One example is Outbrain, a well-funded “content discovery platform” based in New York that helps publishers display stories similar to the one that a reader is viewing. It also lets publishers buy and sell traffic through “recommended articles” on third party sites — for instance, Cat Fancy might (in theory) pay for one of its feline features to appear as a recommended story on Modern Cat.

Outbrain also has a lesser known business where it supplies stories to companies like GE, American Express or General Mills. The idea is that it’s easier for non-media to buy content than to produce it themselves. But while big brands have been in this game for a while, smaller companies too are feeling a growing need to buy content in order to keep their Twitter, Facebook or blog presence fresh.

Outbrain now appears to have this base covered too. Today, it announced that it has acquired Scribit, a startup that lets companies find relevant media stories and host them on their sites — for instance, Scribit could help Annie’s Kitty Co. find and license an article from Cat Fancy for its social media pages. An earlier account of Scribit says its prices are as low as $50 a month.

In the bigger picture, Outbrain’s purchase of Scribit is part of a revolution in the way that content is being passed around the internet. Companies like Outbrain and rival NewsCred are eliminating the friction that used to dog media distribution. In the past, a shoe store that wanted to attract customers by posting shoe-related articles on its website had two impractical choices: engage in costly licensing negotiations or pirate the articles and risk a lawsuit. Now that shoe store can pay a single license fee for access to a wealth of content and a way to host them.

“The growth of content marketing has been unbelievable in the last 18 months,” said Gilad De Vries, SVP of Strategy at Outbrain. “The ability for brands to have the abilty to showcase licensed content is very valuable.”

De Vries did not disclose how much the six-year old Outbrain, which is backed by $64 million in venture funding, paid for Scribit.

(Image by Minerva Studio via Shutterstock)

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OneSpot is in the latter camp. The Texas-based ad firm, which has clients like Dell and Home Depot, believes the banner ad problem can be fixed and points to its easy-to-use technology as a way to do so. In a nutshell, OneSpot offers a rapid way for brands to create ads from pre-existing content — reviews, white papers, slides and so on — and display them in high value settings for a good price through the help of ad exchanges.

In practice, this might mean that an ice cream chain selects a piece of content it controls — perhaps a company blog post or a video or a newspaper review. With the help of OneSpot, the ice cream chain zaps that content into the form of an ad and place it on sites where ice cream fans are likely to be. The advantage of this approach, rather than randomly spraying an ad around the internet, is that target customers are likely to engage with the advertiser because the ad is content they care about.

To explain it another way, OneSpot’s method lets brands take advantage of the fact that many online ad slots are now being filled with dirt cheap junk like this…

.. and replace them with quality ads for a low price. Here is an example of the OneSpot approach, where a piece of content called “Desert Survival” has been packaged into an ad — the advertiser, hoping that Outside readers will be interested in the content, has paid to place it (through an automated ad exchange) on the top right of the Outside page:

One big upside to this approach for advertisers is the chance to hand over the task of ad buying to OneSpot. Doing so spares them the dizzying task of working with ad exchanges to place the ad content themselves. OneSpot also gives advertisers a way to keep tabs on their campaign with real-time analytics; the advertisers can employ A/B testing to tweak their campaigns and measure ROI.

While there are a flurry of companies making big claims about changing the ad game, OneSpot appears to be the real deal. It has been working with major retailer clients since March and received $1.5 million in funding from investors that include RSL Venture Partners and 500 Startups. I sat down last week with founder and CEO, Matt Cohen, who explained his view on the ad industry:

“Advertising is a business model, not a type of content … It’s when one party buys attention from another,” Cohen said, arguing that “interruptive content” fails and leads to banner blindness.

The most intriguing aspect of Cohen’s model is that it appears to be a hybrid of bespoke “native advertising” which is being hailed as the way of the future, and the existing display advertising business that is still popular because it scales so easily. OneSpot-served ads also come with Twitter and Facebook buttons that make them easier to share (another increasingly essential element of online marketing).

If the OneSpot model catches on, it will increase pressure on advertisers to find quality content and, at the same time, benefit writers and other content creators.  It may also reinvigorate the sagging display ad market by replacing worthless “lose your belly” ads with more valuable ad content.

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The numbers are contained in the latest National Readership Survey (NRS) report, which shows Tesco Magazine average issue readership grew eight percent to 7.22 million in the year to September 2012, while that for The Sun newspaper’s weekday edition fell by seven percent to 7.08 million.

We have been in a similar place before — Sky Magazine, which was an adjunct of the BSkyB TV service, was also once the most-read title, before the pay-TV operator ditched the print zine in favour of email, web and mobile customer communication channels.

There are some caveats to this time’s claim, however…

Cedar’s Tesco triumphalism is accurate only when reading NRS’ average readership over the year…

• Unlike newspapers, Tesco Magazine is published every two months, giving readers a longer opportunity to read each edition in any given period.
• On the parallel NRS-PADD report, which asks people what they read in the last month alone, The Sun continues to beat Tesco Magazine with 15.8 million readers against just 5.3 million.
• That NRS-PADD data also puts monthly rival Asda Magazine ahead of Tesco’s.

The average figures also ignore Sun On Sunday‘s 6.05 million readers, which, when combined with weekday readership, still gives The Sun a continuing lead.

Online, it’s a whole different story, too…

• Whilst Tesco Magazine‘s website claims 161,000 unique monthly visitors, The Sun‘s claims 26.4 million monthly unique browsers (source: ABC).
• NRS-PADD data, produced by UKOM and Nielsen, also shows The Sun‘s website saw 3.2 million readers in October, while Tesco Magazine‘s clocked 87,000 readers.

What is inarguable, however, is that growing numbers of retail brands are relying on publishing content — both through existing media and under their own brand — to reach consumers, and supermarkets are well-placed to do so in print, given their large footfall.

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But I think we may be back, baby. After only a few hours at the Monaco Media Forum this week, I was struck by the enthusiasm displayed around a clutch of companies — especially those like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Buzz Media, Thrillist and Tumblr — that suggests, just as Bill Gates said 16 years ago, content is the next hot business model again.

Theirs is a quite different approach from legacy media and, for many, effective monetization is at yet unproven. But a confluence of prospects appears to light the way, for a content template, at least for a certain sub-set of new-wave players. The ennui setting in around networks like Facebook is giving way to excitement about creation platforms like Tumblr. For an industry that was supposedly on its knees, this seems refreshing.

Here’s what I’ve been learning about why:

1. Branded content may be the money-maker

Everyone is talking about “branded content”, “sponsored content” or “native advertising”. While advertiser-funded articles, video and so on are not necessarily new, many old-line publishers had, until recently, been cautious to blur lines too far.

What we are now seeing, however, is a wave of pure-play online publisher with far fewer hang-ups about unifying church and state — and an old guard that, spurred by ongoing decline and recently-relaxed European rules, is following suit.

Marketers themselves are also bullish. Excited about growing publisher willingness and desperate to get their messages across unobtrusively, advertisers are super-keen to pile money in to content creation of their own.

Good timing. “The banner is about to die and is already cratering,” BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said during a panel discussion in Monaco, channelling the community’s shared concern about falling rates. “Now more brands are coming to us saying, ‘We want to be more like a publisher and you know how to do that.’”

For publishers that can both amplify advertisers and retain readers’ trust, this could emerge as a realistic new revenue model to help sustain the content creation sector going forward.

2. Social is content’s best friend

Nobody is operating in old vacuums anymore. Content publishers are fortunate now to benefit from a massive traffic hose, the social networks.

As some users tire of sharing their own baby photos and “likes” online, new-wave publishers think the object of their sharing is, increasingly, becoming “quality” content. As Thrillist’s Ben Lerer said: “The people who stand out are going to be the content creators who create the best content.”

Fahad Khan, CEO of social media conversation manager OnePublic, said during another session: “I don’t have friends who are experts in all fields. They can’t fulfill my interest verticals. I turn to editorial.”

Said Vox Media’s Joe Purzycki, publisher of SB Nation, The Verge and now Polygon: “From a content and marketing perspective, there’s nothing more valuable than social right now. Within three months of launching The Verge, our content was being shared more widely on Twitter and Facebook than our next three closest rivals.”

3. Matching supply with demand

More than just that, we are witnessing the emergence of a class of media company that relies on technology, not just its founding editorial mission, to determine what it publishes. By harnessing what search data says about what web users “want to read”, publishers can create articles to satisfy that need.

It is an efficient system to make a geek proud; journalism as platform, an audience for everything — no article goes to waste. Publishing begins to become a perfectly matched supply-and-demand game, and that minimizes losses.

Peretti: “You can reach millions of people that way, just from making something someone wants to share with someone. There’s an opportunity to build a big media company that’s technology-enabled and socially created for a world of sharing.”

Yet this is a very different kind of content creation from the journalists’ stories that readers don’t know they want but which reporters think must be read. A tail wagging a dog, perhaps. Serendipity, be damned.

Vox’s Purzycki said: “We’re not going to change what we’re writing based on social response all the time. But we use that data daily to drive ‘why was this popular’ and, from a brand standpoint, show them how widely it was shared”.

4. Devices are lighting up a new path

Two brief years in, tablets and mobile devices are giving optimism to content creators who see higher engagement, a straighter-line conversion from print and more attractive presentation

After 15 years in which the web was pretty much the only digital content channel in town, now we are delighting in a diverse number of screens and sizes and modalities, each designed for reading, watching and listening, not computing, and all of which beg, sumptuously, to be touched and consumed.

That’s only going to grow more commonplace. “Thirty-three percent of our traffic is coming from mobile,” Vox’s Joe Purzycki added. “We’re preparing for world where it’s 50 percent. These are perfect reading devices.”

5. Commerce and content can co-exist

Just as brands and publishers alike are beginning to think more expansively about advertiser-funded content, retailers are coming to regard content as one of the best possible drivers of ecommerce conversion.

Brands are being conceived, like fashion-and-beauty’s Asos and Birchbox, that marry articles and sales in the same place. Retailers are realising that, to move people to buy goods, storytelling is a great motivator, and honest, helpful guides are even better.

6. Paid content is really happening

iTunes’ 400 million credit cards on file, growing consumption of pay-for audio and video, and the continuing emergence of sexy new devices with payment mechanisms built in all point to a rosier outlook for business models that rely on charging consumers for content.

Even a start-up darling founder like Tumblr’s David Karp agrees, telling a Monaco Media Forum panel that the economics of content is the next hot investment area.”The ecosystem is at phase two right now – distribution,” Karp said. “The third phase has already started to show its face — the new economics. These people are building huge ecosystems — the next big step is going to be how they profit from it. We’re starting to see that in Kickstarter and in Etsy. I‘d be putting all my money in to that.”

7. Costs are falling

Content-making costs are falling rapidly. New technology platforms are allowing producers to make great stuff on the cheap and several publishers are leveraging pro-am production.

So much of professional content lately has been about cost cuts enacted by troubled big publishers. That hasn’t gone away. But now nimble web outfits are showing large players a plan for how content can be produced on the cheap, making possible content factories that can run at a fraction of their forebears.

This is often a rather different kind of low-grade output than that familiar to trusted professional print publishers — but quality doesn’t always have to fall with costs.

“We were producing broadcast-quality content from a small room in mid-town (Manhattan),” Vox’s Purzycki said.

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That’s the view of a Forrester analyst, who forecasts the number of people buying digital content will grow by eight to 12 percent by 2017 in western Europe.

“While consumer research for years reported that consumers claimed they wouldn’t pay for content, the forecast revenues indicate otherwise,” Darika Ahrens writes.

“Forrester forecasts that, by 2017, in Europe:

• “20 percent of tablet users will pay for news,
• “the online game buying population will have increased by 27 percent,
• “60 percent of video-buying will be digital
• “and the number of music subscribers will double.”

The forecast sees a total 192.9 million people paying for those content types in seven European countries, making for a €10.2 billion ($12.2 billion) paid content industry in the region. The boom will be fuelled partly by the currently-radiating explosion in new devices designed for media consumption, many with attractive built-in payment mechanisms.

For context, it is worth recalling that Forrester in 2011 observed growing consumer willingness to pay but precious few services to support their comfort level, equalling pent-up demand. Now, however, those services are increasingly available.

Ahrens reckons:

“The potential impact on marketers is huge. Successful online content providers no longer need to rely on ad spend. (There will be) fewer chances to reach consumers with ads.”

She says marketers should respond by building their own content channels, sponsoring content packages within a paid content environment and otherwise start advertising as though it were creating content for end consumers.

But is there truth in any of this?

Although Ahrens’ report cites Rara.com and Netflix as examples of content providers that rely exclusively on payment, others, like Spotify and The Financial Times, also operate advertising businesses. And, while those businesses are freemium funnels with which to snag paying subscribers, they are not just sidelines; they also turn over several million dollars.

For many a company, the adage should be that a healthy business is one with diverse revenue streams. The Times may have started charging news readers in mid-2010, but it did not give up on its ad sales business. Indeed, its pitch was that confining its audience to a few select, paying readers would drive up its online ad rates.

This thesis also contradicts the trend that is now increasingly worrying publishers — that, on the free web, ad rates are shrinking horribly because the number of websites on which to advertise is expanding. If premium content services start charging, there are plenty more low-rent alternatives. Advertising opportunities won’t shrink – but premium advertising opportunities will.

So, one can’t deny the tenet of Ahrens’ observation. Thanks to technology developments, the outlook for content payments is positive. Of those providers who succeed at it, some will rely exclusively on user payments, and some, like The Financial Times, will seek to reduce advertising in their revenue mix as much as possible. Many publishers were buffeted by the advertising downturn of 2008-2010 too hard to go on relying on that model alone. While The Times website still runs ads, they many of of the sponsored-section variety Ahrens describes.

New-wave marketing strategies like sponsored content have a large part to play, both as an alternative to free, ad-funded content and alongside it. Vice Media, for instance, relies on big upfront sponsor deals to finance its edgy online magazine and video projects, like its Intel-bankrolled Creators Project.

The consequence of such a model is that, as more content becomes marketer-created, disclosures describing the relationship between advertiser and publisher must be visible to readers, who are as used to the traditional church-and-state separation of editorial and commercial as content producers themselves are.

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Either way, there are enough fans out there to make cat videos one of the Internet’s most enduring and popular genres of web content: “No matter how successful you are here on the Internet on your own terms, it’s de rigueur that you still have to do something with a cat,” blogger and Google employee David Marx was quoted as saying to Wired.

Oddly, though, it’s only this year that we’ve seen any efforts to bring some structure to the cat video universe. Normally, the marketplace is as unpredictable as the animals documented, but in 2012 two separate initiatives set out to honor this content.

Like the Oscars for cat videos

Right now, Friskies, purveyors of fine cat food, is sponsoring, well, The Friskies — a competition honoring the best in cat videos from 2012. Currently open for submissions until October 12, the Friskies seeks to honor cat videos in one of four categories: Cat Behavior, Cat Comedy, Indoor Cat Adventure and Catchall. Category winners take home $2,500 each, and one grand prize winner will receive $15,000 — not to mention a year’s worth of Friskies cat food.

Friskies brand manager Shaun Belongie, via phone, said that so far Friskies has received at least 1,000 submissions, which a team of five will have to process before the voting begins and the celebrity judges — including comedian Michael Showalter and artist Wayne White — select the winning entries.

A live-streamed awards ceremony in November will celebrate the victors as well as, according to Belongie, include “fun content around the idea of an awards show for cats. Musical routines, that type of thing.”

This isn’t Friskies’s first experiment into the digital space, thanks to games like You vs. Cat, which transform the iPad into a human-cat interaction tool; it also has a vibrant YouTube presence, featuring ad campaigns, cat photos, and videos actually shot by cats. Compare this to Meow Mix, whose official YouTube channel features exactly one video, or Whiskas, which seems to have no American presence on YouTube at all. (Russian, British and Canadian, yes — American, no.)

It’s hard to deny that The Friskies should be a lot of fun for cat video fans, but it’s also a brilliant bit of branding — the company is literally giving the brand name a double meaning as “the Oscars of cat videos.” If the Friskies achieve any sort of serious reach, the brand will have successfully made its product synonymous with something people love.

“When we hear from cat owners, we hear a real excitement you don’t normally hear from cat owners about their brands,” Belongie said. “We certainly see the imagination of cats in our brand — which plays into the story that we put forward. The way [cats] see the world is very different from how we as people do — it’s a way to bring this to life.”

And then there is Sundance. Indie-meow.

If the Friskies are the Oscars of the cat video space, then the Sundance equivalent must be the Internet Cat Video Film Festival, which brought at least 10,000 people to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota this August.

Very indie in its roots — according to the the New York Times, there was no budget to bring in celebrity cats like Keyboard Cat or Nyan Cat — the ICVFF did also include a competition component, the grand prize going to extistential black-and-white favorite Henri 2, Paw de Deux.

Henri won’t be eligible for Friskies consideration, as it’s already won an award, but it would also have to be submitted for consideration: For your video to be Friskies-eligible, you have to have likeness rights to the cat. Yep. Likeness rights for cats are a real thing. Likeness rights and royalties and promotional deals; the Wired article quoted above is a fascinating visit with some Internet-famous cats of Japan, who bring in serious bank for their owners.

But even as the cat video world gains some additional structure, cat videos themselves remain one of the Internet’s great spontaneous joys. Because like cats themselves, it’s impossible to predict what will happen next.

Image courtesy of Flickr user pheezy.

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But CafeMom, a web community for moms that is also now one of the latest participants in YouTube’s Made For Web channel initiative, believes that it has a unique approach for its YouTube channel.

“I’d disagree that there’s been plenty of video content targeted towards moms. I think there’s been a lot of video created for brands who want to reach moms,” CafeMom EVP of content Tracy Odell said via email. “I think it’s extremely important to get the voice right. We’ve got the largest community of moms in the country on CafeMom and we’re listening to moms all day every day, hearing what they’re talking about how they talk about these topics.”

So far, viewcounts for CafeMom series aren’t stellar; three months ago, a series of videos featuring Suzanne Somers racked up six-figure viewcounts, and some controversial topics do attract real attention. But most of the shows making up the channel’s new line-up of programming hover in the 1,000-6,000 range.

But its line-up does feature some unique concepts. On Broadway, With Kids, a series about what it’s like to be a Broadway professional and a parent, caught my interest, as well as Our Special Life, which focuses on families raising special needs children.

The latter show came directly from the CafeMom community, according to Odell: “We asked moms what kind of show they’d like to see, and they told us they wanted to see a show about families raising special needs kids because they want to know life is like for these moms.” Several Special Life episodes have five-figure viewcounts, making it one of CafeMom’s most successful new series.

Key to CafeMom’s approach is building a subscriber base — “our new slate of programming includes verbal callouts from all our hosts asking viewers to subscribe to our channel,” Odell said — and they’ve reportedly seen accordingly a 25 percent increase in subscribers per month since January. In addition, they’ve noted a 241 percent increase in monthly positive engagement over that time.

Really, the most important part of CafeMom’s approach is this: “The exciting thing about producing a channel on YouTube is that we can use minute to minute data to analyze what’s working and what’s not,” Odell said. “We are embracing this opportunity to try different types of programming and… discover what moms really want to watch.”

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Sugar Inc is a case in point.

Since launching in 2006 as a network of women’s interest blogs, Sugar has grown into a media powerhouse through organic expansion and a steady diet of acquisitions. But even though Sugar has multiple revenue streams, a swelling readership and claims it is profitable, it receives little notice.

“From the media landscape, we don’t get much attention,” says Chief Revenue Officer, Kristine Shine. “It’s interesting because from a brand and advertising perspective, there’s tremendous interest in women-only content sites.”

The Sugar sites themselves are targeted at “trendsetting Y women” and arranged in verticals that focus on topics like food, fitness, beauty and kids. Its flagship brand is celebrity site Pop Sugar.

From a business perspective, the most remarkable feature about the sites is the degree to which brands and advertising are baked into the content. In practice, this means everything from product placements in videos to slide shows in which readers can click through to buy the items they see.

Sugar also works with brands like Target and the Gap to create “branded content” videos, often in partnership with third party bloggers, that run on the sites as sponsored stories. Here’s an example in which Sugar worked with blogger Jessie Adore to promote Levi’s Curve ID program.

Shine wouldn’t disclose specific numbers but did say that half of Sugar’s revenues came from a “display” and content bucket while the other came from a commerce bucket (which presumably includes commissions from third party product sales).

Sugar’s multiple revenue streams aren’t unusual, of course. Scratch the surface on most digital content brands and you’ll find a variety of side ventures that help buttress the editorial operation.

The question here is whether there is something particular about Sugar’s female audience that makes the sites so amenable to commerce and branded content — or whether any other media site could borrow from Sugar’s playbook.

David Reibstein, a marketing professor at Penn’s Wharton School of Business, says that research suggests that women who use social media have a greater inclination to share and to listen than do men. This could mean that audiences on women’s sites like Sugar, which have a heavy social component, are more willing to consider purchase recommendations than general interest audiences.

But Reibstein says that tools to let consumers buy what they see are still evolving. This could mean, in turn, that Sugar is simply ahead of the curve among content sites in optimizing commerce potential.

Finally, there is the question of whether mixing media and commerce can work only for fluffy fare — or whether buy-through options will one day become a part of serious news media as well.

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I can’t climb up to the windows I’ve tried a couple of times… a bunch of sites are blocked, like Skype, Google Earth etc. but I’m going to keep trying, a lot of other sites seem to work… whoever is doing this seems to be one step ahead of everything I try..

Relax, there’s no reason to call the cops. Perasso is a fictional character, part of a new interactive movie called The Inside Experience that was launched by Intel and Toshiba to promote the laptop used in the film. The 20-something is played by Emmy Rossum, who previously appeared in movies like Phantom of the Opera and The Day After Tomorrow, and the show is directed by D.J. Caruso of Disturbia fame.

Both companies started brainstorming about ways to combine a branded movie with social networks back in Janaury, I was told during a phone conversation with Intel’s OEM partner marketing director Ryan Baker today. The idea really started to take on a life of its own once Caruso got involved, who Baker credited for bringing a lot of Hollywood folks on board. Filming started in early June, and now it’s up to the online community to take the film to its final conclusion.

Perasso has already started to post a bunch of clues on her Facebook page, including various receipts from take-out restaurants and furniture stores. Users have eagerly begun to go over those clues to locate Perasso and help her to find a way out of her captivity. The pace and order in which these pieces of the puzzle are solved directly influence what kind of videos get posted next. “The clues have an impact on how the film plays out,” said Baker.

This also means that we won’t know for some time how long this movie actually is, and when it will end. Baker said that the team estimates viewers to solve the entire puzzle by mid August, but admitted: “We are not exactly sure.”

The Inside Experience is in many ways similar to alternate reality games, which have been used to promote shows like Lost by blurring the line between reality and fiction. However, the movie doesn’t even pretend to be the real deal. Part of this obviously has to do with liability: You don’t even want to pretend for a second that an abduction could be real. However, Baker also said that this was more about exploring new ways of storytelling: “We had always conceived of this as a fictional story line.”

There are a few things that I find interesting about The Inside Experience: First of all, it obviously seems to capture the imagination of its audience. The trailer to the movie was seen 1.75 million times before it even launched, and the publishing of Perasso’s first video even briefly took the movie’s website offline. Also intriguing is that Intel is willing to go rather dark with its old “Intel Inside” tagline. Sure, the laptop is Perasso’s most powerful tool, but she’s also held inside, against her will. Exploring this double meaning is pretty ingenious.

And finally, there’s the promise that we will eventually be able to see The Inside Experience as a complete movie, with edits and story line depending on all the social inputs that are gathered while the mystery unfolds. The movie’s audience also takes part in its completion, or in other words: We’re all inside, even if we don’t know it yet.

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But looking at these nominees, two things become clear: 1. broadcast and cable television have become increasingly innovative in how they use the web to grow show branding, and 2. independent web production still has a long way to go when it comes to building mainstream awareness.

While last year the nomination and eventual win of Star Wars Uncut gave hope that in the future more indie projects would be considered by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, this year witnesses a return to the tradition of nominating Fringe “webisodes,” the (admittedly excellent and innovative) digital experience for TBS’s Conan and an NBC.com website about Jay Leno’s cars.

But at the same time that web originals are overlooked by awards shows and the digital studios producing them are shuttered, there has been increased movement in another arena — web-to-television adaptations.

Showtime, for example, premiered Lisa Kudrow and Don Roos’s Web Therapy this week, which originated as a web series produced by L Studio. Based on the first episode, Web Therapy has not changed a bit from the original web version — the actors are still filmed web-cam style, and the desktop screenshots still drive changes in camera angles. It also jumps right into the story of unconventional therapist Fiona (Kudrow), who is trying to establish a practice without ever having to leave her desk.

Episodes of the web series would focus on one individual client at a time, and the approach to adapting that for a half-hour format has been a simple one: They’ve kept the one-on-one element of the web series but structured the episode as multiple “sessions” with “clients” (who, in the upcoming season, include Victor Garber, Rashida Jones, Jane Lynch, Steven Weber and Lily Tomlin), strung together to make a full-length episode. There is some effort to create a linear narrative within that framework, but the emphasis remains on exploring the depths of Fiona’s dysfunction over a full narrative.

Another group of folks to make the web-to-TV leap lately are comedy duo Rhett and Link, whose branded series I Love Local Commercials has found its way to IFC as Rhett and Link: Commercial Kings. The title is different, but the premise — two guys traveling around the country to make commercials for local businesses — remains the same; the major change made in bringing the series to television is combining the actual commercials and behind-the-scenes footage into a complete package.

Whereas Local Commercials broke apart the commercials produced by Rhett and Link and the behind-the-scenes elements, with an emphasis on the quasi-facetious commercials for small businesses, Commercial Kings frames each episode around the journey of producing the commercials, following Rhett and Link through development and production and revealing the actual commercials at the end. Conceptually, though, it’s a very clean adaptation, and extremely entertaining.

Neither of these shows are necessarily on next year’s Emmys short list (except, perhaps, for Web Therapy‘s admittedly talented cast). But they’re both examples of high-quality content that didn’t require much work to shift from the web to TV. As the lines continue to blur between the two mediums, projects like this will become more and more important — if only as a reminder for Hollywood to keep its eyes on what’s happening on the Internet.

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