Behind `toon boom w/Channel Frederator
LOS ANGELES — Fred Seibert wants you to have his card.
And his phone number. He even won't mind if we print his fred@frederator.com e-mail address right here in USA TODAY.
Seibert, 63 is the online toon king, with 400 million views monthly to his Channel Frederator network on YouTube, but he's never sure where his next hit will come from.
So he's always out there looking, at schools, industry gatherings, book signings. You name it.
Next weekend, he'll be at the Vidcon convention near Los Angeles, a gathering of folks who make their living off YouTube, which is where most folks see his online `toons.
"I have no ideas," he says. "But I recognize talent."
That's for sure. Seibert, then president of Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studios in the 1990s, is credited with discovering Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the Family Guy, fresh from college, when he hired him to work on Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
For Seibert's "What a Cartoon!" series for the Cartoon Network, Seibert hit ratings gold, signing up the creators who churned out hits like "The Powerpuff Girls," "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Johnny Bravo." Their series debuted as shorts for first for Seibert's series.
He still serves as executive producer of "The Fairly OddParents," a TV series he began producing in 1998 when it debuted on his "Oh Yeah, Cartoons," series. It's been running ever since on Nickelodeon.
Seibert's biggest audiences, however, have come from online, to the tune of some 1.9 billion views for 'toons like the Bee and PuppyCat and Bravest Warriors.
We had Seibert as a guest on our #TalkingTech podcast in June. At the time, he was averaging 300 million monthly viewers to the Channel Frederator network. Now he's already up to 400 million monthly viewers, and predicts he'll top 700 million by year's end, and 1 billion by 2016.
The reason for the massive growth is that unlike before, when animation was targeted just to young kids, either for Saturday morning TV, and kid-based cartoon TV channels, anyone of all ages can view `toons online.
Seibert's Cartoon Hangover, a Frederator section where he shows the best of his `toons, bills itself as the channel for "cartoons that are too weird, wild, and crazy for television."
Bee and PuppyCat, about a young woman with a hybrid dog-cat, is written by Natasha Allegri, a woman in her 20s, about a character in her 20s, and thus, obviously not targeted to the traditional animation crowd.
"No matter what your interest online — whether it be anime, or science fiction or comedy cartoons, there is a place for you," Seibert says. "TV has a tough time supporting the sub-genres. Online is all about sub-genre."
Channel Frederator is what's known as a multi-channel network. Cartoons run on YouTube, but his network promotes them, sells ads and distributes the proceeds to some 2,000 of his video makers.
Through Frederator, the channel makers learn about which color to make their thumbnails to find larger YouTube audiences (he recommends yellow) and which keywords to use in the descriptions ("funny" always works, he says.)
"We give them the tools to grow their performance," he says.
Dominic Panganiban, a 24-year-old animator from Toronto, joined the Frederator network in November, and has seen his subscriber base grow ten times since.
He had been working with Full Screen, another multi-channel network that works with YouTube creators to help them monetize their videos and attract larger audiences.
"Frederator was a better fit, because they cater more towards animation channels," Panganiban says. Because Frederator attracts folks who enjoy cartoons, "I have more potential here."
By being part of the Frederator network, Australian animator Sam Green says he's learned about how to better promote his cartoons, and gotten access to a database of free music and sound effects to use in his cartoons.
He too has seen a spike in traffic.
Being with Seibert "helped me move from my mother's garage to affording my own apartment in the big city," he says.
How did the traffic for both creators go up so dramatically?
Seibert promoted the cartoons to his audience. With 2,000 cartoon makers, that's a lot to choose from. He says he'll plug as many of them as "show an interest" to growing their audience. He looks for people who post new work regularly, stay in touch, and ask "what we can do to help them more."
And despite the massive online audience, Seibert isn't making money yet, and doesn't think he will for another three years.
"Our cartoons are 3-4 minutes long, and the average American watches 6 hours of TV a day," he says. "We have a long way to go to even that out."
Follow Jefferson Graham on Twitter, where he's @jeffersongraham and look for his daily #TalkingTech audio reports on Stitcher and TuneIn.