I’ve been looking around and realizing none of my friends pay for TV, or if they do, six people use the same Netflix account, and—
RB: Oh, what a great topic.
EE: Yeah, sorry.
RB: No, it’s great! I have been living without for—I’m now on my fourth year without television.
EE: Really? Wow.
RB: Yeah. And I spent most of my life working in it! Being addicted to it! And not anymore.
EE: So you’re one of us! But the thing is, everybody I know watches Breaking Bad, but nobody I know has AMC! They all just have torrent accounts or watch it on Netflix and I’m wondering, like, since people are already accessing 22 minute and 44 minute shows online, do you think that web television will ever, not necessarily locked into act breaks or those exact lengths, but you know, do you think there will be full time, full length shows that are just online?
RB: Yes, I do think that’s the future and everybody knows that’s the future, we’re just not there yet. We will get there and we’re moving there day by, cord cutter by cord cutter and maybe, I mean, I’m not great at this crystal ball stuff, but the best guess I can give you this afternoon is that two years from you and me talking, there’s gonna be a hell of a lot more people like you and me, and there’s gonna be a hell of a lot more organization, and this is gonna get a little bit heady here, organization of the internet content on your formally known as television set big monitor on the wall. It’ll be organized a lot better than it might be today. But little by little by little you’re seeing companies as big as Google TV and others like Boxy and Roku and a number of other people who are figuring out how to make the viewing experience on the flat screen as small D democratic as possible, pulling in any and everything Liz wants, when Liz wants it, how Liz wants it. Fact is, we’re moving there and fact is that the short answer to your question is yes, it’s just a matter of when, you know? Now that this kind of a studio like My Damn Channel will not be terribly different than a television studio or a movie studio producing all this work because you’re gonna consume it in the same way using all the same technology.
EE: And does that make you nervous? Does the idea—
RB: It makes me ecstatic! Yeah.
EE: But, but, does it make you nervous that if it becomes as profitable an enterprise as mainstream television is now or has been in recent years, that the networks will take over and their size allows them to—
RB: That’s a good question and there’s history, okay? There’s recent history. Go back to 2006. Google buys YouTube for almost 1.7 billion dollars and around the same time, and I’m not gonna give you a complete list, but I’ll give you a rough list and you can find a lot more. Companies like HBO go out there and try something called “This Just In.” NBC tries something called “Dot Comedy.” Turner tries something called “Super Deluxe.”* They were great, by the way. Um, uh, a big talent agency in Hollywood called UTA launches something called “60 Frames.” And I could go on and on and on. This is going back to 2007 and maybe 8? And guess what? In 2011 all those companies have crashed. They’re all gone. Annnnnd that tells you a lot about the difference between huge monolithic media corporations and little punk outfits like My Damn Channel. And, you know, we can go on for hours and hours and hours about why the big boys and girls don’t seem to do this so well.
EE: So, you don’t think that YouTube going into original programming is dangerous?
GiGi: Almost American
RB: They wrote me a big fat check!! To be really serious, I mean, to be really serious, I’ve said this publicly in the last couple weeks, I think it’s a great thing for any web creator to see that Google has made a decision to start funding original content for the first time ever. That’s a great step forward for you and me and, you know, the Lost Nomads and everybody that wants to make web content.
EE: So, switching over to a sort of practical note, how does ownership work with a group like My Damn Channel? If their name is on something, do they, how do they share profits with the creators and what kind of control do the creators have over what happens next?RB: Well, you’ve got a couple of questions there, so let me try to explain as best I can, you know, the various ways that we work as a company and see if I answer your question and if not, then come back around. We build 4 core businesses all under the same roof. The main thing here, from day one, is the studio and if you spend way too much time looking deeply in our site, A, I’ll be your best friend. And B, you’ll find that over 80 or 85 percent of everything in there is original. We produced it, we paid for it. Or, perhaps a sponsor did, but it’s an original production, but we’ve never been one of those places that say, “Hey, Liz, upload your video and, you know, have the honor of having it on My Damn Channel.” We just didn’t believe that we needed to out-YouTube YouTube. The most important thing here is the studio. Now, that leaves 20, 25 percent of the things in there that we did not produce originally. So we are, sometimes, acquiring things that were produced by someone else and giving that person distribution, marketing, PR and all the time, energy, focus and money that it takes to get your video to be popular so in the studio business we’re paying for content and then the second business is the network, mydamnchannel.com, which is a series of channels devoted to each individual creative team. The third part is syndication where we push that video out beyond the website to other places where we and the content creator can get paid, like YouTube and a number of other distribution platforms, you know, to get that video widely seen. And then the last thing we do is the wild world of branded entertainment, and there’s a lot of stuff on My Damn Channel where the play is the thing for some of the smartest sponsors out there. So, in a couple of weeks, you’re gonna see a brand new season of Wainy Days, season 5. And, it’s always been this great, long running comedy series here, it’s always been completely the vision of David Wain. It still is, but now it features the new Fiat, or the JLo car. Fiat is paying for the whole production of the new season, which is awesome! In all of these cases, to try to come around to your first question, if the idea comes from an outside source, we’re a place that believes that the creator owns their own idea but since we’re doing a whole hell of a lot to help that idea A, see the light of day and B, get extremely popular and C, make a lot of money, we want to participate in, you know, the upside on that idea, and we have a whole lot of variety of different deal structures whether A, we originally produced it, B, we just acquired it, C, how much did we spend on it. So, then you sort of dive into the weeds and then it gets kind of boring. But hopefully I got to the core of what you want to know.
EE: No, you did, actually, you skipped right over a couple of my next questions, too.
RB: Okay, good!
EE: So, I guess leaves me with, do you see… and you can just ignore this question if you want to, but it’s part of what I’m writing about so I thought I’d ask.
RB: Sure.
EE: Do you have like, a political side to your manifesto? Toward the idea of a democracy functioning better when, you know, people can see content made by more than six companies. I don’t know if that affects your decision-making at all, but if it does…
RB: There’s a great question, you know, the short answer is yes! You know, the whole reason, I use this phrase, “small D democracy” all the time and I really do believe that that’s what this is allllll about. I got to a point in my career where I just got reeeally tired of sitting in a room with the kings and queens of show business and seeing a huge slew of executives making decisions over every project. And I also have found, from the very earliest days, I mean, I started out in rock radio right out of college, and I used to get really angry when I would sit in a management meeting and watch the executives of a company talk down behind closed doors about their audience, you know and just speak of them in all these derogatory terms like “the kids” or, like, you know, like, I once worked in a pretty blue collar town and people would call them “the grits” or something like that and from a very young age I got really angry at the way media management disrespected their audience and just thought, you know, your entire salary is based on the people that are bothering to watch and listen to your crap, so, you know, you really have to treat these people better and in all show business you have these powerful institutions like Arbitron for the radio industry or Nielsen for the television industry that are taking this small snapshot of the public and driving so many of those decisions that corporations make about what shows are up and what shows are down that the incredibly exciting freedom that was created on the internet meant that not only could anybody upload a video, but everyone was judged in the exact same way, based on all of the statistics, not just a snap shot. So, to me, that is a very politically relevant fact that changed the entire game, about who gets a shot. Who’s up, who’s down. That is just totally revolutionary and people like the original founders of YouTube deserve incredible credit and gratitude from people like us who are still enjoying working in this way where everybody has a shot.
EE: So, I’m writing a show and I’m getting a lot of notes, or, well, I’m having a lot of conversations with professors and also some of my friends where they’re saying that, “oh, like, it’s too targeted an audience, people won’t get it” or “it’s too blue, no one can take this” and I’m basically wondering, not just for myself, but for people in my position, should I care? Is that a concern anymore?
RB: You know, that’s a really great question. The beginning of every original project on line has to start with the single most important opinion in the world: yours. And the way that you really decide what path to walk down and how blue is blue and how safe is safe and how funny is funny enough. All those questions you might ask or judgments that people might put on it have to come back down to just one thing and that one thing is intention. Right? What’s your intention for making this? And you can make a really long list of potential reasons why people make an original video online. One might be, I’m fulfilling a requirement of my, you know, schooling. One might be I’m just doing this for fun for my friends and myself and my family. Another is, I’m going to turn the camera on and teach myself how to get better and better at this simply by doing it. And you can go on and on and make a long list about it but nobody’s opinions really matter at all other than yours and then the only reason you’d want to get other people’s opinions is if they’re really focused on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. But to just say it’s too this and too that? I mean, they’re basing it off their own, you know, points of view and their own feelings that may not have anything to do with why you’re doing it in the first place.
EE: Great. Thank you. So, my final question, and I’m asking this of everybody, though I think I have a handle on your answer, is: somebody in my position, who doesn’t particularly have any money, doesn’t know any celebrities, um, isn’t a name, doesn’t have any influence, can they hope to create a show that will at least, can they hope to, if they are actually talented, create a show that will at least sustain itself financially?
RB: One billion percent yes. You know, it’s so easy to say, well you’re never gonna succeed on television or in movies unless you’ve got A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but history proves that wrong all the time! You know? And that gets back to the conversation we had earlier about the rebellious nature and the freedom that all this technology created. The answer is yes, you know? And we have evidence here in our company because it happens here and it happens I mean, we definitely took a specific path and a channel to say you will get to the dance quicker if you have names from television and film doing original online video. That’s the biggest duh in the world. And maybe one of the biggest examples is this show called You Suck At Photoshop.
EE: Which I love by the way.
RB: Thank you! It was one of those moments that you live for where I needed, it’s a long story that I’ve told before, and you can look it up online, but these guys were total unknowns that I found when I went to look for web designers and I said I can only pay you X, but maybe some day I’ll give you a shot to make some videos and they started submitting ideas and some were better and some were not as good but all of the sudden one day they submitted the very first episode, which you can see up on the site. And the minute that came in I thought, oh my god! This is doing something I thought was nearly impossible, which is total original, you know? Not derivative, not like, yeah, this is kind of like that show that—no. This just knocked me out of my chair! And I realized, I knew it was gonna be a hit, but I didn’t know how big it was gonna be and it just exploded. And that’s always there for you and everybody else. It’s no different than grabbing a microphone and signing or grabbing a set of drum sticks. You know, Adam Corolla works for us and he has this great rap about, you know, making it as an unknown. He goes, “I mean, technically, you know, anyone can be in the NFL.” You know? Technically. You just have to, it’s a question of whether you get there or not and how far you go.
*Super Deluxe actually got taken over by Adult Swim, but they aren’t really… using it.
