Sure, it’s only been four years, but 2004 still feels like a lifetime ago in the new media world. And no one knows this better than Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron. A grizzled veteran of the industry, Baron successfully created one of the web’s perennial daily podcasts before anyone really knew what podcasting could be. We talked with him about the reasons for Rocketboom’s lack of expansion, Amanda Congdon’s Rocketboom lawsuit, plans for the next Rocketboom endeavor, larger industry problems with networks and monetization, and the toll of daily production. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.
NewTeeVee: Rocketboom has been running daily for over three-and-a-half years now. Who, at this point, do you feel is your audience?
Baron: People who are the first to use aggregators, new technology. We also have a regular audience of people who aren’t plugged into the Web 2.0 world the way that we are, but they come to Rocketboom to get a little taste of Internet culture. We still don’t have a lot of mainstream audience. Probably our biggest mainstream audience comes through TiVo — people who may not even surf the web, but might discover us through that.
NewTeeVee: Do you think there’s been any major shift in audience over the past few years?
Baron: It’s grown larger; it’s grown more international. I think we have a more mature audience now. When people were first discovering Rocketboom, there was a lot of audience that seemed to be attracted to the show for reasons that weren’t really why we wanted them to be attracted to the show. You’ve got a lot of people online who are really obnoxious and say a lot of horrible things — overtly sexual or whatever. They’re important in a way, but they were coming to look at the wrong things. And we’ve toned that aspect down a lot.
NewTeeVee: What’s your current plan for future Rocketboom endeavors?
Baron: The plan is to grow the Rocketboom brand. But we’re still so small.
NewTeeVee: Yeah, despite having been around for four years, Rocketboom hasn’t expanded much. Is there a reason for the lack of growth?
Baron: When Amanda Congdon left, she usurped the show and the business I had in place for ABC, HBO and the Amanda Across America projects. While that was a setback, I had no interest in suing her. I tried to move on. However, she was unwilling to let go and so we went to court. Eventually, after a great deal of time and money was wasted, Amanda lost the case — she appealed and then lost the appeal as well. But [the suit] prohibited us from seeking investment or other partnerships, so all of my work has been to preserve our position in the space. I think we have done well considering the circumstances.
Note: We have not yet found record of a lawsuit in which Congdon is named as a primary plaintiff, but documents from 2007 indicate that she filed motion in a New York court to be recognized as co-owner of Rocketboom and was denied. NewTeeVee will continue to investigate this matter.
When I look around at some of the other networks — like Revision3 or Next New Networks or PodTech, which recently fell apart — they all have something in common with us: They all started out with a hit show, and they tried to create a network out of it. If I’d had the resources to build out those other shows, that would have happened to me, too. But looking back I’m glad it never did, because I think they’re all going about it the wrong way.
NewTeeVee: What do you feel those networks are doing wrong?
Baron: The main thing is that they’re not efficient at leveraging the resources they have in an economical way. If you’ve got a small network, you only have a few shows: one about cars, another about building houses, another one about news. And while it’s true that yes, you’re reaching several kinds of audiences, with those kind of audiences…
NewTeeVee: There’s no crossover?
Baron: Exactly. So you have all these different shows and you’re building them up and creating a new set of resources for each show, and you’re not able to leverage the audience from the other shows. So you end up stretching yourself really thin. I think we’ve seen a lot of problems come from that and I think we’ll see a lot more.
NewTeeVee: Looking back, how much has the shift in hosts changed the show?
Baron: I would say that the main difference is that when we were first getting the format going, we did a lot more to press buttons and explore boundaries. But the more that time has gone on, the more we’ve been able to focus on the content itself.
The transition from Amanda [Congdon] to Joanne happened at a perfect time. Originally, the reason people liked Rocketboom was because it was something new: People were not used to video online. Now that’s changed — now it’s about what you can really do with this. And we’ve been able to hold onto our position by focusing on content. Joanne has really helped the company with that transition, because of her experience, her education — she’s a really fantastic human being with a lot of integrity.
NewTeeVee: Do you have an official comment on Amanda’s new show?
Baron: I’m going to stick with “no comment.” But you can say that I said “no comment.”
NewTeeVee: “No comment” is kind of a comment, in its way.
Baron: Yeah, it is a comment.
NewTeeVee: What is the current Rocketboom audience?
Baron: We recently decided not to talk about that, because it is so controversial. But what I can say is that from February or March of 2007 to 2008, Rocketboom was ranked one of the fastest-growing video startups by Compete, based on their own public data.
NewTeeVee: After four years, do you still consider yourself a startup?
Baron: Yeah. I do. We’re still in startup mode.
NewTeeVee: But when do you stop being a startup?
Baron: That’s a good question, because I don’t know what the condition of a startup is. We have not been acquired by anybody and we have not taken any investment by capitalists or anybody. We’re just kind of on our own right now.
When Rocketboom started, there was no market, and I knew we weren’t going to come up with any money for a while. So I just said, “Let’s just do this and give it away for free and let people redistribute it and try and get really popular.” I set a benchmark of 50,000 per day, so when we hit that I knew, “Oh, there’s a market value here. How do we extract it? ” But when I stopped to look, there was still no market at all. Even now, several years later, YouTube is saying that they haven’t cracked this nut yet. Blip.tv is a recent partner we have for ad sales, and they have not cracked the nut yet. We gave Federated Media a chance, and they couldn’t do it.
NewTeeVee: What can you tell me about the upcoming show featuring Ellie [Rountree, a Rocketboom producer]?
Baron: The focus is on Internet culture. We’re really excited about it, because when we release it, our strategy for how we’re growing will be a lot more apparent. This show is a lot more innovative — it’s a step in a new direction, working in context with Rocketboom and everything else, but taking it a step further.
NewTeeVee: In the interactive direction?
Baron: Yeah, in the interactive direction. We’re not going to have tickers and flashing lights all over the place; we’re just going to make the show more efficient and more fun at the same time. Rocketboom audiences initially assumed the brand was the personality, but over the past few years they’ve seen that the brand is the show itself. The personality is really important to it, though, and Ellie’s got a great personality. So I think it’s going to be one of the stronger points of this one.
NewTeeVee: Is it going to be daily?
Baron: No, not at first. It could turn into that eventually, though.
NewTeeVee: How has doing a daily show changed your life?
Baron: You know when they take a picture of a president from before his election and afterwards, and you can’t believe how much someone can age over that time period? The stress of trying to meet deadlines and make the show as good as possible — that kind of stress definitely has an impact. But last night I got about four or five hours of sleep, and while I could have gotten more sleep, this is still so exciting and interesting that I don’t even notice that I’m not sleeping or that I’m stressed out or that I’m tired. It’s definitely taken a toll on me physically. But I’ll catch up on sleep when I retire.
