Bill Cammack

Adrienne & Bill

So I’m chatting with Adrienne Brawley the other day, and we’re discussing web shows since we’re both shooters and editors. We were talking about my post Personal Brand? No Crossover, and the topic of internet show hosts came up.

I “matter-of-factly” mentioned how several female show hosts either ACTIVELY HIDE their boyfriends or whatever and some of them merely omit the fact that they’re in relationships, to which Adrienne replied something to the effect of “But the guys don’t have to say who they’re dating.”

That’s where I lost whatever point I was about to make, because all main & auxiliary mental power was diverted to attempting to recall even ONE instance where a guy was asked about that.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to be able to cite a single instance in the 2+ years I’ve been involved with internet shows, I started thinking about WHY I couldn’t come up with one. :) What I decided was,

Nobody Cares Who Guys Are Dating

According to my Quantcast demos, my site has a 65% female readership. BlogHer has 61% female readership. Rocketboom has 65% male readership. Digg has 58% male. Wallstrip has 56% male. Blip.tv has 51% male. The point is, that according to statistics, it’s mostly males that are watching internet shows (even though studies are saying there are actually more females on the net, they just don’t identify themselves in surveys as female).

So, basically, there are a lot of guys that watch these shows, and if you go to IRL conferences or at least look at the flickr sets from these conferences, you’ll see there are a ton of guys at these things as well. There really isn’t a lot of representation for the female population. So that’s one reason why there isn’t any pressure on guys to disclose their dating status. Nobody cares. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a response to Tyme White‘s article: “Experienced vs. inexperienced ‘advice’”, which was a response to my article, “Personal Brand? No Crossover”.

@Tyme: Good points.

First of all, I was specifically talking about internet shows. Actually, FIRST OF ALL, no… I don’t have ANY experience with hiring ANYBODY to be the figurehead or “face” of a show. What I *DO* have experience with is watching a show and determining whether a) it’s good, b) it sucks because of the production (technical issues), c) it sucks because of the script-writing, d) it sucks because the face of the show is entirely talentless, or e) EVERYTHING about the show sucks.

Granted… That MAY be because I’m an editor AND a show producer.

I wouldn’t know what the average joe/josepine takes away from looking at a show that “fails” (whatever that means in the context of this discussion). All I can do is ‘project’ and believe that distinctions are made between whether the show a) wasn’t good, and it’s the talent’s fault, b) wasn’t good, and it’s NOT the talent’s fault, or c) WAS GOOD, but got shut down for other reasons (or didn’t make money or didn’t grow it’s audience… whatever you’re defining as a “failed” show).

For instance, we just received news that MobLogic was shut down. According to articles on the net, Lindsay Campbell is still an employee of CBS. Before MobLogic was cancelled, they were outputting sporadically compared to the regular schedule they were using when they first started.

Without “inside information” from “the horse’s mouth”, there’s no telling what the reason was for the shutdown. It just so happens that WallStrip was shut down on the same day, apparently. Let’s say the average person isn’t going to search for articles about WHY a show got cancelled, and all they know is that it was here today and gone tomorrow.

What that person’s going to take away from the show, as far as the “face” of the show, is the sum of their experiences from watching her. They either liked her style, didn’t like her style, or felt she was inconsistently good/bad. If she gets selected for a new show, that sentiment is going to drive whether that viewer goes “YAAY!” or “oh no. She got ANOTHER show? :/”. That’s what the talent has to carry forward, their own performance. Unless the public feels that the show “failed” because the talent sucked, the ending of a show, which as you mention, is the BUSINESS side of things has nothing to do with the ENTERTAINMENT VALUE they received from the talent.

Read the rest of this entry »