BoingBoing.net bounces into TV territory
The arty blog adds a video component to its eclectic mix. — BoingBoing.net, the popular everything blog that now gets 7.5 million page views a month, today will launch a daily online TV show. — Five days a week, tv.boingboing.net …
Context & Ripple Effects
BoingBoing's move lands in the middle of a two-year run of text publishers bolting video onto their sites: GigaOm spun up a dedicated video-only blog in December 2006, and by mid-2007 newspapers were carving out their own online video niches. What distinguishes this launch is cadence and scale — a five-days-a-week show attached to a blog already pulling 7.5 million page views a month.
The audience for indie web video had been building since Vloggercon in June 2006 framed 'everyone's the media,' but most of that energy came from individuals. A top-ranked blog committing to a daily show is the moment the format stops being a hobbyist practice and becomes standard publisher programming.
First-order effects
- BoingBoing converts its existing 7.5-million-page-view audience into a guaranteed launch viewership for tv.boingboing.net, giving advertisers a recurring video slot rather than one-off placements.
- The five-day-a-week schedule forces the blog to operate like a small production shop — hosts, editing, and a publishing pipeline layered on top of its editorial operation.
Second-order effects
- Peer blogs that stayed text-only now face an expectations gap on ad inventory, since video slots command different sponsorship formats than banner-and-text placements.
- Hosting and distribution vendors for independent web video gain a marquee client whose traffic volume tests whether blog-scale audiences can be served without broadcast-style infrastructure costs.
Third-order effects
- If daily-show economics hold for a blog of this size, the line between 'blogger' and 'broadcaster' erodes: independent publishers become mini-studios competing with traditional TV for the same ad dollars.
- That shift pushes value toward whoever owns distribution and hosting for web video — a structural question the industry is still working out, since no dominant platform for indie shows has yet consolidated the market.
The trend: Web-native publishers are layering episodic video onto established text blogs, turning page-view scale into a base for original programming that competes with broadcast formats.