The guest list really is a who’s who of Internet fame and/or ignominy. Amplifier’s own Joel Bush will be there to hopefully document the event. We gave him a great video camera so honestly, he’s without excuse!

ROFL Con (In their own words)

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.

Then, there’ll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

• Get out your credit card. Share the Despair. You can see all five new Demotivators here. I think this one is my favorite.
• Strong Bad answered an email about business travel. His commentary on webcomics last week reminded me of a classic from the Penny Arcade archives. It seems Gabe and Tycho anticipated the joke by, oh, about eight years.
• Tiki Bar TV unveiled their latest, Ice Breaker. Check the awesome new mug at the end of the episode.
• Just in time for Halloween, JibJab has served up two zombie reels (one featuring Democrats, the other Republicans) for their popular Starring You series of Sendables. Undie cat Aaron Simpson created his; you can, too.

Click the mug to get your drink on:

Your store links: Despair; Homestar Runner; Penny Arcade; Tiki Bar TV; JibJab; Aaron Simpson’s Cold Hard Flash.

• Angry Alien celebrates Bun-O-Ween and also Kills Bill twice.
• Homestar Runner’s Strong Bad answers an email about webcomics; I am not sure that, uh, he’s a fan.
• Undependence is cool. I wonder if we will get to see Drew of Toothpaste for Dinner on America’s Next Top Model. Read this exchange.
• If there is still time, perhaps you can get your PVP Fun Pack.

Store links: Angry Alien; Homestar Runner; Toothpaste for Dinner; Half Pixel.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Even with all the fetishization of the long tail these days, it’s important to remember that entertainment (and therefore online video entertainment) is a hit-driven business. People flock to hits, advertisers flock to people.

But agreeing on criteria is not so easy. The easiest measuring stick is, of course, the play count. But since content online never really goes away, does it matter if it takes a week or a month to reach a million plays?

Amplifier defines success differently. We submit that it’s not about raw viewers, it’s not even about video. It’s about a state change, namely, are you self-sustaining? Is your audience large enough (and do you monetize it well enough) to KEEP creating new content?

Getting Paid
Mass and Internet media inadvertently operate as a kind of ad-hoc, unofficial business school. For convenience sake, let’s just call it Greater Fool University (henceforth GFU) Students are taught (largely by example) that building a new, sustainable business isn’t necessary to become successful. The goal becomes personal liquidity. The business can be highly profitable for founders/principles without earning profits or even having trendlines pointing to future profits. One can leave the burden of creating a working business model for someone else to deal with.

With VCs moving into the Internet content space, GFU is signalling students of very recent history that imminent fortunes are going to be made. Get your game faces on. Many will do so and some will get flipped into fortunes.

The Road Less Travelled
We submit the greater accomplishment for creators is to make it work without the Deus ex Machina. Create something compelling enough to draw an audience and monetize them yourself. The means to do so are now so much easier to acquire. Your audience won’t fault you for making money from them, they’re eager to support you. Most people consider Homestar Runner the referential gold standard for that other, underappreciated school. The content equivalent of “we make our money the old fashioned way, we earn it.”

Homestar’s Matt Chapman sums up their rejection of a Cartoon Network TV deal to WIRED Magazine this way

“Being in Atlanta, we have friends that work there, but we’re not waiting for a big reconciliation,” Matt said. “What they do works for them, but if we were doing our show there, we’d still have producers telling us what to do, what to change, what to write, etc. We love the control and the immediacy that writing and creating cartoons on the website brings us. As the ideas come, we can do whatever our whim is that week.”

Homestar Runner is so popular now that revenues generated by the site’s merchandise sales allow its creators to devote their professional lives to the cartoons.

This model clearly inspired folks like Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns who referred to the Homestar Runner School of Economics in his 2006 SXSW keynote. (2 minutes, 20 secs)

This is the road less travelled, to be sure. It takes so much more creativity, talent and discipline to attract and sustain the interest of a large audience. But this is the essence of true success. This is not the pyrite being sold to some distant investor in public offering/fleecing. It’s real gold.

Audiences know it and most Content Creators in their heart of hearts do too.

You may know them better by their clients: Besides Despair, there’s Penny Arcade, Rooster Teeth, JibJab, Ask a Ninja, and Tiki Bar TV. Amplifier is designed to facilitate business for the creative sector, whether that’s fulfillment, distribution, customer service, or anything else that might otherwise be outsourced. This lets small businesses do things like personalize orders, include bonus items for certain customers, tailor their phone support to the feel of their company, and be able to focus on ideas, not management.