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The Clicker: Boom goes the Rocket
Stephen Speicher contributes The Clicker, an opinion column on entertainment and technology:It's official; the video blogging world is coming into its own. The harbinger to this digital coming of age? Well it might just be the explosion of everybody's favorite rocket, Rocketboom. After all -- a medium can't be truly successful if there aren't the predictable pulls over money and the ever-present "creative control."Arguably the most successful video blog ever, Rocketboom and its host Amanda Congdon have heretofore been the poster children for video blog victory. Fueled by its seductively simple recipe of one part clever writing, one part quirky-but-likeable-host, and about ten parts really tight sweaters, Rocketboom has from its October 2004 inception grown to a massive daily audience of 250,000.In December of 2005 Rocketboom took yet another step towards legitimization when it became featured content on TiVo's video download offering. Rocketboom followed up on this TiVo victory in February by selling its first advertisement block (via eBay) for $40,000 dollars. Over the course of the following months Rocketboom sold other chunks of advertising, and while it hadn't sold enough advertising to firmly label it a long-term success, the future for Rocketboom was definitely looking bright.Yet, despite the introduction of money (or perhaps because of it) all was not well in Rocketboom land. And while Rocketboom is a product of the Internet, the story is as old as television itself. It's the age old battle between the "talent" and the "management."
