Month: August 2018

The Americans capped off its gripping final season by winning three Television Critics Association (TCA) Awards on Saturday night. At the ceremony in Los Angeles, FX’s critically acclaimed drama, which is nominated for four Emmys, was honored as program of the year–the evening’s top award–and for outstanding achievement in drama, while star Keri Russell was…

Cond? Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg confirmed Thursday to staffers in a email that after a review to determine which titles were “vital” to growth, the publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker would sell off Brides, Golf Digest and W – all of which are niche publications that are limited in their ability to scale….

Rooster Teeth wants to help animation creators make money online — and grow its subscription business in the process.

The Otter Media-owned digital studio and network has created a $2.5 million development fund to work with animation creators on YouTube and other platforms to develop new video projects. Along with the development fund, Rooster Teeth is bringing animation creators into its digital network with the promise of helping them make extra money through advertising, subscriptions, merchandising and commerce and other forms of revenue.

“We’re looking for like-minded creators who have a good track record of producing consistently,” said Matt Hullum, co-founder and CEO of Rooster Teeth. “It definitely helps if they have an archive of past material our audience can watch to get up to speed immediately, but overall, we’re looking for folks who are ambitious.”

Rooster Teeth is one of the biggest digital producers of animated programming. Its anime-style series “RWBY” has aired for five seasons and has been licensed to streaming platforms including Netflix and Crunchyroll. (Season six is set to premiere this October.) Its other upcoming animated series include “gen:Lock” starring and co-produced by Michael B. Jordan; and a horror-comedy called “Spikeface” from Rob McElhenney, the co-creator of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

Rooster Teeth’s primary focus is building out its subscription video service, which has more than 250,000 paying members. By working with more animation talent, Rooster Teeth hopes to convert more people into subscribers. Rooster Teeth typically releases new episodes of its popular shows to members before releasing it for free on its app and platforms such as YouTube. That said, Rooster Teeth won’t ignore the chance to fund and distribute shows that come out of the development pipeline, Hullum said.

Beyond the development fund, Rooster Teeth is recruiting animators to join its talent network. Rooster Teeth’s network consists of eight gaming channels that include owned channels such as Achievement Hunter and Funhaus as well as partners’ such as Cow Chop and Sugar Pine 7. Now it wants to extend that network to animation creators. In exchange for joining the network, the company promises to help creators grow and diversify their own revenue through subscription revenue (by distributing content inside the Rooster Teeth app), ad sales, live events, commerce and more. Merchandising, for instance, accounts for 20 percent of Rooster Teeth’s own revenue, the company has said.

“The partnerships are modular deals that involve some combination of a library content license for the Rooster Teeth app, development of new projects, merch sales in the Rooster Teeth store, podcast ad sales, brand integration sales, and more,” Hullum said.

Working with Rooter Teeth could be attractive to animation creators, since it’s still difficult for many of them to make enough money from YouTube advertising alone, which limits the type of videos and stories these creators can make independently, said Evan Bregman, director of programming for Rooster Teeth.

“YouTube is a tough place for an animation creator today — animation is our biggest content category by far and we feel that,” Bregman said. “But through our diversified revenue model, we’ve created an infrastructure that allows us to better monetize the day-to-day life of being a creator. We want to extend that to other creators.”

The post Rooster Teeth creates $2.5 million development fund for animation creators appeared first on Digiday.

Burberry unveiled two new aspects of its brand identity this week: One was a quite lovely tessellated monogram created from the initials of founder Thomas Burberry. The other was a new wordmark for the brand, and while Burberry’s chief creative officer loves it, the reaction among fans has been notably mixed. The brand’s first logo…

Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, is stepping down, The New York Post reported today. Hearst did not return multiple requests for comment. Coles is expected to leave the company next week. Her departure comes on the heels of Troy Young’s appointment to Hearst Magazine’s president. Young, who led the company’s digital…

Crimson Hexagon is back in business on Facebook and Instagram – mostly. The social analytics platform, which uses AI to analyze public data across social networks, said Friday that most of its customers have had their access restored to both Facebook and Instagram data since the end of last week. The process was far swifter for… Continue reading »

The post Crimson Hexagon Regains Partial Access To Facebook And Instagram, Investigation Is Ongoing appeared first on AdExchanger.

Being a teenager is tough. For any victim of bullying, social media adds fuel to the fire. Wunderman Buenos Aires created a cyberbullying campaign for the Argentina-based telecommunications company, Movistar. What sets this campaign apart from other cyberbullying ads is how it’s told: in two parallel timelines where the viewer can select which version to…

At least three advertisers are alleging in antitrust suits that Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media colluded to fix prices.

At least three advertisers are alleging in antitrust suits that Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media colluded to fix prices.