Not So Lonely
The new Wired has a great feature about the lonelygirl15 story. Lonelygirl15, you will remember, was a hit YouTube vlog about a teenage girl, her family and her ambiguous relationship with her friend Daniel. You’ll also recall that the central character, Bree, turned out to be an actress called Jessica Rose, working with a guy called Mesh Flinders and a doctor, Miles Beckett, and his wife as business partners. Emails to Bree were answered by the doctor’s wife, Amanda. What seems fascinating to me is that although Bree and her relationships were fictional, the truth isn’t a million miles away from the fiction. Bree and Mesh were really an actress and an aspiring film-maker. But who did you think they were, since their videos were on YouTube? The real Bree and Daniel are probably already on the video network somewhere, waiting to be discovered.
Some edited highlights from the section covering what happened after the deception was uncovered, which was the last time I read anything about this. Notable is the complete failure of the mainstream media to cope with the phenomenon:
No backlash
Many assumed the series would sputter and die. Media reports zeroed in on how viewers had been duped, suggesting an inevitable backlash. But the fans – raised on the unreality of reality TV and with the role-playing ethos of the Web – seemed to take the revelation in stride. One guy who had corresponded regularly with Bree wrote to ask if he’d been conversing with Jessica Rose.
“No, you’ve been talking to Bree,” came the reply (from Amanda). “If you want to talk to Jessica Rose, you can go to her MySpace page. If you want to keep talking to Bree, use this email.”
“Fair enough,” the fan wrote back, and then went on to tell Bree the latest news in his life. To many, it didn’t seem to matter whether she was real or not.
Viewers and revenue
The show has a reliable viewership of 300,000 per video, and the team posts two, sometimes more, each week. Lonelygirl15.com, the site Beckett and Flinders maintain as the center of Bree’s universe, generates about $10,000 a month in ad revenue by attaching commercials to the end of the videos they stream. [...]
But what of the future?
[TV execs fail to understand the format] Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.” [...]
If this was going to be the first successful Internet TV show, they felt it needed to embrace the medium. As a result, they still don’t have a deal.