Okay, so, like I said, it’s probably worth going back and revisiting what Channel Awesome even was.
Flashback to, like, 2008.
YouTube has been around for a couple years.
And people are starting to realize that for little more than the price of a webcam and maybe, maybe, maybe also a mic, you can produce your own video kahntent, which you can then use to make money.
You know, it’s a totally new field.
There are very few standards of quality.
There’s very little in the way direct competition.
People really don’t have expectations for this stuff yet.
If you can just get people watching, then, you know, you might actually have something.
James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, is one of the big, early success stories in this arena.
Not long after him, you get Doge Walker, the Nostalgia Critic.
Except, problem: The Nostalgia Critic riffs over copyrighted movie footage, and even back then, YouTube didn’t like that.
So, Doge leaps off of YouTube and land on a different platform entirely:
Blip.tv.
Now, Blip doesn’t really give a shit about copyright – advantage number one. Advantage number two: Blip also pays a lot more.
This is the early days of web video, remember, so companies aren’t exactly sure how much this stuff was actually worth.
YouTube guesses low.
Blip guesses high.
Blip actually doesn’t exist anymore, so you can see how that worked out. But at the time, it was an absolute godsend for people like Doge.
The one big downside is that it’s hard to get people watching on Blip.
YouTube is structured to promote individual viral videos, but Blip didn’t think of itself as a host for random individual videos.
It thought of itself as the equivalent of a TV network.
It specifically hosted web series.
Shows.
Ongoing “programming.”
So, because there was pretty much no such thing as having any one video “go viral” on Blip, marketing was a much slower, much more limited process.
And this is why Channel Awesome made sense.
So, what was Channel Awesome?
Well, as Doge was taking off, he was approached by a guy named Mike Michaud.
Now, Michaud was…basically nobody.
He didn’t have any experience in web design, web video, marketing – anything. He was basically a random guy who worked at (I believe) Circuit City.
Just a shrewd dude who saw an opportunity.
He went up to Doge, and he said, “Hey, man, I’ve seen what you do, and I like it. Why don’t you let me control the business side of it, so all you have to worry about is making your videos?” And Doge happily agreed.
So, Michaud, Doge, and Doge’s brother Rob come together and create ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com.
A site where all of Doge’s Blip videos will be embedded.
But it’s not just going to be Doge’s videos.
They’re going to recruit more outside talent.
It’s going to be a coalition, an aggregate of all these various kahntent creators, all these video producers coming together to build a community.
They’re going to get seen by pooling together.
That’s the idea.
But it’s not just That Guy With the Glasses.
Michaud envisions something even bigger.
Channel Awesome is going to be the umbrella, the parent company, and under Channel Awesome, you’re going to have That Guy With the Glasses (for Doge’s stuff and other movie reviews).
You’re going to have Blistered Thumbs (for game reviews).
You’re going to have Inked Reality (for reviews of cartoons and comics).
You’re going to have Barfiesta (for reviews of Chicago-area bars and clubs).
It’s going to be massive. Michaud insists that Barfiesta, by itself, is going to be “the new Facebook.”
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
How could it be the new Facebook?
One is a social media platform.
The other is a…show that reviews bars.
Those aren’t even similar.
That’s not even the same basic category of thing.
In which case, congratulations – you have more sense than Mike Michaud.
Now, Barfiesta crashes and burns almost immediately.
Unsurprisingly.
Because, hey, turns out a show that reviews bars in Chicago is really only going to be appealing to people in Chicago.
That’s a very small niche for a web series.
Especially when most of your other kahntent, like Nostalgia Critic, is appealing mostly to teenagers. Who cannot go to bars.
So, Barfiesta dies.
Inked Reality never materializes at all.
And Blistered Thumbs exists for a couple of years, spearheaded mainly by Angry Joe, but it eventually collapses despite Joe’s efforts because of Michaud’s abuse and chronic mismanagement.
So, you’re pretty much just left with That Guy With the Glasses. Channel Awesome effectively becomes just an alternate name for TGWTG.
But Channel Awesome/TGWTG is thriving.
It becomes a million-dollar company.
It’s not “the new Facebook,” but it’s incredibly successful.
Except then Blip’s parent company, Maker, is bought by Disney.
And Disney kicks all but the most profitable creators off the platform, and then eventually closes the platform entirely.
So all the Channel Awesome/TGWTG creator have to migrate back to YouTube.
And that’s why people nowadays generally only know “Channel Awesome” as the name of Doge Walker’s YouTube channel.
Because the concept of a big aggregator site became unnecessary as soon as everyone was back on YouTube.
These creators needed an external hub to bring all their Blip kahntent together, but on YouTube, YouTube is the hub.
It has the kinds of internal promotion systems (related videos, recommended videos, viral videos, etc. etc. etc.) that Blip mostly didn’t.
So there’s no need for anything else.
The idea was that by pooling everything together, they could make TGWTG itself bigger than Blip and thereby compensate for Blip’s limitations.
But nothing is bigger than YouTube.
YouTube is already doing all the work.
Everyone can just have their own channels thriving in the greater YouTube community instead of having to build a second community on the side.
~~~~~
Epilogue: Why is Doge’s channel called Channel Awesome instead of That Guy With The Glasses?
Well, like I said, the two names became essentially interchangeable for many years.
But one of the big complaints shared by pretty much every single other creator on the site was that Doge, Rob, and Michaud really only cared about Doge’s kahntent. Everyone else was a second-class citizen at best.
The fact that Doge’s face was literally the logo of the site was proof of that. So was the fact that even the name of the site was a description of Doge that made it sound like he was the only one who did anything there.
So, eventually, after many, many years of begging, the site was redesigned, and the name “TGWTG” was dropped.
Channel Awesome went from being essentially some weird, alternate name to being the site’s only name.
So, when the big migration from Blip to YouTube happened, that’s the name Doge’s channel inherited.
Side note: The site redesign did not help, and honestly wasn’t even an earnest effort. The new site still put all of Doge’s stuff front and center, relegating everyone else to the site’s margins and sub-menus.
So, anyway, the aggregate site formerly called ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, now called channelawesome.com, still exists.
But, really, no one uses it.
If you follow Doge, you probably follow him on his YouTube channel.
If you follow any of the other current or former contributors, you probably follow them on their YouTube channels, too.
And you probably do it without even knowing channelawesome.com exists.
Because pretty much the entire concept of this central aggregate site is incredibly outdated
Which is why all these people have been able to leave channelawesome.com in protest of all the various abuses detailed in the Google doc without having to worry that much about their income being impacted.
Because this whole thing is really just the lingering echo of an era that functionally doesn’t exist anymore.
