Comedy in the Delivery for App Maker

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There was an era in television when the surest way for comedians to be “discovered” was through Johnny Carson. A short set on Carson’s “The Tonight Show” was seen as the mandatory gateway to mainstream success during the three-channel era.

Of course, the Carson model is long gone, and people are now awash in a sea of comedy videos hosted by YouTube, Facebook and countless other sites.

But Dan Altmann of Laffster Inc. said this new world of online videos creates a different problem: How do you get the right ones to the right people?

His company recently released an iOS app that tries to solve that content conundrum. It’s called Mock the Vote and it delivers a stream of political comedy from some of the genre’s biggest names.

Users watch videos and read articles through the app and then click a thumbs-up or thumbs-down button to indicate whether they liked it or not. Based on the responses, the app is trained to learn a user’s taste and recommend similar content. It’s akin to Pandora, a popular music streaming and recommendation service where music fans input a song or genre and the program launches down a path of related music. Laffster thinks that same model will work for people looking for yuks.

“Unlike music that has great technology behind it, online comedy was mostly done by people trying to be little movie studios,” Altmann said. “We’re coming at this as comedy meets technology.”

Mock the Vote relies on political inclinations to refine the recommendation system. The first time people launch the app they’re prompted to input party affiliation (Democrat, Republican or independent). That way, the app can track what content is preferred by different political persuasions.

The site does include some exclusive pieces, but the majority is redistributed political comedy by outlets such as “The Colbert Report,” “Saturday Night Live” and Slate.com.

That focus on distribution of content rather than creation of it has become a growing field in the L.A. tech scene. The region has always been a hub for content creation, both in traditional media with all the major movie studios as well as the burgeoning online videos field, led by companies such as Culver City’s Maker Studios and Hollywood’s Machinima, which focuses on video game-related content.

But the new goal of getting the videos out to the right people has created a handful of companies that act as a bridge between creators and audience.

In the Internet era and its feast of options, these companies, which include Blayze Inc. in Santa Monica and Big Frame in West Hollywood, argue that audiences have to be led to the right content. The advantages YouTube has over traditional TV don’t mean much if people have to dig deep to find an enjoyable clip among the 48 hours of video that are uploaded onto the site every minute.

“When you look at YouTube, the irony is that it’s still a lot like TV,” said Ben Smith of Blayze. “But I think we’re moving to a new world where the shows and recommendations are customized for every audience.”


Delivering jokes

Altmann, at 25, already has been around the block in the world of online video. He previously worked as a consultant for Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corp. in New York, which owns a gaggle of web properties including popular comedy site CollegeHumor.com.

Altmann’s job was in ad technology, a role that gave him a firsthand view on how the company tried to reach CollegeHumor’s audience. He saw that even on this highly trafficked site, the viewership numbers vary wildly between the viral video hits and the virtually unseen misses.

Before starting his new company, Altmann chose to avoid competing with well-funded sites such as CollegeHumor or FunnyorDie.com, which is backed by actor Will Ferrell. Instead he looked into the mystery of why some videos hit and others do not.

“There’s already enough good content creators and you’re not going to get better comedians than Will Ferrell in a project,” he said. “The next layer of companies are ones that take the massive structure of content and help organize it.”

He co-founded Laffster along with Eric Posen, its chief product officer, as well as Geoff Plitt, formerly of Google and currently a standup comedian. The company went through Santa Monica tech accelerator MuckerLab, and recently closed a $750,000 funding round led by Menlo Park venture capital firm Greylock Partners; Chris Williams of Maker Studios; and Howard Lindzon, founder of Coronado’s Stocktwits. Laffster and its five employees recently moved into the co-working space in Google’s former Santa Monica offices.

The growing list of companies doing targeted content delivery has been a boon for the lesser-known Internet video creators. While big stars such as Ferrell can get hits without much effort, smaller outfits that are targeting a niche audience rely on the technology that companies such as Laffster and Blayze provide.

For example, Wigs, a YouTube channel in Culver City that creates scripted content aimed at women 18 to 49, is using high-end analytics to grow its current audience of almost 90,000 subscribers.

Wigs hired Blayze to build a fan contest site, which the channel used to dole out prizes while also getting information about its fans – something YouTube numbers don’t show. Executives at Wigs said that the better the channel can target the fans, the sooner these Internet-based companies will be on the same level as the big players.


Personalized channel

“In the future, you’ll be able to come home, turn on your TV and be presented with a library that’s a mix of movies, TV shows and web videos,” said Steven Shin, director of marketing at Wigs. “It’s about putting it all together and creating a personalized channel.”

Altmann admitted that Laffster’s Mock the Vote app is only partly about embracing the political climate at the height of election season. The deeper game is to refine its video recommendation software and build up an audience who turns to the app for entertainment and then advertise to them. The company also hopes to create revenue-sharing agreements with content creators who need the Laffster platform to reach the right audience, or perhaps license the technology to them.

But Altmann insisted that he is keeping far away from any in-house production, instead using a business model that paraphrases the comedy truism: It’s not about a joke’s content, it’s about the delivery.

“What we’ve realized working with partners was how little time they spend on technology,” he said. “Our goal is to go into a content company and be their discovery engine.”