ICG Creator Chat

Today Hank and Anthony are going to talk a little bit about why I have YouTube stories are actually different, and might be a good thing, about how long it has taken (and will take us) to learn how to be better at using the internet, and about how the YouTube algorithm is encouraging longer content (and why that might be bad for users, and actually one of the biggest competitive advantages YouTube has opened up for a competitor). Also, as always, we'll talk about the music industry and how it's screwing us all over.

Today we're talking to Jeffrey Cranor who, along with Joseph Fink created one of the first, most successful, and most influential fictional podcasts of all time, Welcome to Night Vale. If you don't know about Night Vale, it is a small town in the desert and it is very dangerous and creepy and you do not want to be an intern at the radio station. It's hilarious, surreal, and horrifying, and it exploded into the podcast world, rapidly changing everyone's minds about what can work in podcasts. Today we're going to talk about the secret sauce of creative collaboration, how we need to invest in partnerships, and work to maintain healthy relationships. We'll also talk about why they have a PR firm, why they didn't take advertising for the first several years of their porject, and about this fancy new thing called "Dynamic Insertion."

Today Anthony D'Angelo and Hank Green chat about the goings on in online video, including a quick note about YouTube Rewind, but also a lot about DEFY Media closing down, how it works, what it means, and how vulnerable creators are to the corporations that we work with. We'll also chat about a bunch of other stuff, including YouTube's recently launched snapchat/instagram-like Stories feature, an interesting step for the platform that might be really fun, but also might be really not what we need right now.