Bilton described in a piece for the Bits section of the Times how his posts used to get as many as 50 or even a hundred likes and shares, from users of Facebook who had signed up to get his feed using the network’s relatively new Subscribe feature. But even though the number of users who subscribe has soared from just 25,000 after the feature was launched to almost half a million now, Bilton said that he gets far fewer responses to his posts — sometimes as little as 10 or 15 likes and shares. After paying Facebook to promote his posts, however, that number increased by almost 1,000 percent.

Facebook denies it is tuning users out

I’ve noticed the same kind of phenomenon as Bilton has with my own feed, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. While Bilton has almost half a million subscribers, I have about 75,000 — but I’ve also found that the content I post is getting a lot less interaction than in the early days of the feature. I haven’t experimented with paying Facebook to promote my posts, but I have no doubt I would see the same kind of increase in activity if I did. That’s kind of the whole point (Facebook is holding a news event on March 7 that could include more changes to the news feed).

The conclusion that everyone seems to be jumping to is the same one that Mark Cuban arrived at when he complained in November about the increasing difficulty of reaching his fans on the network: namely, that Facebook is deliberately tuning out (or at least turning down) the signal coming from some users so that it can convince them to use promotional tools like ads and “sponsored stories.” Cuban said he was so irritated by the move that he was diverting almost all of the marketing budget from his various brands away from Facebook to Twitter and other platforms.

Facebook gave much the same response then that it has made to Bilton’s column (as reported by my GigaOM colleague Eliza Kern): it said that it tweaks its ranking algorithms all the time, in order to try and decrease spam and increase the visibility of content that users like, and that this is not an attempt to market its other services such as advertising or various promotional features. An official post on the Facebook site entitled “Fact Check” says:

“Our goal with News Feed is always to show each individual the most relevant blend of stories that maximizes engagement and interest. There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true.”

Like Google, Facebook is a black box

It’s worth noting that former YouTube executive-turned-venture-capitalist Hunter Walk came up with some alternate theories about why Bilton and others might have seen a dropoff in their likes and shares, including the fact that some of the followers and subscribers that boosted those numbers were spam accounts or bots who have lost interest. I certainly noticed after the “Subscribe” feature launched that I got a lot of spammy responses as well as likes and shares, and those have died down as well. In that sense, decreasing the amount of activity would actually qualify as a good thing.

Zach Seward of Quartz had another theory that I also think has a lot of merit: in a comment on Walk’s post, he noted that Facebook often devotes a substantial amount of energy to promoting its new features — such as the subscription offering, as well as the “social newsreader” offerings that were launched by a number of newspapers such as The Guardian and the Washington Post. But after a certain time, the network almost always tweaks the ranking algorithm so that these new features are downplayed relative to when they were launched, which often causes problems for those who relied on them.

The bottom line, of course, is that there is no real way for anyone to know why Facebook’s algorithm behaves the way it does, any more than it’s possible for us to know why certain pages rank high in Google. They are both a black box, and the way they function is a mystery. As I tried to point out to Cuban, Facebook is entitled to do whatever it wants with your news feed, including using it to convince you to pay for promotional tools, because it owns your news feed — not you. It’s good to be reminded of that sometimes.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Fickr user balakov and Flickr user Pew Center

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According to VidIQ CEO Robert Sandie, big companies have learned the power of Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools but are overlooking YouTube, which he describes as the world’s “second biggest social network.”

To fill this gap, VidIQ is offering tools that let companies monitor and manage their videos and apply some SEO zest to help their videos rise in search rankings. He explained that most companies are failing to apply even basic search strategies to their YouTube content, meaning it’s still relatively easy to achieve big improvements in YouTube visibility.

“It means an organic boost in video traffic,” said Sandie in a phone interview. “Like the early days of the web, when you could get a headstart on Google or Yahoo or Alta Vista, it’s still early on in YouTube.”

VidIQ’s primary SEO tool is a box that prompts users to add more keywords to their videos. It also provides guidance about the optimal time to publish new videos.

The company also offers analytics tools that Sandie says can deliver important demographic information such as the ratio of male to female viewers. And, like HootSuite does for Twitter and other social media, VidIQ lets users monitor comments and buzz about their YouTube videos.  Other broader social media management companies, like Unified Social, also offer some social marketing services for YouTube but Sandie says VidIQ offers a unique YouTube listening platform to monitor and engage influencers.

To start, VidIQ is offering two versions of its products: a free one that small users can apply to manage single YouTube channel and a more sophisticated enterprise package for a fee.

VidIQ says it has so far raised more than $800,000 from Mark Cuban, Scott Banister, David Cohen, and others.

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Transcriptic, which was founded earlier this year, has built out a biological testing lab using robotic equipment that researchers use to prepare samples. What’s cool about this is Max Hodak, the company’s founder, is trying to take expensive and proprietary equipment, hack it so people can program the machines via the web and then offer the results as a service to academia.

Building a bio-cloud

In biology labs around the country graduate students spend their days filling test tubes and testing samples. It’s boring work and something that well-funded companies in the pharmaceutical industry automate or outsource. But the equipment used in automating those processes are hundreds of thousands of dollars and generally out of range for biology departments. So are the services of outsourcers that sometimes work on behalf of the industry.

So Hodak created what he calls a cloud for biology, but what is really more of a collaborative consumption model aided by open source software and robotics, than an on-demand cloud. In a Menlo Park, Calif. lab Transcriptics owns several large pieces of used testing equipment such as centrifuges, incubators and high-powered microscopes that it purchased for roughly 10 cents on the dollar whose software it has reverse engineered. The company then wrote new software that controls the machines and can run common biological operations such as closing plasmids with other options coming later.

Customers pay for the process and the materials they use on a pay-as-you-go basis, much like you only pay for an Amazon EC2 instance when you are running it. Hodak’s goal is to continue buying gear and building better software for job scheduling to keep the equipment running as often as possible. Of course, that type of scheduling software is a tough problem, since there are so many variables and an unpredictable number of jobs coming in. But for now, he can’t really over-provision at the costs that Amazon has.

For the researchers who use the service, they spend less time doing hundreds of tests by hand, because they can instead pay Transcriptic to run a synchronous process. And because it’s robotic the idea is that it is more repeatable and less prone to human error. As for the potential customers, Hodak estimates that it gets grad students away from grunt work and into real research. They control the robotics and design their experiments over the Internet.

“We think of ourselves as a very long pipette over the internet,” Hodak told me in an interview earlier this year.

Man, that’s a lot of investors!

As for the relatively rare step of bringing in more than 60 investors for a seed round, Hodak explained that he probably wouldn’t do it for the next round, but it made sense for the current one. In general having a huge number of seed investors can leave an entrepreneur with too many people to appease when negotiating future rounds. Additionally with so many investors it can be hard for someone to take a leadership role in shepherding the company to new opportunities or providing good advice.

Hodak however stressed those investors don’t have the full rights of a larger investor, so can’t cause troubles in later funding rounds. He also said via an email exchange last night that he hasn’t seen a lack of leadership with so many participants. “The major investors (Naval, Google, Founders Fund / FF Angel, etc) are being very helpful already, and the minor investors are dozens of cheerleaders for the company now,” he wrote.

Transcriptic is a really interesting company trying to apply lessons learned from cloud providers and taking advantage of better broadband and cheaper automation to deliver a unique service. Add to that the bold decision to bring on so many angels and I can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

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Ganxy already lets authors and publishers create ebook “showcases” that can be tweeted and embedded on sites like Facebook, or can stand alone as websites. With the new bundling feature, authors and publishers can create “box sets” of ebooks and sell the bundles directly to their audience through the showcase. They can also quickly adjust pricing and offer flash sales.

Ganxy’s showcases for single titles let users either sell ebooks directly through the showcase or link through to retailers. But the bundling option is only for users who want to sell directly through Ganxy. The company’s fee is 10 percent of all the sales made directly through its platform.

Some of Ganxy’s current users include Diversion Books (publisher of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and the Washington Post ebooks, among others), romance authors Barbara Freethy and Sylvia Day, and New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer. The company is self-funded.

Separately, StoryBundle, the startup founded by former Gizmodo and Lifehacker editor Jason Chen, announced its new “Holiday Gift Bundle.” StoryBundle packages together a group of ebooks by self-published authors and lets users pay what they want. The holiday bundle includes six ebooks in a variety of genres; users who pay at least $8 get two bonus ebooks. The company also added gift cards.

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The idea behind clarity is simple: “If you’re at a conference and threw a rock, you’d probably hit 15 amazing advisors, but if you’re in the Midwest, that might not be the case,” explained founder Dan Martell. ”Airbnb has done it for housing apartments, and the App Store has done it for games and products, and we want to do it for advice.”

Clarity allows anyone to set their hourly rates for giving advice, and allows entrepreneurs to make inquiries on anything from marketing to engineering to growth. Beginning Tuesday, entrepreneurs will also be able to post on the problems they’re facing, and get advice on who would be best to answer their questions, if they don’t have a particular person in mind.

Ryan Kim explained how Clarity functions when the company launched in May:

The way it works is that users sign up with their Facebook account and find experts on various topic pages. Or a new user can just submit a question and Clarity will suggest relevant advisors. When they’re ready to reach out, users explain the reason for their call in the web app and Clarity then connects the call to an advisor, whose number is kept private. The advisor, who can see the reason for the call as it comes in, can choose to take the call or add the person to a call back list. Or they can offer a scheduling widget so users can slot themselves into open blocks of time.

Martell said the product has been successful and profitable so far, and the seed funding will allow them to keep growing while adding new services. He said Clarity has grown from about 1,200 advisors at launch to about 7,000 right now, and facilitated 12,000 phone calls from people in over 47 countries. Advisors can choose to offer advice for free (about 50 percent do this) or take compensation for their time. Of those who take compensation, about 30 percent have chosen to donate their profits to charity, an option which means Clarity takes a smaller transaction fee (4 percent instead of 15 percent.) Users can leave reviews and ratings for advisors, giving some quality control to the system, and meaning people who give poor advice might not get repeat customers.

Martell said the average advisor charges $250 an hour for his or her services, although startup celebrities sometimes charge more if they’re getting mobbed by entrepreneurs and need to decrease demand. For instance, Mark Cuban charges $10,000 an hour, and Eric Ries charges about $1,000 an hour — prices Martell says some people are certainly willing to pay.

“The coolest thing is I think we’ve started building a community of entrepreneurs and investors,” he said, noting that about 98 percent of calls occur between two people who’ve never met before, and especially with foreign entrepreneurs.  It can be a great way for a Canadian startup, for instance, to find people in Canada who are willing to give advice on growth in that particular area.

Investors in the new seed round include Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Mark Cuban, Real Ventures, Version One Ventures, 500 Startups, Venture 51, Ariel Poler, Howard Lindzon, Gerry Pond and Haroon Mokhtarzada.

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One of the first major complaints came in a piece in the New York Observer that accused the social network of being “broken on purpose.” Not long afterward, a blog called Dangerous Minds wrote a long polemic about how what the social network was doing was “the biggest bait-and-switch in history” — since users (including brands) were enticed to use the service on the understanding that they could use it to build up a giant fan base, and were now being charged for the right to reach those same fans. The cost to do this by paying for sponsored posts, the blog said, was just too exorbitant:

“We simply can’t afford to pay Facebook $2000 to $3200 a day and we can’t afford to do nothing, either. Their shockingly greedy business plan offers us no alternative and we’re not alone.”

Hiding valuable content or blocking spam?

In response to this criticism, Facebook explained — both in a post by one of its engineers and in comments to TechCrunch and Ars Technica — that the newsfeed filtering was designed to eliminate spam and noise, and that it was constantly being tweaked in order to show users things they were actually interested in, not just things that brands wanted them to see. The message seemed pretty obvious: don’t be spammy with your posts and lots of your users will still see them for free. And if you want to spam them anyway, you will have to pay for sponsored posts in order to do that.

This didn’t stop the criticism from flowing, however: one user wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, complaining about the moves by the social network and urging the founder and CEO to remain committed to his stated goal of “giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Actor George Takei responded to this letter with a Facebook post, saying he was devoting a chapter in his upcoming book to the issue. On Tuesday, Mark Cuban — who had been posting complaints on Twitter for days about Facebook’s behavior — unloaded to Dan Lyons at ReadWrite about the impact that the changes were having, and how he wasn’t going to stand for it any longer. The sports mogul and star of TV show Shark Tank said that he was shifting the focus not just of his own presence or that of the Dallas Mavericks but all of the other businesses in which he is an investor to other platforms, including MySpace:

“We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook. We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first. We have already pushed more to Twitter. The new Myspace looks promising.”

Filtering is necessary for Facebook, and for users

As Wired points out in a response to Cuban’s complaints — and App.net founder Dalton Caldwell also does a good job of explaining — this kind of criticism makes little sense, unless you assume that Facebook is supposed to be a utility of some kind, broadcasting the messages of its users far and wide without any kind of filtering whatsoever. The reality is that a proprietary platform like Facebook is very much a double-edged sword, and Cuban and Takei are feeling the sharpness of that alternate edge: yes, it reaches a lot of people, but it is also a business that faces significant financial pressure.

Do Cuban or any of Facebook’s other critics really think that Twitter or MySpace are going to be any different? Twitter started off as a much more open platform than Facebook — which is one of the reasons that users like me have responded so negatively to some of the restrictions it has been imposing on external services — but it is heading down the same inexorable path. In order to justify their multibillion-dollar market value, both companies have to find new sources of revenue, and traditional advertising just isn’t going to do it. Sponsored content is the future, whether we like it or not.

It’s one thing to excuse George Takei for not realizing the implications of this, but Mark Cuban is a notoriously sharp businessman who routinely criticizes entrepreneurs on his TV show for failing to understand how markets work. Facebook is a business, not a charity or a platform for social well-being — and it provides that platform free of charge, on the understanding that users agree to be marketed to in a variety of ways. The idea that it should somehow allow Cuban to spam all his followers with marketing content for nothing is nonsensical.

Not only does Cuban’s criticism not make much sense from a business standpoint, but as even social-media evangelist Robert Scoble points out, what Facebook is doing by trying to tweak its filtering algorithms is arguably in the best interest of users as well, since they are already being overwhelmed by noise and marketing spam. From that perspective, Facebook has to do what it is doing or it will suffer a lot more damage than some angry emails from celebrity users. We can argue about how it is filtering and the way it is communicating that to users, but the fact that it is doing so seems inevitable.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and See-ming Lee

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New York-based startup Ganxy provides an easy solution. The company, which was founded in 2009 and is officially launching today at the Frankfurt Book Fair, gives authors and publishers a straightforward toolset to let them sell books and control marketing and promotions. In just a few minutes, anyone can create a “showcase” for a book that includes its cover, description, video and other marketing materials, and purchase options. Authors and publishers can sell books directly through the showcase or simply provide links to retailers. The entire showcase can then be tweeted, embedded in a blog, website or Facebook page, or can just stand alone as a website.

Ganxy also allows authors and publishers to track where their sales are coming from. “People have had no idea what’s working,” cofounder and biz dev lead Joshua Cohen told me. With Ganxy, they know if a book was purchased by someone who clicked on their showcase from Facebook, for example, versus from a tweet. Users can also add an email capture field to a showcase, allowing them to connect directly with readers who are interested in their books.

It’s free to create a showcase, but Ganxy makes money in two ways. The company takes 10 percent of each sale when an ebook is sold through a showcase (authors and publishers can choose whether they want to sell ebooks directly). Ganxy also makes money through the affiliate links to retail sites that are embedded in the showcase. An author can also request to use his or her own affiliate links in the showcase; in that case, Ganxy displays its affiliate link 25 percent of the time and the author’s 75 percent of the time.

Ganxy also wants to appeal to readers. When someone buys an ebook directly through a Ganxy showcase, it’s added to his or her library and can be downloaded in any format (EPUB, iOS, Kindle and so on). All the ebooks Ganxy sells directly are DRM-free. (Publishers who don’t like that can just display retail links and not sell ebooks directly.)

So far, a few clients are using Ganxy in beta: Diversion Books (the publisher of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and the Washington Post ebooks, among others), romance author Barbara Freethy (who’s achieved huge success self-publishing her out-of-print titles as ebooks) and author and Cracked columnist Robert Brockway. The site is now opening to everyone and will accept new users in waves.

Ganxy is entirely self-funded. The company’s president is Aleks Jakulin, who previously taught data mining at Columbia and is an expert in artificial intelligence. (The European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence named his PhD research the best artificial intelligence dissertation in Europe in 2005.) Cofounder Cohen previously cofounded the German video identification company iPharro Media and worked at Merrill Lynch, Random House and MTV.

I asked Cohen if and when the company plans to expand Ganxy to include other forms of digital content. For now, he said, the primary focus is books, with the direct sales functionality focused heavily on ebooks. (In an earlier version, Ganxy focused on direct music sales, and those are still available.) But as a promotional tool, Cohen says, Ganxy’s showcases could be used for any type of digital content.

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The Portland-based company, which is being demoed at PIE [Portland Incubator Experiment] Demo Day this morning, is also announcing a $1 million angel funding round today. Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments led the round, with participation from Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage Group, Hubspot cofounder Dharmesh Shah and former Twitter engineer Blaine Cook. MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey, Accel’s Jonathan Siegel, Blogads’ Henry Copeland and social media expert Jay Baer also invested.

Little Bird determines which people are most influential on any given topic based on their personal connections, rather than on the content they create. “Unlike almost every other service out there, we are not doing content analysis for discovery of influencers,” Kirkpatrick told me. “We are looking at the specialists that other specialists are paying attention to…I think of it almost as a robot librarian. Whatever topic I’m interested in, I have the ability to snap my fingers and say, ‘Bring me the world’s most trusted neuroscientist.’”

Little Bird’s algorithm works by crawling the social graph of Twitter accounts and reducing them down to the “most trusted specialists” on a topic. (So you won’t necessarily be finding the world’s most trusted neuroscientist, but you might be finding the most trusted neuroscientist who’s also active on Twitter.) “The only way to climb up the ranks is to win the respect of your peers,” Kirkpatrick said. Though Little Bird is only crawling Twitter and blogs for now, the company plans to add LinkedIn and Google+ accounts soon. “We have reason to believe there are some serious professionals out there using Google+,” Kirkpatrick said, but “nobody knows who they are now.”

While Little Bird sounds somewhat similar to Klout, Kirkpatrick stressed that it’s “almost the opposite of a black box” in that it’s designed to be transparent and rational. He also says it’s a better discovery tool. “If you’ve already got someone in mind, Klout can tell you what their general popularity across the web is. But if you need to do discovery and what you’re really looking for is influence among other specialists, that’s something we provide better than Klout or anybody else.” Even so, he said, Klout data could eventually be added to Little Bird’s algorithm: “Sorting by Klout score would be an interesting way to display the data we’ve discovered.”

Along with person discovery, Little Bird offers various content discovery options. A “hot content” tab shows the links being shared the most around a given subject. “It’s like Techmeme for any topic,” Kirkpatrick said. A “top blogs” feature ranks blogs based on the number of inbound links, and a custom search engine lets users search inside “a whitelist of trusted domain experts” rather than across the web at large. Finally, if you’re in the mood for navel-gazing — and of course you are — “scorecard” lets you compare any Twitter account to other influencers on a topic.

So how well does it work?

I tested Little Bird and had pretty good results. I tried searching for two topics, “book publishing” and “ebooks,” figuring that I’d be most familiar with the results and would be able to gauge how good they were. My search for “book publishing” mostly turned up publisher accounts (for Simon & Schuster and Sterling, for instance) rather than individuals. Kirkpatrick admits that “in some sectors, companies do dominate,” but users can filter their results to show only individuals. When I did that, my results were much better.

My search for “ebooks” turned up a mixture of people I know and would actually consider influential, but also a number of marketing, company or promotional accounts that people probably primarily follow in order to get freebies. There were also many users speaking in foreign languages (though you can confine your search to a geographic area).

My search for “hot content” around ebooks revealed basically useless results: Two separate tweets about Catalonian independence (from the same user), two duplicate tweets from an editor and one tweet about Mitt Romney’s education policy.

These results may improve when Little Bird starts pulling in sources beyond Twitter. And the service also might be better for broader topics. A search for “broadband” pulled up our own Stacey Higginbotham, while “journalism” found people like Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly.

What it costs

Today you can view a few reports for free. Then Little Bird is rolling out free previews and subscription access in waves to individuals, small businesses and large businesses, with general availability expected in the next year. Individual accounts are $50 a month, and business accounts range from $250 for companies with three or fewer employees to $1,000 a month for companies with 26 to 500 employees (larger companies can get in touch for custom pricing). “It’s a little less expensive than [social media monitoring tool] Radian6 and more expensive than Meltwater,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s a lot less expensive than hiring a consultant or agency to go out and do this research.”

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Beginning as early as June, AXS (pronounced “access”) plans to deliver behind-the-scenes coverage of live concerts and music festivals, red carpet premieres, award shows and celebrity parties, as well as in-depth interviews with entertainers and various glitterati.

“This isn’t another E!,” Cuban told paidContent via e-mail, describing the re-christened channel. “Think of it more as ESPN (NYSE: DIS) for music and pop culture. We will work towards being live all the time. We will have a live studio show that will go remote to actual events rather than being driven by celebrity rumor packages … If you see a tweet for breaking pop culture news, we want you to be able to turn on AXS and know we will have someone on site to cover it and a studio to discuss it.”

In the current cable and satellite realm, larger media conglomerates like, say, Fox (NSDQ: NWS) Networks can use the reach of popular channels like FX to leverage better carriage for more obscure networks like Fuel. As a result, channels like HDNet have often been squeezed into the less popular programming tiers and channel numbers of the various cable and satellite carriers — or worse, pushed off altogether.

But partners like AEG, which has the ability to offer AXS subscribers early access to perks like concert tickets, vastly improve the channel’s negotiating position. “These are things we could never do before,” Cuban pointed out.

Right away, AXS TV will get enhanced carriage from Dish Network (NSDQ: DISH), which will take its standard-definition feed and put it on its top-tier America’s Top 120 programming package. Dish will also make AXS-branded live events available on VOD channels and has a ticketing. AXS TV’s reach will expand from its current level of 27 million to 35 million cable and satellite subscribers as a result of these moves. Dish Network also extended its carriage contract for the channel for seven years.

At least at the beginning, AXS TV will remain confined to the HD tiers of operators including Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) and DirecTV (NYSE: DTV), but Cuban said he discussed the re-brand with these other carriers and “they love the idea.” Of course, loving and paying are often two different things.

Seacrest, AEG and CAA are giving up their own idea for a new network, opting instead to rebuild one that already has some carriage agreeements. As for how the various partners fit in, AEG will provide the production wherewithal for the new venture, with much of that coming from operations situated in the LA Live entertainment complex in Downtown Los Angeles. AEG will also leverage its connections in the live entertainment world to set up red carpet events, performer interviews and back-stage access.

Seacrest, who also owns equity in the re-branded venture, doesn’t plan to be on the channel but will provide his reach through Ryan Seacrest Media, including his various relationships. He’ll produce some programming through Ryan Seacrest Productions.

Hollywood talent agency CAA, which represents Seacrest, is promising access to its extensive industry relationships, as well as its advisory services in the areas of corporate development, marketing, technology, brand integration and sponsorship.

The re-brand won’t entirely wipe away all remnants of HDNet’s current form – the sports-themed HDNet Fights and Inside MMA, the channel’s Sunday concert series and the news show Dan Rather Reports will continue on AXS TV but with more live elements. HDNet Movies, meanwhile, will retain its current focus on high-definition films.

Cuban said the re-branding would include some cross-platform elements, but their form would not be “typical,” he added, and they will be announced later. One effort was included with the news: the AXS Headliner Club, an online audition site with Dish, is planned for an August launch.

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Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback predicted that the company would reach profitability in the fourth quarter back in June, as it celebrated its fifth anniversary creating content aimed at the 18- to 34-year-old geeky male, exemplified by its flagship show Diggnation.

Louderback credited that growth to the company’s focus on that demographic, saying that “We didn’t stray from that, didn’t try to do shows for mommy bloggers or kids. We figured out what we wanted to do, and we’ve been very consistent.”

While Revision3 has remained focused on that demographic, it’s also built a large stable of content to engage those viewers, through partnerships with established names like The Onion, acquisitions of proven brands like The Young Turks, and home-grown franchises like Tekzilla, Dan 3.0 and GeekBeat.TV. The house that Diggnation built, in short, has grown well beyond one show — and even Diggnation is continuing on in 2011.

In addition, Revision3 continued to evolve its distribution model, not just in the mobile space with iPhone and Android  apps, but onto set-top boxes and connected TVs. Rev3 is the number-one independent video channel on Roku and a top 10 channel on Boxee.

The real sign of success? Mark Cuban, no friend of web video, takes it seriously. Cuban, of course, believes that cable and VOD distribution is the only financially viable one, but according to Peter Kafka, Cuban is investing in Rev3 to get a first look at its content for potential adaptation on his cable channel HDNet. Whether or not anything comes from that deal remains to be seen, but if it does — that’s just another platform for Revision3 to expand to.

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