Lizzie Bennet, a reinterpretation of Pride and Prejudice created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, updates Jane Austen’s often-adapted classic novel for the social media age: The series, which began as a vlog created by Lizzie (Ashley Clements), modern-day grad student, now spans across at least three YouTube channels and multiple Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook accounts.

Since April 2012, Lizzie has been uploading video diaries about her mother’s obsession with marital status, her sister Jane’s romantic drama, and William Darcy, the snobby friend of Jane’s crush. The vlog approach has kept Darcy literally out of the frame until this Thursday, when he (Daniel Gordh, whose casting had been kept secret) burst into Lizzie’s office to admit that his “heart has overwhelmed his judgment.”

The episode, “Are you Kidding Me?”, recreated one of Pride and Prejudice‘s most memorable scenes (Darcy’s surprise proposal) and racked up over 100,000 views in its first 24 hours online; its release was surrounded by hundreds of #darcyday Tweets and Tumblr posts from the show’s primarily young female audience, who had “all the feels”:

I have never been this exited about a video before in my life #DarcyDay

— That french girl. ∆ (@Perriiineee) November 1, 2012

I just keep rewatching #darcyday. @hankgreen and @realkgreen picked the perfect Darcy.

— Kat High (@zoeythekat91) November 3, 2012

@elizabethdz Is it possible to have a #DarcyDay hangover? Is that a thing? Like I was drunk on my emotions, and now I’m not anymore … ?

— Elly (@elissacameron) November 3, 2012

It was this level of fan engagement that not only made #darcyday a landmark one for the series, but helped it recently secure a deal with DECA for infrastructure and financial support.

“This is something that doesn’t come around that often — it’s high-quality, it’s of the platform, it’s scalable. We just pursued them until they did a deal,” DECA CEO Michael Wayne said via phone. DECA is now a co-owner of the series — as well as future adaptations using the same format. (Jane Austen wrote more than one book, you know.)

“They’re able to take over responsibilities like payroll — we can now focus on the actual show,” Su said via phone.

“What they do is very much in line with what we do — they’re very excited by content that’s made for and watched by women,” Green added. Green, Su and the writing staff retain 100 percent creative control over the show.

Lizzie Bennet‘s roots were relatively humble: Green, one half of the the popular Vlogbrothers team, got the inspiration for the series from his wife, a devout Pride and Prejudice fan who exposed her husband to the multitude of previous adaptations. “I had the idea that it would be cool to convert a piece that was in the public domain into a video blog, but it was just an idea. I didn’t have any way to execute it. I’m a very different kind of content creator,” Green said.

Su, however, had previous experience creating narrative content, including the award-winning series Compulsions. So when Green and Su met for the first time, Green mentioned the idea, and Su became interested — the two of them spent a year developing the concept before the first episode finally made it onto YouTube.

Initial production on Lizzie Bennet was funded out of pocket by Green: A few months into the series’ run, the show got to the point where the ad revenue from one month would pay for the next month of production, but according to Green, his initial investment was not recouped until they signed with DECA.

That investment has paid off: “Are you Kidding Me!” is (as of writing) at almost 200,000 views, but more importantly at almost 6,000 comments; Green said that episodes of the series get more comments than the Vlogbrothers did.

The show’s extensive transmedia components, covering characters and action happening off screen (Darcy has been tweeting off-screen for months), deserves a large portion of the credit for this engagement. “You don’t need to watch every episode or follow all the Twitters, but it adds to the experience. And it creates evangelistic fans, which is fantastic,” Green said.

In addition, the entire cast and crew uses social media to interact with fans, with Su and Green actively discussing the making of the show as it goes, going so far as to calm panicked fans and reblog fan fiction featuring them. “There’s always a fear that [the behind-the-scenes content] will kill the magic — but that’s like saying a rainbow is less beautiful because you understand refraction,” Green said.

The result is packed VidCon panels, over 100,000 YouTube subscribers, and nearly 10 million total views on the main Lizzie Bennet channel.

Socially Awkward Darcy is now a meme. (Via @missnoriginal on Twitter.)

I’ll be completely honest — the last narrative web series I saw build anything close to this intense a fanbase was The Guild. Lizzie Bennet fans are rewatching, reblogging, GIF-making, meme-generating superfans — the show has a hold on its fans on a level rare not just for a web series, but for media of any kind.

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It’s four hours long, though, which is quite a few hours! There’s some good discussion overall, with folks from AOL, College Humor, YouTube, Blip, MySpace and MSN, but here are the Cliff’s Notes — some of the smarter insights and comments from the day’s panels.

• Research matters — apparently, people are pitching content to the CW Digital department without actually knowing what the CW is. Don’t be that person. “Nothing is more frustrating than when someone comes in who haven’t been to our website, don’t know who our audience is, but know they have the perfect show for us. Not gonna happen,” CW Digital EVP of marketing and digital programs Rick Haskins said during the Development: Building a Foundation panel.
• The great content creators, according to everyone on the Development panel, understand more than just making content — specifically, how to market that content on a social media level.
• Celebrities don’t always click on the web, according to Ran Harnevo, AOL Senior Vice President of Video, but casting someone with, say, four million Twitter followers will be significantly more meaningful than a celebrity who has less of a following. And web celebrities like Ian and Anthony of Smosh may have a lot more draw online.
• “A lot of well-known stars want to do it for the money — they don’t give a rat’s ass about digital, and to me that goes nowhere. You want to find people who understand digital and are passionate about it,” Haskins said.
• My Damn Channel CEO Rob Barnett urged people to avoid exclusivity initially, but then focus on finding a company the best deal as your development grows — especially when it comes to promotion, not just money. “You gotta look for promotion — the sea we’re all swimming in gets more and more crowded every day,” he said. “If you’re just upload to one of those huge places, the odds are getting the push that you need are getting scarier by the minute — you’ve got to be as judgmental of a home as we are of your content.”
• Barnett also recommended people check out the YouTube Creator Handbook: “90 percent of it is awesome — 10 percent, I don’t like, but we’re using 90 percent of it and our videos are getting more views.”
• During the Talent Debate panel, Innovative Artists head of digital David Tochterman revealed that breakout web series Lizzie Bennet Diaries has partnered with DECA — big news for the homegrown web series from Hank Green and Bernie Su.
• Also revealed during the Talent Debate panel: Mark Malkoff’s life is now much more difficult since Facebook removed email addresses from user profiles, as he now has to work much harder to book celebrities for his Celebrity Sleepovers series.
• Going back to the web celebs point: Despite Celebrity Sleepovers‘s impressive roster of names (including Camryn Manheim, Steven Weber, Ed Begley Jr. and Rob Corddry), Malkoff said that the iJustine episode was by far the most viewed of the series.
• Blip CEO Kelly Day laid out the company’s shift in approach over the last six months — specifically, a shift from its previous “Blip vs. YouTube” mentality, and a new focus on helping creators distribute their content through a variety of means, including YouTube as well as other partners. “I don’t think it’s a binary conversation. YouTube can be a great way to build your audience, but it’s not the only way to build your audience,” she said.
• Lee urged creators to “play the whole field” when it comes to putting content out there. “Go out and experiment and see what you get out of it.”
• MySpace Entertainment president Roger Mincheff stepped up big time to discuss MySpace’s recent relaunch, and defended keeping the MySpace name despite the brand’s rocky recent years, especially given the comedians and musicians who attribute MySpace to their success — making MySpace the ultimate farm system. MySpace nostalgia? That’s apparently a real thing.

This is just some of the interesting stuff discussed over the course of the day: It’s a fun mix of folks discussing how creators can use the current state of entertainment to thrust their content into the world, and the challenges they might face in the process. Go watch it yourself if you have a minute to spare.

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Because every year, Vidcon serves as a real-time, real life reminder of the vibrant community that cares passionately about online video — a community born in comment threads, response videos, retweets and subscriptions.  It’s a young community. It’s a very specific community.  It’s largely united by inside jokes and Doctor Who references. But it’s impossible to ignore.

A hybrid of professional conference and fan party, Vidcon moved from the Hyatt Regency in Century City to Anaheim this year entirely because of huge demand and the Regency’s occupancy limits. Vidcon 2011 topped out at 2,500 attendees — attendance over the three days of the 2012 conference was estimated at 7,000 by Vidcon Head of Content Jenni Powell.

And the masses were kept moving from panel to performance to the much-expanded-from-last-year expo hall, which included pleasures like an arcade, make-up stations, a slow-mo video booth and the convention’s only decent wi-fi hub. Throughout the halls, there were impromptu pockets of people sharing YouTube tips and taking photos. One guy with a ukelele can trigger a mass sing-a-long:

YouTuber Jon Garcia, in performance, in a hallway.

And random run-ins are common — unexpected people appearing in unexpected places.

Photo courtesy of Tubefilter’s Josh Cohen.

This year, a day at Vidcon broke down into two portions: The mainstage shows, in which YouTubers took the stage for tightly pace intervals, showing off their random talents or just taking questions from fans, and the breakout panels, which featured more focused discussion. The breakout sessions required impossible choices for those passionate about the digital content space: At 11 AM, for example, Bernie Su and Freddie Wong took on the future of storytelling while the Gregory Brothers and the Double Rainbow guy spoke about creating viral videos.

I ended up panel hopping between the two, as well as a panel featuring LGBT web personalities like Hannah Hart and Michael Buckley. Su talked about the possibility of using demographic data to tailor story experiences. Hart spoke bluntly about how she refused to sell her series My Drunk Kitchen to interested buyers, so she could continue to make it on her terms. And the Double Rainbow guy, AKA Paul Vasquez, had this to say about his big viral video moment:

“If people approach it like they don’t care if it gets seen, if they’re open and honest and brave — if you can just put your soul into whatever you do, that’s what people want to see. You don’t see any people in [Double Rainbow], so everyone can connect with it. But you experience it through my heart.”

I wasn’t expecting to get inspired by the Double Rainbow guy. But that’s Vidcon for you, where some of the best moments are the most spontaneous.

Director Kevin Smith, who’s launching the YouTube channel Loud and was speaking on a panel about personal branding, confirmed something I said back in 2011 — that if he were just starting out as a creator today, he would be working on the web.  ”Every one of you is a potential content generator,” he said.

Whereas in 2010, YouTube stars were the primary focus at Vidcon, this year web series like Squaresville, Machinima’s Bite Me and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries had a strong presence. Lizzie Bennet deserves special mention: Created by Hank Green, with Bernie Su serving as showrunner, the modern-day retelling of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice not only filmed two special episodes at the conference, but its spotlight panel, scheduled for 1 PM on Saturday, was filled to capacity by 12:30, and dozens more fans were turned away at the door.

It’s hardly a suprise that there was a large crossover between Vidcon attendees and Bennet fans, given the Hank Green connection and its vlog-style format. But fans for more traditional properties like Husbands and Video Game High School were also represented — continued proof that not only is the audience for web original content growing rapidly, but it’s interested in more than unscripted content.

Meanwhile, not everything on the main stage was a success — comedian Kyle Mooney was full-on booed off the stage during the Saturday afternoon session, thanks to a crass and off-key character bit.

But the four stars of SourceFed (currently the number one YouTube original channel online) brought the room’s energy back up immediately afterwards with an energetic rundown of recent news.

And after that, the Green brothers, who were hosting the session, apologized for the bit — promising that “We will never let people on stage who do not love and respect you.”

Love and respect have always been key VidCon themes, energies to be applied towards the creation and consumption of unique content. The end result is the peaceful clash of a thousand cults of personality. It’s not a perfect distillation of the current reality of making web video. But as a taste of what’s possible within the space — of what causes all these creators to slave away for viewcounts — it can’t be beat.

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Frank wants to use that energy to get started with his new show soon. His plan is to have first episodes up at the end of March and release three new episodes every week. He told me he hasn’t made up his mind yet on how to distribute the show, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if the episodes end up on YouTube one way or another. Frank said that he’s been getting advice from Craig Benzine ( aka wheezywaiter) as well as the VlogBrothers John and Hank Green on the matter. All three of them are veteran YouTube stars.

Speaking of YouTube: the Google-owned video site has been on a buying spree in recent months, securing talent for premium channels by paying out sizable advances. So why go to Kickstarter, instead of just asking YouTube for a check? Said Frank:

Kickstarter is an amazing way to get the audience involved from the ground up, which is a big part of what I am trying to do with this show. That said, I would certainly be open to having YouTube as a partner in this. They are the epicenter of online video and home to some of the best new talent on the web and beyond.

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A relatable guy
Philip DeFranco, SourceFed

Help from his history teacher
John Green, Crash Course

A lot less wonky
Felix Salmon, Reuters TV

Four months in
How’s the new content working out for YouTube?

Wondering what other channels already launched on YouTube as part of this initiative? Then check out our complete list.

Go to page 2 (of 6) on GigaOM .

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A significant part of this has been driven by the smashing success of the Khan Academy. Salman Khan’s no-frills biology, calculus and physics lessons have clocked close to 120 million views on YouTube since he started uploading them in 2006. However, there is a growing movement toward more entertaining and visually appealing lessons that speak the language of the YouTube generation.

The most recent examples for this type of programming include some projects launched in January as part of YouTube’s new channel initiative: Crash Course, for example, combines lessons about biology and world history with smart humor, a YouTube-typical in-your-face style of narration and professionally animated graphics.

Crash Course is a co-production of Hank and John Green, of Vlogbrothers fame. The channel launched just days ago, and the duo have already managed to get around 275,000 views with little more than two lessons posted. John Green told me during a phone conversation this week that he has been very excited about this initial success: “It really stabs in the heart the lie that YouTube is about cat videos,” he said.

The Vlogbrothers are among dozens of content makers that have been receiving sizable advances from YouTube to professionally produce content. Reports put the total spent by Google for this kind of content north of $100 million. That money buys YouTube participation from stars like Rainn Wilson and Tony Hawk, but the initiative also includes around a dozen channels with news and educational content.

Many of these channels are part of YouTube for Schools, a program launched last month that offers educational institutions access to a controlled YouTube environment to ensure that students don’t goof off watching the latest music videos. Green told me that he has already received “dozens of emails” from students who were introduced to his new show by their teacher. “People are already watching Crash Course in classrooms,” he said.

But with great power comes great responsibility; in this case, there is a duty to get the facts right. Green has been using a real-life educator to make sure that he doesn’t get his history dates mixed up. Fact-checking is absolutely necessary for this kind of content, he told me, admitting, “I don’t trust myself.”

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Organized by Hank Green, the younger Vlogbrothers brother and thus a longtime YouTuber, VidCon is meant as a celebration of the online video world. There’s a clear emphasis on YouTubers in the lineup: the impressive roster of speakers includes Shane Dawson, Shay Carl, Ze Frank, Philip DeFranco, The Gregory Brothers (Auto-Tune the News), Tay Zonday, iJustine, Swift Karate Chop, Charlie McDonnell, Brittani Louise Taylor, Dave Days, Natalie Tran, Lisa Nova, The Fine Brothers, Rhett and Link., MeMeMolly, Mystery Guitar Man, Kaleb Nation, Alex Day, Kassem G, Nalts, Dan Brown, Michael Buckley, David Choi, Julia Nunes, Karen (Spricket) Alloy, Mitchell Davis, Michael Aranda, Iman Crosson (Alphacat), Tim De La Ghetto, Tessa (Meekakitty) Violet and Marina (Hot for Words) Orlova.

But while there’s no official organization backing VidCon, industry players have embraced it, and also slated to speak are Jim Louderback from Revision3, Hunter Walk and George Strompolos of YouTube, Barely Political’s Ben Relles and representatives from JibJab and Machinima.com.

In a phone interview, Green compared VidCon to the Penny Arcade-organized PAX conference, which brings together both the video game industry as well as video game enthusiasts for a celebration of the industry. This means the focus of VidCon is on connecting attendees with each other and their favorite YouTube creators, although Green says there will be a few announcements made — including one by YouTube during Walk’s Friday morning keynote. Green couldn’t hint at what that announcement might be, except to say that the YouTube team was “very insistent on needing a large screen TV.”

Awareness of VidCon has spread in a gradual way, with potential speakers and sponsors getting involved organically. “I’ve had several sponsors come out of the woodwork because their kids told them to. In particular, Cisco is now on board sponsoring VidCon entirely because one of their marketing VPs had a daughter who was a fan of mine,” Green said.

Green is pushing VidCon as a conference for both online video professionals and fans of the medium because, according to Green, “A lot of [YouTubers] don’t really realize the kind of reach and impact they have, especially when it comes to 18 or 19 year olds who don’t recognize the scope of their audience, which is sometimes in the 500,000-600,000s,” he said.

While issues like DMCA takedowns and monetization strategies will be discussed, the point Green is hoping to emphasize over the course of the three days is that “it’s very important for people to have a personal relationship with their audience.”

Only two of the three days of VidCon have been programmed, with the last day of the conference being reserved for more informal interactions, such as open mic sessions and Calvinball.

Currently 1400 people are set to be in attendance, with 100 of that being major YouTube players or industry professionals. 200 to 250 of those attending have also signed up for “Insider” track sessions, which will focus on topics like merchandising, destination sites, and the music industry. And as of June 30, VidCon tickets and sponsorship slots are entirely sold out.

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