This Week in YouTube stars TWiT founder Leo Laporte and YouTube geek comedian Lamarr Wilson, who told me this about his plans for the show:

“Our new YouTube show will cover the most interesting YouTube news story of the week. In addition, we will analyze a viral video of the week, along with the most topical discussion topic of the week. Finally, we will choose a channel each week from YouTube to spotlight, and we’ll give the audience a YouTube tip to either enhance their video watching or their video creation experience.”

This Week In YouTube, which will officially launch in a few weeks, is an interesting format for TWiT, in part because it shows how much the company has changed over the past few years. TWiT began as a weekly tech pundit podcast, branched out to other topics, and eventually transitioned to focus primarily on video, with a big focus on live video content.

Laporte told me two years ago that his goal was to become “the CNN of tech.” But TWiT CEO Lisa Kentzell made it clear Monday that this doesn’t mean to copy old media distribution models:

“As an online network, TWiT has always been platform agnostic. We want to be available everywhere our audience is.”

Part of that puzzle has always been YouTube, but This Week in YouTube producer Chad Johnson admitted Monday that YouTube hasn’t been front and center of TWiT’s video strategy. “While TWiT has covered every step of YouTube’s growth, it’s never been the main way we connect with our audience,” he said, adding that he hopes to change that with Wilson and the audience he has already grown on the video site. “We are very excited to cover the future of online video together with this new show,” Johnson said.

Check out this video tour of the TWiT studio I did back in 2011:

This story was corrected 12:48 pm to clarify that the show hasn’t officially launched yet, but is still in beta.

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The entire procession, as well as Laporte’s ribbon cutting, was streamed live online and has since been documented in a TWiT live special that also offers a behind-the-scenes look at some of the technology used in the new building. Laporte revealed during the following This Week in Tech show that the new studio cost his company a total of $1.2 million. The facilities are equipped with some 40 cameras spread across a number of different sets, which utilize state of the art LED lighting technology.

TWiT began as a technology audio podcast in 2005, but Laporte and his team have since aggressively moved into the video space, launching live streaming and a number of shows on subjects like Android, Apple, security and daily tech news. The entire company has been bootstrapped without any outside investment. Laporte raised some money for the new facilities though selling commemorative bricks and said during the inaugural This Week in Tech broadcast from the new studio yesterday that 1,000 bricks have so far been sold.

Check out this video from a few weeks ago, featuring Laporte and Kentzell showing GigaOM readers the still unfinished studio:

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“I said: Okay, let’s do it,” recalled Kentzell when I met her and Laporte in the TwiT cottage in Petaluma, Calif. last week. Kentzell is now the CEO of TWiT, and the company is ready to take the next big step towards its ambitious goal in July with the move into a spacious new studio built with a 24/7 live video operation in mind.

Check out this video of Leo Laporte and Lisa Kentzell showing off their new studio:

The new space is only a couple blocks away from the old studio, but in a way, the two studios are worlds apart. The old TWiT cottage, which has been Laporte’s home base since 2005, looks like your grandma’s small old summer-house taken over by a bunch of geeks. Too many geeks, actually. The 18 staffers are literally bumping into each other all the time. The new studio, on the other hand, will have multiple sets, 40 cameras, state of the art tech and lots of room for future expansion.

The move is also as sign of TWiT doubling down on live video. It’s a ambitious proposition, in part because most of its audience still thinks of TWiT as a podcast network. Kentzell told me TWiT sees about 5 million downloads every month. Live is harder to track, she said, but still much smaller.

“The live audience isn’t here yet,” admitted Laporte. “It’s a big bet on the future.” And live is expensive: TWiT recently had to shut down the live feed of its Roku channel because of exploding bandwidth costs. However, Laporte believes that these things will eventually sort themselves out with bandwidth prices going down.

Taking a step back when things get too expensive is also a part of the TWiT way of doing business. Laporte and Kentzell thought about moving to San Francisco with the new studio, but decided to stay in Petaluma to get more bang for their buck. The company only spends as much as it can afford at any given time, and has been entirely bootstrapped from day one, declining many opportunities for outside funding. “We are very committed to bootstrapping,” said Laporte. Kentzell agreed: “We wanted to have full creative and financial control.”

Speaking of Kentzell, she’s one of the lesser-known folks on the TWiT team, but Laporte couldn’t speak more highly of her. “It really wasn’t a business until Lisa came along,” he told me. Laporte initially hired her to do his books; he soon discovered that she was outsourcing the actual bookkeeping to a whole team she managed. Impressed, he convinced her to bring some of that leadership to TWiT. Laporte credits her for doubling revenue every year in the past few years, up to the tune of $3 million in 2010.

Much of that money comes from advertising these days, which is brought in by an external sales team. Initially, TWiT was entirely donation-based, with listeners shipping in as much as $20,000 per month. The company is relying on some of that loyalty to finish its new studio, which will cost about $850,000, by selling commemorative bricks to fans. “Donations give people a feeling to be part of it,” said Laporte.

So what’s next for TWiT? 24/7 live streaming is one goal; a satellite bureau in New York is also in the cards. Laporte also wants to hire more talent and add more shows after poaching broadcaster Tom Merritt and producer Jason Howell from Cnet last year. But he doesn’t believe in branching out too far. “I’m not trying to get bigger; I’m trying to serve our niche better,” he said, adding that he’s confident to have a good sense of the content that will be popular. “I really understand our audience. I am one of them.”

And as for the ambitions to become the CNN of tech, Laporte says it’s not just a numbers game. He may never reach as many simultaneous viewers as the cable channels, but he believes TWiT can be just as relevant. His team will have succeeded once “a breaking news story happens and people turn to us,” he explained. Getting there may take years, and millions of dollars that Laporte and Kentzell intend to make the old-fashioned way: through bootstrapping. Said Kentzell, “It’s a little risky, but I think it’s worthwhile.”

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The story goes on to say that while the majority comes from ad revenue, Laporte himself takes his salary from fan donations, capping his personal income at $10,000 a month and putting the rest back into the company.

The fact that Laporte’s salary is covered by audience contributions speaks to the increasing power of the crowdsourced funding strategy. More and more examples of this approach to supporting online content keep popping up, whether it be Kickstarter campaigns to fund web series or post-download donations for free torrents of films.

What all these successful campaigns have in common, it’s important to note, is a clear appeal to audiences or a strong personality at its center. In Laporte’s case, he’s been a known figure in the tech world since the 90s as a radio and TV commentator, most notably creating and co-hosting now-defunct TechTV’s The Screen Savers. It’s frankly no surprise to me at all that he’s earning that kind of revenue from his audience, and doing so while pulling off stunts like breaking the world record for live-streamed crowd-surfing at SXSW.

Listen to that crowd chant his name. Who wouldn’t want to be Leo Laporte for a day?

Picture courtesy of Flickr user macinate.

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