Kent’s Official Blog

Hopefully you’ve seen this series before.  This is the perfect example of how to launch a new show.

We’ve talked to the MyDamnChannel guys and they are smart and well grounded in both old media and new.  Their initial slate was pretty star driven, but none of their shows took off like “You Suck At Photoshop”.

Why?

Well it’s the only show that is of the net really.  It embraces several brands that early video adopters also like (Photoshop, WoW, Skype), and above all else it’s funny.  It takes the simplest route — they never even show Donny.  It’s just a screencast.  But everything that show, Donny’s wallpaper, the other stock pix in Bridge, what the files are named, the subject lines in the other emails, all add story and comedy.

And each week they add drama.  Awesome.

They also do a lot of smart things businesswise (and a couple of dumb things too).  They are growing the traffic on their own site.  Huge.  This becomes monetizable.  They have a podcast of the show too, also a money source.

They also are embeddable (but I’m having a bitch of a time doing it here thanks to WordPress) and I know that places like BoingBoing have put them right on their site.

What they do wrong is — well, I don’t know the producers, but I can guess that they have none of the rights to the desktop backgrounds, to Photoshop itself, or to Skype.  If this was a feature film all of those rights would need to be secured just to avoid a potential lawsuit.  Not that I’m saying that we as filmmakers shouldn’t just be able to use whatever we want, but this is a litigious society and that’s the current lay of the land.

Also, more importantly, it’s sorta hard to find the episodes.  Yousuckatphotoshop.com is owned by someone else, and until recently MyDamnChannel wasn’t even advertising it because it was part of the BigFatBrain channel.  They need to at least break it out into a prominent area on the frontpage and have it be its own channel.

But overall, great job.  Keep up the good work.