By Janinne Brunyee
Four-year-old AwesomenessTV is on a mission to create a global media brand targeted at Millennial women between 16 and 24. What started out as a single YouTube channel founded by television producer Brian Robbins, with US$5m in funding supplied by YouTube, has grown into a multi-channel video network with 90,000 YouTube channels and over 3.3 million subscribers, a talent management service, a record label, movie studio and much more. The company was acquired by DreamWorks in 2013.
According to chief digital officer Kelly Day, the key to their growth has been developing close relationships with the biggest talent in the digital space – often found on YouTube – to create high quality video content that is distributed across a wide range of platforms.
According to Day, in the early days of YouTube, the key to success was creating a massive amount of content that could be discovered when users searched for key topics. This allowed the company to quickly grow from a single YouTube channel into a multi-channel network that allows fans to create their own content.
But content creation is deeply embedded in AwesomenessTV’s DNA, so moving from YouTube to creating a feature film (which went to top of the iTunes chart) at the end of 2014, was a natural fit.
Today, AwesomenessTV is making episodic television-type content as well as feature films for a wide ranges of platforms. Two movies, currently in production, should enjoy a wide theatrical release.
Meeting the millennial audience where they are
The focus has been on developing other platforms rather than awesomenesstv.com including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Day pointed out that the youth audience already spends all their time on social channels so building the brand there made sense. “We built the brand in the places we knew they were spending time,” she said.
At launch, there was almost no focus on Facebook because, at the time, teens were abandoning Facebook for Twitter and Instagram. Today, this trend has reversed and now Facebook has become a much bigger focus.
Content strategy
“We believe in content as marketing,” said Day. “We invest in creating original shows or at least cuts of original shows that are unique to each platform.” Most episodes are between 5 to 11 minutes long and can be packaged into 22-minute segments. Most videos for Facebook are less than a minute and for Instagram, they are under 15 seconds. Day said the company has dedicated teams who work on each platform. “We invest in people and content, not buying media,” she said.
About 40 per cent of traffic comes from new content and the rest comes from archived content. Day explained that because YouTube is so search driven, you get traffic forever.
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