Rob Barnett, a former executive of CBS Radio and MTV, had a vision. He aimed to develop a website with original episodic content driven by creative people with a stake in developing their own shows. This vision grew to become what we all know as My Damn Channel. However, in a market full of video based entertainment portals, Rob sought to separate My Damn Channel from YouTube and the plethora of other similar sites.
With a relatively modest budget driven by some angel investors, Famous Interactive took on the challenge as MDC’s consultant to help develop an innovative product that would not only prove entertaining, but inspire loyalty in otherwise fickle internet audiences.
Famous began by taking time with Mr. Barnett and his team to determine what exactly the website’s function would be, and how users would interact with it. After gathering information and putting together user stories, Famous created wireframes for each page, so as to better demonstrate functionality and purpose. Next, mockups were drafted, which served as a starting point for the development of My Damn Channel’s style and tone.
Famous Interactive developed a sophisticated website framework that can handle large amounts of internet traffic. We used our extensive expertise in building social media portals in ASP.NET and SQL Server to create a site that was not just dynamic but also made effective use of caching to serve up data in a way that required very little server resources. We employed a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute the load of videos across servers located around the globe. This allowed My Damn Channel to avoided the expensive costs of a large server farm, while also stay strong after catching a big break with a video that hit news stations across the country.
The site received millions of visitors within a time span of just hours. Despite limited resources and hardware, My Damn Channel kept pace with the immense amount of video requests, even during massive traffic spikes.
The next important element in MDC’s creation was brainstorming ways to make it profitable. We developed a sophisticated ad management system that allows MDC to circulate both internal and paid advertisements on any particular show or video, as well as integrated external ad networks. Furthermore, we integrated video pre-rolls and overlay advertisements. The flexibility allowed by these myriad ad implementations meant that My Damn Channel could adapt to different sales requests and avoid any missed opportunities. With relatively effort, and with surprising rapidity, MDC turned profitable.
My Damn Channel has since grown to become a true web destination. The website won a Communicator Award, was an honorable mention for the 2007 Webbies (in the viral video category), and a few of the shows won Webbies for funniest video and funniest video series.