GigaOM's NewTeeVee Relaunched with Expandable Video Players -- Traffic Is Doubling Monthly at the Essential Industry Blog

Om Malik, Founder, GigaOM; NewTeeVee and Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee

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David Kavanaugh: Hi. So we’re here in San Francisco, a place that many would say is the mecca for the online media revolution. Today we have the privilege of meeting with some of the minds behind newteevee which is an exciting new blog about online video.

Om Malik: So we basically had started the site in December and initially it mimicked the look and feel of GigaOM and the reason for that was that we weren’t very sure if it was going to stick.

Three months into the new site, we realized that it was a different audience, right? It wasn’t my classic GigaOM audience. It was very different from what my typical readers were.

Liz Gannes: Maybe ____ for changing the design of our site was to better reflect our subject matter and also just to be attention grabbing and catchy and make you actually want to click through to our site where a lot of the action happens hopefully in the comments and in the video surrounding the posts.

David Kavanaugh: Liz is the creative force behind the web page’s new look.

Liz Gannes: We had a really great designer come in and turn this into something visual. And if you go to the top of the page, over in our new video bar, I’ll show you this video, a special episode of Ask a Ninja in which the ninja sneaks on to some kind of press junket for Blades of Glory, the new Will Ferrell movie and interviews Will Ferrell and his costar, in character as the ninja. Well, of course, the ninja’s always in character. And they have a pretty funny discussion which includes, as usual, the ninja telling them that he looked forward to killing them.

David Kavanaugh: What sort of model do you guys use to find out who’s looking at your site?

Liz Gannes: We get emails. We get comments. Sometimes we specifically solicit feedback. We definitely try to respond and foster some kind of a community on the site rather than just an audience.

David Kavanaugh: So, yeah. I think that the online publications, they really have an upper hand over the other formats because you can get really good feedback from your viewers?

Liz Gannes: Yeah. So it’s a particular skill to foster feedback, I think, and one that I’m striving to have. But to be open and engaging and approachable in a way that people feel like they’re invited to offer their opinion. And it’s been fun to see that develop as the site goes on because when someone comes to a site and say last December, there are no archives, there’s very little kind of site identity, it probably took a lot more to step in and say here’s what I think. But now we have kind of a regular gang of commenter’s. Schlo-mo’s always ready to step up and criticize someone for self-promoting in the comments which is really nice so we don’t have to go do that ourselves.

And this guy, Nat, is always ready to jump in with some kind of insider view on the P to P industry and keep us in check if we forget to mention something. So it’s nice to have an idea of who’s out there and who’s contributing and include them as members of the site.

Om Malik: I mean, that’s the beauty of the Web is like you can walk with your audience and our readers are basically the reason this Web site redesign happened. And I hope people are liking it, you know?

Liz Gannes: Om was just telling me inside that he was just looking over our traffic stats and we’ve doubled our number of visitors every month that we’ve existed.

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Om Malik, Liz Gannes, Online Video, NewTeeVee