Earlier this month LonelyGirl15, one of the most successful examples of viral web marketing to date, aired its last episode. The series originally began as a joint project created by Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, and Ramesh Flinders, who produced a series of YouTube videos portraying the life of a fictional 16 year old girl named LonelyGirl15. The videos presented LonelyGirl15’s life as if it was real, leading to a media scandal when the fictional nature of the show was revealed. Following the revelation (and the show’s continued popularity), the founders launched Kate Modern, a British web show hosted on Bebo that was set in the same fictional world.
In April, Beckett and Goodfried formed EQAL and raised $5 million to produce the remainder of LonelyGirl15 and Kate Modern, as well as a number of future series. Today, the company has released a number of details concerning its new show, LG15: The Resistance, which launches on September 20.
As part of the new series, LG15.com will be relaunching as a hybrid blog/social network designed to further the level of viewer immersion. Equal’s founders say that they’ve built the social network themselves because it gives them greater freedom during the course of the shows (for example, they could modify the look and feel of the site depending on recent events in each story), but that the network isn’t designed to compete with the likes of Facebook or MySpace.
EQAL will also be upping the show’s distribution, with syndication deals with MySpaceTV, imeem, Veoh, YouTube and Hulu. But while the show will be available in many places, each episode will contain subtle mentions of the LG15.com site, telling users to visit it if they’d like to participate. The LG15.com will also include frequent updates, though these won’t be essential to understand the overall storyline.
There have been a number of attempts to create “distorted realities” online through online shows and games, but few of these have managed to take off – users generally find it hard to suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy themselves. EQAL’s approach may be able to skirt this issue by catering to hardcore and casual fans alike, allowing users to consume as much content as they’re comfortable with.
Whoa… new look.
oh… yeah. lonelygirl15. big deal.
Kind of enjoyed the full stories on the front page, but the look is nice.
The new look is beautiful but i would prefer to see the whole story at the front page instead. But there might be a reason behind this, maybe to protect content from fully-rss-content sites. maybe.
Sorry, Mike, I don’t like the new look. Way too much white. Change is good, though — keep trying.
Agree, dont like the new look. Sorry dont get me wrong, techcrunch is great, but the new look is distracting from the good content.
Keep up the good work.
There will always be a market for drama and soap operas…Taking them online was bound to happen. I find it fascinating that people really got into lonelygirl’s story.
I prefer the cleaner design but theres just a little too much white, unused space at the top (or gray as it appears). It looks like it was purposely left that height to include the ‘TechCrunch’ logo, but then that appears below? Cutting the height of the gray area would improve the overall look. Just a wee bit of constructive criticism.
Ok, for some reason the top banner ad isn’t showing up for me. Now I see there was method to the extended height madness. As you were cowboy!
But what ever happened to the actress?
from a media producer’s perspective, I don’t see this working at all – the original LG15 was a “viral hit” that fizzled post-reveal – the episodes barely break 100-200k views now. They rode the hype and got funding, but I’m not sure they can execute on their original plan within the incredibly fickle and fast moving market of online video viewers.
Video viewers? They’re starting a social network!
When is the whole reality or ‘fabricated’ reality craze going to end? I just don’t get it. I’m willing to bet that most, if not all, of the reality shows are scripted and I think the same about online reality ventures in general. If anything LG15 proved how easy it can be to dupe people. In many ways we live in a cynical society, yet people often fall for stuff like this with ease. If they have new series and openly state that they are scripted I doubt it will catch on at all.
I agree with Brian every now and then we come to know of reality shows ‘REALITY’. BTW … remember the popcorn mobile video… my ex-wife stopped putting my girl on the mobile for a week or two…
Its hard to really to know ‘what is real’
Fabricated reality works when it’s a show of some kind, I don’t know about whole social networks… then again I’m not a teenager so maybe their focus groups and whatnot say the kids will bite.
Enough already with LonelyGirl15. I mean, yeah, okay, great success story. But, come on, this is, like, soooo 2006.
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? The Resistance-new web show by LonelyGirl15 creators,predictions? [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/69f12