aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Show is over

As promised, the last episode of The Show with Ze Frank is up.

At halfway through the one year run, he was interviewed for On The Media and asked what he had learned:

ZE FRANK: What have I concluded? I would say there’s this notion that this space is sort of a quasi-reality space, right? - and that, in a sort of different way than television, you actually, there’s this sense that you and your audience are enmeshed somehow and that they know something about you and you sort of know something about them. And I guess one of the really surprising things is the degree to which that’s true. You know [LAUGHS], the kind of emotional investment that I have gotten from this, and, [LAUGHS], you know, the degree to which a single comment in a huge comment field can pretty much ruin my day is really, really remarkable.

BOB GARFIELD: You’ve got 100,000 people a day streaming your production, which is, you know, let’s say, a bigger audience than Tucker Carlson has, and he makes a lot of money and he’s pretty famous. To what extent have you been able to cash in on the success of your show? I mean, is this a money-making proposition?

ZE FRANK: You know, the amount of time and sort of personal resource that I spend on the show [LAUGHS] makes it very, very hard to call any sort of financial gain on my part “cashing in.” One of the interesting things now is getting involved in this conversation of what exactly is the business model? But it’s not really about finding the business model that works. It’s about, you know, a few really large key players starting to invest real money into this space, you know, deciding that there’s value in this space. So in the meantime, you know, I have all this sort of requisite Web money-making tactics in place. I sell t-shirts. I have text links. And, you know, probably the most unusual thing that I do is I work with Revver, which encodes a small click-through ad on the end of my video and gives me some of the money from that.

BOB GARFIELD: And are you making a living compared to what you were making when you were, you know, in the advertising business?

ZE FRANK: [LAUGHS] No. The answer to that question is no.

The Show may be over but Ze’s only just begun.