LG15 has been around for what, a couple of years now? And it’s finally coming to an end tomorrow. For real this time. Thanks to YouTube, a “webcam,” and some great lighting, LG15 quickly grew in popularity and formed quite a cult-like following. And I’m serious about the cult part. As the LG15 series progressed and we all learned to love the hokiness of it all, the production team behind LG15 also found that an online web series could easily lend itself to an interactive relationship with its cult-like followers, with last year’s season finale ending in a bit of a wild goose chase where some fans were chosen to become part of the show.

From the looks of it, the series finale of LG15 won’t be quite so melodramatic this time around, but it will be quite epic, with 12 hour-long episodes that will begin airing tomorrow at 8 am PST. An episode will be released every hour for 12 hours, so this will be an all day affair, just like KateModern’s finale. Get ready. If you are indeed saddened by the end of LG15’s run, you may be comforted in knowing that EQAL, the production team behind LG15 and KateModern, have a few things up their sleeves for a new online series, which will premiere in September.

EQAL hasn’t released any further details, but the system used for both LG15 and KateModern seemed to work well, as they appealed to a pretty large demographic and found mutually beneficial ways in which to integrate with social networks and media-sharing sites. The beauty of EQAL’s execution was its ability to leverage social media for what it is, both embracing and pushing forward the way in which online media is created, distributed, and consumed.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:KateModern’s 12-Hour Finale BingerLonelyGirl15 Finale to Appear Exclusively on MySpaceTVTrolls: This Is It. Your Last Week to Insult Us (and win prizes for it anyhow)Strutta Turns Videos into a Spectator SportKateModern to Go Off the AirLG15 Lands Exclusive Deal with MySpaceTVSummerMash New York City Gets Ready for its Close-Up

By Richard Rushfield and Claire Hoffman

September 13, 2006

It turns out the people behind the wildly popular website lonelygirl15 are not studio executives, Internet moguls or, as some suspected, Satanists. Instead, they are aspiring filmmakers who met at a mutual friend’s birthday party in April: Miles Beckett, 28, a Web-obsessed medical school dropout; Mesh Flinders, 26, a screenwriter; and Greg Goodfried, a 27-year-old lawyer.The lonelygirl15 story unfolded in a series of confessional video blogs, supposedly made by a home-schooled girl named Bree, Since June, viewers have questioned whether Bree and her friend Daniel, who also appeared in the videos, were real people or part of some larger project or promotional scheme. An ominous hint of a satanic plotline to come suggested a horror film in the making.In their first interview with the media, the three video makers said they are amazed by the reaction to their creation, with audiences in the hundreds of thousands for each episode of their story, which was posted on websites such as YouTube.

‘We did this with zero resources. Anybody could do what we did,’ Flinders said Tuesday. The sum total of the equipment they used to create a sensation on the Internet, as well as perhaps the web’s biggest homegrown mystery: ‘Two desk lamps (one broken), an open window and a $130 camera.’

Goodfried said Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills got involved about a month ago - well into the lonelygirl15 story - through a friend who works at the agency. ‘We went in there one afternoon. I walked around the place, and met some cool young guys that got the idea and said they would help us,’ he said.

A Creative Artists Agency spokesman said Tuesday that the filmmakers are now agency clients.

The lonelygirl15 story began early this year, when Beckett hatched the idea of creating a mystery story online, one that could roll out small mock-confessional bites in real time.

‘Our goal was to tell a very realistic fictional story in this medium,’ Beckett said. He dreamed of using the various technologies of the Web, from comment boards to social networking sites, to both build a rich identity for a character and to let fans influence the story’s direction.

In April, at a karaoke-bar birthday party, Beckett met Flinders, who had been struggling in Hollywood as an assistant in the entertainment industry and a maker of short films. Flinders’ recent screenwriting efforts had been focused on a recurring character, a shy but precocious teenage girl. ‘It was like I had found my creative mate,’ Flinders said of Beckett. ‘We spent the entire night talking about the idea, the next day we talked on the phone, and the day after that.’ The pair then joined forces with Goodfried, who supplied the know-how to make the shoot happen.

Through a friend who was a casting director, they quickly met with potential actors, using a borrowed room at the offices of the Independent Feature Project to shoot the auditions.

The filmmakers declined to identify the actress who played Bree. However, various websites Tuesday identified her as Jessica Rose, a 19-year-old New Zealand native who attends acting school in Los Angeles. Rose could not be reached for comment.

The videos were shot on a shoestring budget in the bedroom of a home ‘in the greater Los Angeles area,’ Goodfried said. Contrary to Internet speculation that the videos were all shot at once and rolled out in dribs and drabs, the team revealed that each installment was filmed only after the previous one had been posted.

The intent was to allow fan response posted in the comment section of lonelygirl15’s YouTube and MySpace pages to determine the direction of each subsequent episode.

As an example of the fans’ influence over the story line, what the team calls ‘collaborative storytelling,’ they pointed to an episode in which Daniel reveals his romantic feelings to Bree. ‘In the ‘Hiking’ video,’ Beckett said, ‘where Daniel filmed her, there were a ton of comments saying, ‘Daniel likes you. It’s obvious that the cameraman was completely in love with you.’ We saw the comments and said this is the perfect opportunity to address this.’

But as the mystery unfolded on computer screens, fans who became obsessed with the series took the investigation in a direction the filmmakers had not expected, searching for their identities and the true nature of the production. Having decided to remain anonymous, they found themselves unprepared.

‘Our hats are off to the really impressive investigators,’ said Goodfried, who found himself on the hot seat when the news swept the Internet that an application for a trademark on the lonelygirl15 name had been filed by his father, Kenneth Goodfried, an Encino lawyer. ‘We really didn’t know what to do,’ Greg Goodfried said.

As to where the story is going now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted, the team said the story of lonelygirl15 will continue, with the hope that the focus can now return to the on-screen mystery. They would not comment on whether the lonelygirl15 saga might someday leap to other media.

As for the efforts to conceal the actress’ identity, the team said they took precautions such as removing pictures of the actress from MySpace and the Internet. But throughout the furor, they said, she has been living openly in Los Angeles.

‘There is no place better to hide then right in the middle of L.A.,’ Goodfried said. ‘Everyone is so focused on themselves that I guess they don’t even notice.’

* richard.rushfield@latimes.com claire.hoffman@latimes.com

Copyright © 2006 Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved.

As social news works itself out, advertisers seek to get into places like MySpace and YouTube and the line between amateur and pro continues to blur - there’s a number of things unfolding that could change media in the same way as bloggers at the Democratic National Convention went down in history as a key turning point for that medium. When Yahoo! bought Flickr they said that one of the system’s biggest appeals was that users built the community for free. According to Calacanis’s logic, that’s not be the direction things are moving in these days. There’s a lot of evidence to support that opinion; these sites are being made viable by the work of rewarded top users combined with high quality, very unorthodox corporate advertising.

To put the recent debates about Digg (our coverage) and Netscape (our coverage) in context, here’s an overview of some of the key events unfolding right now that are blurring the line between amateur users and professional content producers.

Here’s some bullet points for this meme:

• some top Digg users feel unappreciated
• Netscape’s hiring top contributors is helping grow page views fast according to Calacanis
• a top YouTube user turns out to be a professionally produced work
• YouTube users are going pro and pros are succeeding in YouTube
• MySpace isn’t a training ground anymore - it’s a sales platform
• the Revver video community has stars of its own and they’re getting paid
• people hate Paris Hilton.

Details below.
YouTube is the most interesting site right now concerning these questions. Last week one of YouTube’s most watched video makers, Lonelygirl15, was revealed to be the work of the powerful Beverly Hills talent agency Creative Artists Agency - not a stereotype affirming, sheltered 16 year old girl making and posting videos behind her parents’ backs. The controversy has been huge; was Lonelygirl15 a legitimate work of pre-commercial art or a manipulative attack on the authenticity of community media sharing? Danah Boyd has some of the best blog coverage of the event and says that the New York Magazine has the best mainstream coverage so far.

The community response has ranged from Bravesgirl15’s attempts to emerge as a leader in condemning the company behind Lonelygirl to long time site leader Renneto recording what appears to me to be a piece of faux indignation smartly following the lead and ethos of Lonelygirl. Still others have posted a mock press conference with a purple monkey puppet that resembles Lonelygirl’s and countless other less interesting replies. This is the discussion driving YouTube right now and it’s important to the future of all of these kinds of sites.

While the headline smashing YouTube/Paris Hilton deal has been an unqualified flop and provoked a substantial backlash on the site, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video is at least very compelling if not a success. Site favorite Brookers has signed a deal with NBC after making less than 30 videos, many of which were her lip syncing to commercially copyrighted songs.

Arguments that copyrighted video pilfered from off site was the only thing sustaining YouTube seem less solid than ever, but so do arguments that commercial activity on the site is impossible to pull off.

MySpace has become the new companion home page for YouTube stars, a major advertising platform via the Google deal that will go into effect later this year and a path direct to market for musicians. While the Arctic Monkeys rode MySpace success to big record sales off-line earlier this year, these new developments indicate that social media sites have the potential to be more than just training grounds for mainstream success.

Not content to concede viral video to YouTube, competitor Revver has stars of its own and a revenue sharing program based on still image ads at the end of each video. Ad based revenue sharing is unlikely to be sufficient incentive for the vast majority of any system’s users, but that may not be the case for a site’s biggest stars. Those stars may be incentivized to use a particular service and pull in a large audience of viewers who are also long tail content producers themselves; they could in aggregate monetize well for the site. Ze Frank has shown on Revver that news video blogs don’t have to be performed by boring, pretty girls in order to build a large audience. Even Steven Colbert has been accused of lifting several jokes from Frank. Ask A Ninja, another project now on Revver, is working on a commercial movie with Viacom’s Atom Films and selling merchandise on their site.

Of all of these examples, the Lonelygirl15 controversy is probably the most timely and interesting, but I think all this sheds light on some of the recent Digg/Netscape debates. As my friend Alex Williams puts it, viral media sites are the new Star Search and recognition of top users, be it through financial compensation and/or status, could be a key driver in making these sites viable. And conversely, commercial activity is possible in these communities but the format it can take is still up for debate: Paris Hilton no, Tea Partay yes, but for short campaigns and Lonelygirl15 maybe - I don’t think there’s consensus, or any indication that model could be reproduced well enough to be sustainable. As a proof of concept though, it was fascinating.

Advertising in these spaces well takes a whole lot of skill and we’ll see far more people fail than succeed, but occasional success could help build tolerance for the bulk of attempts instead of a wholesale rejection of commercial engagement with viral media communities. Companies are struggling to find people capable of pulling off advertising in social media spaces. Second Life is a whole other can of worms.

Who’s going to drive these sites and make them commercially sustainable? Top users are going to be an important part of it, and they will want to be rewarded for their work. It’s hard work to do what these people are doing and recognition, if not payment, is proving itself to be very important.

Within hours after the story was broke lonelygirl15’s website started to get flooded with visitors, lonelygirl15 topped Technorati’s (leading blog search engine) most popular search term list (replacing other popular terms such as Steve Irwin, Path to 9/11 and Facebook) and lonelygirl15’s videos on YouTube now hold several impressive ranking titles within the YouTube community, which were announced by the scammers themselves on their YouTube profile and included: #2 - Most Viewed Channels (This Week), #1 - Most Viewed Channels (This Month), #7 - Most Viewed Channels (All Time) and #2 - Most Subscribed Channels (All Time).
The Internet and Web 2.0 is a fast paced, quick changing environment that keeps you on your toes. Less then one week after Steve’s Irwin’s death made YouTube’s most viewed list, videos about him are still on the list, sometimes 4 out of the top 20 most viewed videos are about him, but unfortunately they are not parodies and jokes. There’s even a video on the most viewed list that discusses her dislike of lonelygirl15’s behavior and how their popularity will soon diminish because of badly they hurt their fans and supporters. Come on, lonelygirl15 had dedicated fans and supporters?

I wonder if the famous venture capital firm Sequoia Capital knew what they were getting into when they invested in YouTube? With YouTube’s fast growing popularity, impressively increasing brand recognition and wide Internet reach, I think they knew exactly what they were getting into, as usual.

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