Today we’re excited by the news that YouTube announced its 10 Most-Watched Videos of 2010, a list topped by episodes of two Next New Networks shows: The Gregory Brothers’ “Bed Intruder Song,” and The Key of Awesome’s Ke$ha parody, “Glitter Puke,” with over 110 million views combined.

While these two series were a big part of our success in 2010, they also capped a year where Next New Networks grew across the board, doing over 1.2 billion video views in 2010 alone.  To put that in perspective, in July we announced that we had done 1 billion all-time views since launching in 2007. In 2010, our shows were viewed on average over 100 million times per month, more than the previous three years combined.

So how did we do it? We asked Ben Relles, who heads up our programming and creator development, and who co-created The Key of Awesome and brought The Gregory Brothers to Next New Networks, to help with some insights.

We decided that 2010 was the year three main focuses of the company came together: 

1. Betting on new talent for a new medium. 

We launched the Next New Creators program last December so that we could work with more of the top emerging creators in the space, and one year in, we’ve added over 65 Next New Creators series that already represent more than 50% of our monthly viewership. 

Working with new talent required a new model, and without Next New Creators program, we wouldn’t have gotten to work with The Gregory Brothers and had the #1 video on YouTube in 2010, but we also wouldn’t have gotten to work with over 60 other amazing new creators and shows like Keep the Heat, Beyond the Trailer, Moviebuzz, Hot for Words, DJ Mike Relm, Nalts, Food Wishes and the other great shows on Hungry Nation.  Every week, there’s a new creator in the office we’re all excited about, and one of the great things we get to do is exposing them to new audiences, like we did last week with new creator What’s Up Elle in a special crossover episode with The Key of Awesome, which helped drive 10,000 new subscribers to her channel. 

2. Consistent programming, not just viral hits.

As Ben has long noted, ”viral” video and “episodic” video don’t need to be mutually exclusive.  In fact, the best episodic series often use a highly viewed, shared, and blogged video to bring in new fans and loyal viewers.

Both The Gregory Brothers and The Key of Awesome regularly and consistently created new episodes to grow their fan base, both before and after their breakout hits.  As a result, each series regularly breaks the one million mark on new episodes; The Gregory Brothers now have more than 680,000 YouTube subscribers, and Barely Political, home of Key of Awesome, just passed the 1 million subscriber mark. Other Next New series benefited from this in 2010 as well — the “Twitter Movie Trailer”, for instance, was a much-buzzed about video and introduced a whole new audience to Indy Mogul, and Fast Lane Daily continues to grow from consistently delivering episodes for a fourth straight year, with their 1000th episode due to hit this month.

What the most successful web series creators know is that it’s not enough to have a viral hit; you have to come back the next week and do it all over again. And you have to be ready, when success hits, with a back catalog and new episodes that are easy for your fans to find.

3. Optimizing for how audiences watch online.

For the past few years, some of the most important sources of audience in online video have been subscribers, search results, and related videos, and the most successful web series optimize to increase the impact of all three, focusing on great packaging in terms of branding, metadata, and thumbnails to stand out in search and related video results, and including calls to action within programming and packaging that drive viewers to subscribe on YouTube, social networks, or in email. 

In 2010, we saw two other massive impacts on audience growth: effective cross-promotion of episodes, shows, and channels using tools like YouTube annotations, and increased viewership coming from sharing on networks like Facebook and Twitter.  As more creators and shows joined our Next New Creators program, there’s been a corresponding network effect in both of those areas — Next New Networks series now have nearly 6 million YouTube subscribers combined, and a marked cross-pollination of fan bases, that we believe is a big part of our growth in viewership. Perhaps, much like Facebook is built on a social graph, online video viewership is increasingly powered by something like an audience graph of sharing and relationships. 

We work with all of our shows and creators to better understand and take advantage of these trends, and great examples of the power of the audience graph abounded this year, like when Next New Creator Food Wishes won the Food Network’s “Next Food Network Star” challenge by rallying their subscribers and fans online.  

What we like most having these focuses is that anyone can follow them; in fact, we’ve learned as many of our best practices from paying attention to other top web series and YouTube channels as we have from our own. In many ways, online video is like an open source developer community, with the best practices out there for anyone to see, and cross-pollination of ideas happening daily that’s lifting up the entire medium.  

Our congratulations to the Gregory Brothers and the Key of Awesome for having the #1 and #2 most viewed videos this year: read Ben’s full blog post about the milestone.  Also thanks to all the creators in the Next New Creators program, and to our super-distribution network of partners including YouTube, iTunes, DailyMotion, Metacafe, 5Min, Yahoo!, Hulu, AOL, Blip.tv, Howcast, Boxee, Tubemogul and MSN.   We’re looking forward to the remaining videos in 2010, and much more in 2011!