The Rise of the Video Blog

On a recent afternoon, Amanda Congdon strides across the set of Rocketboom in green corduroys, furry snow boots and a snug gray T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon skull. A month before, Congdon had announced on her show, a three-to-five-minute daily video blog -- or vlog -- that she would wear a different T-shirt every day if viewers would send them in. She was deluged. "We've gotten, like, a million," she says, only faintly exaggerating. "Now they all want a mention on Rocketboom, and it's impossible to keep track of who sent what."

The "set" of Rocketboom is in fact producer Andrew Baron's apartment on New York's Upper West Side. Production values are humble, at best: a desk, a chair, a $15,000 Sony HDV video camera and a budget of twenty dollars per day. Despite this, Rocketboom -- a kind of Headline News for the online community, featuring reports on new Web sites, Q&As with technology innovators, whimsical video clips and other ephemera -- is watched by 350,000 people a day. Part of its popularity is attributable to the fact that Congdon, 24, looks like a model (she was one; she hated it) but acts like a girl who'd be perfectly happy discussing the genius of Steve Jobs with her geek fan base.

Rocketboom may be the vanguard in the march of the vlogs, but it's hardly alone. Video-blog monitor Mefeedia.com currently lists more than 6,900 vlogs. And while the vast majority are essentially home videos glorifying children, hobbies and pets, vlogs are beginning to infiltrate the mainstream media, part of the increasingly seismic shift in the way we get our news and entertainment.

"It's because of cheap, ubiquitous, available technology and cheap, ubiquitous, available broadband," explains Derek Gordon of Technorati.com, a Web-site tracker. "The average person has such effortless access to low-cost tools that they're able to do these things that only mainstream media were able to do in the past."

Things like drawing advertisers: Baron, a laid-back thirty-five-year-old who dreamed up Rocketboom two years ago while teaching at New York's Parsons School of Design, says that ever since ATM manufacturer TRM paid $40,000 on eBay for rights to a week of commercial spots at the end of the broadcast, advertisers have been lining up. Considering that Rocketboom's audience has more than doubled since the auction, Baron now believes the show is worth $4 million to $5 million annually in ad revenue.

"Since Day One, we wanted to make it sustainable," Congdon says. "But we want to play in the big leagues, too."

The big leagues have taken note. Steve Jobs gave the site a tremendous boost last October when he name-checked Rocketboom during the unveiling of the video iPod. Since then, Congdon and Baron signed a deal with TiVo, and they've teamed up with Intel on various projects, including a vlogging contest in Latin America this April, the most recent step in Rocketboom's march toward world domination. "We want to have correspondents all over the world," says Congdon, noting that the show already has staff in Kenya, the Czech Republic and Germany. Today, about half of Rocketboom's viewership comes from outside the U.S.

Already, at least two major TV networks -- Congdon and Baron won't say which -- have offered to buy Rocketboom. These overtures were refused. "I think we could go a lot further on our own," says Baron. "If you can do it, why not do it your way?" It's not only TV execs who have sought to tap into Rocketboom's success. John Edwards, the former vice-presidential candidate and possible 2008 contender, has enlisted Baron and Congdon to set up his own video blog and consult on technological matters. Jonathan Landman, the New York Times editor who oversaw the revamping of the paper's Web site with a slate of vlogs, says he could imagine candidates' video blogs becoming "essentially a debate format" in the upcoming presidential elections. As for his own paper's vlogs, he says, "We're still searching for our own style."

Needless to say, most vlogs take a decidedly un-Times-ian approach. Take cult fave Ask a Ninja, in which the host -- in full Ninja garb -- fields viewer questions. (Sample: What is the ideal gift for a ninja? "Giving a ninja something black is like giving crazy to Angelina Jolie . . . we already have plenty.") Or Kitkast, the weekly sex-themed vlog helmed by Casey McKinnon, a U.N. worker by day, lingerie-clad temptress by night, who features news, porn reviews and interviews with strippers, sex columnists, adult stars and more. For those new to the vlogosphere, Steve Garfield's Vlog Soup functions as a tour guide to the Web's best video offerings.

Travis Poston, a twenty-nine-year-old with an assault rifle and "Rock N Roll" and "Kill Me" tattoos, sees vlogging as a path to bigger things. His show, A Good Word With the T-Bird, made headlines in December when he interviewed a coke dealer who claimed he'd partied with Jenna Bush -- and had her college ID to prove it. That footage will be part of Poston's first official episode this spring. The show will focus on gonzo Q&As with low-flying celebs like comedian Todd Barry, Andrew WK and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.

"I consider it a road map of something we'd like to legitimize either on TV or the Web," Poston said over drinks at an Upper East Side bar. "I never sat down and said, 'We're creating a video blog.' My ambition was to say, 'Let's get people to see this,' and the Web is the best venue I can think of at the level we're at, which is a completely DIY, independent, ghetto-ass level."

And with technology getting cheaper, and the mainstream media jumping in, the proliferation of vlogs could transform the Net into a kind of limitless cable system. "The Web is this great democratizing force, so that everyone can be a publisher and a television producer," says Landman. "Name it, and you can be it. That's the world we live in."