Tonight, an all-new season of Top Gear premieres on BBC America at 9p/8c, and if you tune in, you might just see some familiar faces from Next New Networks. 

BBC America’s running a groundbreaking online campaign, My First Car, to promote the new season of Top Gear across Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube, asking viewers to share the stories of their first cars for the chance to be featured on-air, or even win a trip to London to see a Top Gear live event.

In a first of its kind partnership, BBC America sponsored dozens of Next New Networks creators to create My First Car-themed videos, which you can see in BBC America’s YouTube playlist, and encourage their own viewers to do the same. 

So far, thousands of viewers have shared their stories online, as highlighted on Top Gear’s Tumblr blog, and starting tonight they’ll be featured on-air alongside some of BBC America’s favorite videos from Next New Networks creators. Here are a couple to get you started:

So tune in tonight, share your own #myfirstcar stories, and spread the word! And our thanks to our co-founder Herb Scannell and his team at BBC America for working wiht us on this incredibly fun campaign. 

Today is the 1,000th episode of Fast Lane Daily, the first show we launched at Next New Networks, and the most popular car news show in the world now for almost four years running. To celebrate, they’ve taken over YouTube’s homepage, and Emil sent the team to Germany to make this special, 24-minute episode.

So much has happened along the way: Emil went on to launch a little cable startup called Epix, Fast Lane Daily and our other automotive shows moved outside the company to become part of Next New Creators, Derek D. became an auto world icon, and one of our original hosts, Andrea Feczko, found fame as Ke$ha.  

Nearly everyone who’s worked at Next New Networks has touched Fast Lane Daily in some way — and probably have been in an episode — and we’re all really proud of what FLD’s accomplished. Happy 1000! 

emilgh:

Thank you.

To everyone that made this happen.

To everyone that has ever watched and commented.

To everyone that ever said yes and helped.

To everyone that ever said no and made us work harder.

Thank you.

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!

The Gregory Brothers take over the Today Show. Great job, guys!

(Source: nbc.com)

Our co-founder and Next New CEO Fred Seibert breaks down the latest for Beet.TV: Next New’s latest growth; the creators program and how we work with independent shows like Auto-Tune the News; and what the online video landscape looks like these days.

Also noted: The Gregory Bros’ latest video (“I’m Not a Witch”) is a hit, with over 250,000 views in the first day.

[Beet.TV] 

If you’re like most of us — crazy busy during the week — and come Friday, you just want to know which movie to go see, we hope you’re checking out our weekly show with MSN Movies, FilmFan, which is really starting to find its stride. Every Friday, Maribel Aber highlights the best bets for moviegoers who just want to catch something good this weekend. 

This week, our picks are JACKASS 3D, RED, and CONVICTION: 

FilmFan’s the first partnership between Next New Networks and MSN, and Samsung stepped up to support the show just weeks after we launched. It’s also a great example of how the Next New Creators program hooks up independent web producers: we brought on Rebecca Lando, a movie buff who’s also creator of the Tasty-award winning Hungry Nation series, Working Class Foodies, as FilmFan’s writer and producer, and she’s bringing a lot of the Next New vibe to the show. 

We all especially dug what Rebecca did with their episode on The Social Network, where they managed to ask Justin Timberlake a question submitted by a FilmFan viewer, and showed a bit of the hilarious Indy Mogul Twitter Movie Trailer. 

Vanessa writes: We often read about the sizable and growing audience of online video but less documented are the habits of an online video viewer. Given viewership has pushed online video to the mainstream, we at Next New decided to partner with the largest video platform, YouTube, and research group Frank N. Magid Associates to find insights into this demographic.

Today we released the findings of the first ever extensive study on how audiences view web original content versus television. The study revealed that the majority of viewers of web original content find these videos to be just as, if not more, entertaining than television programming.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Viewers are 2.5 times more likely to be fully engaged with online video than viewers who watch traditional television.
• Viewers of web original content are spending 13% less time with traditional television.
• 60% of online video viewers watch web original content on a weekly basis.
• 4 out of 10 online video viewers share the videos with others.

To find out more behind the methodology and findings of the study, check out our full release.

Next New Viewership Gaining on Prime Time Television

Given these findings, and the growth story we’ve had this year at Next New Networks where viewership is up 500%, we decided to put that in context of television viewers and see where we would sit with broadcast TV network ratings. While it’s not strictly apples to apples, we graphed our US weekly total unique viewers to television’s prime time viewership over the week of Sept 20 - 26th, which is television’s first week back for the Fall season. Here’s what we found:

[Mashup of a recent TV by the Numbers chart, with data from The Nielsen Company. Next New Networks viewership data provided by Google Analytics and YouTube Insight.]

Check out our full research report release to read more of the findings of this study, and this great article by Ad Age on our latest numbers and research. And for more information email me at vanessa (at) nextnewnetworks (dot) com.

Today we announced new research we undertook with YouTube and Frank D. Magid Associates about how viewers of web original programming behave online. Our full press release is after the jump.