"Channel Awesome" Clearly Wasn't

I had to dig back into the archives for this one, but I did write up a few posts about the "Channel Awesome" critics way back in the early days of this blog, talking about how new media and and old media were getting along, and the changing the nature of media criticism. I was one of their regular viewers when they were at the height of their popularity around 2010, happy to waste hours on the reviews and video essays of a dozen different contributors.

I haven't really kept up with Channel Awesome since the departure of a big chunk of their talent in 2014 and 2015. I still watch Lindsay Ellis and Kyle Kallgren, but stopped paying much attention to the rest. I just didn't have the time anymore, and frankly there are a lot of better alternatives. I'm not surprised they hung around though, with the site hitting its tenth anniversary this year. Doug Walker of "The Nostalgia Critic" is still railing against the mediocre media of our childhoods with no end in sight, a gimmick that his audience still loves. Chris Stuckmann, anime fan and movie reviewer, was apparently also affiliated with the site for a few years, though he's primarily known for his Youtube channel. Really, since the Blip video hosting service folded, all of these smaller video producers are Youtubers by default. The last time Doug Walker popped up in my line of sight was when he posted a video in 2016 railing against Youtube's overzealous content flagging system.

And it also doesn't surprise me that Channel Awesome is by all measures an awful, awful mess of a company. There have been reports of the site's dysfunction and behind-the-scenes drama going back years, but this past March several of the old contributors took to Twitter and really went into detail about the level of mismanagement and incompetence they experienced. A 70+ page document has been in circulation, cataloguing instances of harassment and mistreatment by the site's leadership. Much uglier stuff has come out since. #ChangetheChannel was organized shortly thereafter to boycott Channel Awesome, and all of the remaining contributors left in April - Stuckmann included. The subscriber base has also taken a significant hit.

This is a sad fate for a site that I really enjoyed and was rooting for back at the beginning. In 1998, when Channel Awesome predecessor "That Guy With the Glasses" started out, Youtube wasn't nearly the ubiquitous video hub it would become, and there was still some space for these scrappy, smaller content producers to establish themselves on the digital frontier. Nobody at that point had really made much headway with producing online content for profit, so there weren't any rules. "The Nostalgia Critic" was a rare popular success in the early vlogger era, and it was a truly independent venture, made by a couple of midwesterners who had no experience with the established entertainment world. They made vlogging look fun, like something anyone could do, and their format became very popular and influential. That's what made Channel Awesome such an attractive platform, and why it became a launching point for so much younger talent. There were next to no barriers to entry, and the no-budget DIY aesthetic was actually kind of charming.

My hope was that Channel Awesome would be a good alternative to the status quo at the time, and maybe establish a different model for content production. And this did happen to an extent. Creators like Lindsay Ellis were able to build audiences through affiliation with Channel Awesome, and figure out monetization models that worked for them. Quite a few of the producers who are still active, get by on a combination of platform ads and Patreon campaigns. However, with Youtube having grown so dominant, and social media providing many new avenues for self-promotion, the cachet of being part of a portal site like Channel Awesome has shrunk considerably. And they never figured out how to grow or improve themselves the way that other outfits like College Humor and Rooster Teeth did.

It's fascinating to trace the company's ups and downs over the years, and they way they reacted to each new change to the indie content creator ecosystem. They were clearly too dependant on Blip for too long, and didn't handled the switchover to Youtube very well. They took advantage of Indiegogo, but were resistant to individual Patreon campaigns. There's still next to no social media presence. The site itself now looks so rudimentary and badly organized compared to its competitors, it's no wonder why most of the smaller producers didn't see much reason to stick around. It's apparent that the early success really went to the heads of the guys in charge, and a few pet projects got completely out of hand . This coupled with their continued resistance to innovation severely hindered their ability to adapt.

There's no shame in being an amateur, but after ten years, it starts to look disingenuous or just plain incompetent. The recent drama revealed some very shady practices and bad behavior, but it's really the site's stagnation and inability to change with the times that has turned Channel Awesome into a cautionary tale.

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