Los Angeles is placing a new focus on technology and entrepreneurship, according to Investor’s Business Daily.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa last week “announced a new business council with 25 local entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders,” notes the article. “His Council on Innovation and Industry aims to attract investors and spur the tech scene in the City of Angels.”
“The announcement comes four days after the local beach towns of Venice and Santa Monica hosted Silicon Beach Fest, a tech celebration featuring local start-ups, panels, workshops and mixers, with about 2,000 in attendance over two days,” reports IBD.
“Relative to Northern California we are undercapitalized,” says Zack Zalon, managing partner at business incubator Elevator Labs. “L.A. is an incredibly rich market of opportunity. It has a boundless creativity that exceeds anything I’ve seen in Silicon Valley, New York or Seattle.”
Creativity — especially in regards to online digital media content — has been largely fueled by the major entertainment studios, but until now the area has been hampered by a shortage of VC funding and a supporting community.
L.A. is experiencing a surge in support for start-ups from business incubators (or accelerators), the availability of facilities that start-ups can use to invent and work, and new programs at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles that “help students and graduates with business ideas and research,” says the article.
Investors are beginning to take note of the changes and VC funding is on the rise. ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld also notes that L.A. has a reinvigorated networking, crowd education, and social scene.
At VidCon last week, YouTube announced Video Creation Marketplace, a new platform designed to help connect brands and agencies with content creators.
YouTube pays out millions of dollars to partners each year in shared ad revenue. “Thousands of channels are generating six figures a year,” claims Baljeet Singh, group product manager at YouTube.
“The idea is to create a more formal revenue stream for the long tail of YouTube creators,” reports Advertising Age. “YouTube has been very focused on launching and promoting its first 100 ‘Original Channels,’ but its message to VidCon is to the YouTube stalwarts: We’re here for you, too.”
Marketers will be able to tap the creative talent displayed by YouTube’s users, notes Singh. This could potentially appeal to smaller businesses that do not always have the resources for expensive campaigns.
“The creativity coming out of YouTube rivals that coming out of creative agencies any day of the week… And we already know that their content performs really well on YouTube,” he says.
According to the article, YouTube “will launch the site and talk to marketers later this summer.”
Google hosted its “Next Up” event, where talented YouTubers were invited to New York for tips and training and were awarded a check for $35,000. The purpose is to accelerate “the growth of the next big YouTube stars,” according to the YouTube blog.
There are hundreds of YouTube stars — such as Ray William Johnson, Mystery Guitar Man, Smosh, Michelle Phan, the ShayTards, Jenna Marbles, Freddie Wong and Philip DeFranco — whose videos attract millions of views, and a share of the resulting ad revenue that could amount to six figures or more.
The New York Times interviews a number of these stars to understand how they got into the business, what motivates them and how their lives have changed.
About half of the Next Up winners live in and around Los Angeles where a YouTube ecosystem has developed among YouTube pros, YouTube-focused production companies and agencies.
The bond between YouTube creator and audience has attracted interest among advertisers. Some brands are paying stars six figures to create an ad.
“Five years ago, ‘brands would not touch this stuff,’ says Barry Blumberg, the former president of Disney television animation who now runs Web sites and YouTube channels for Alloy Digital,” reports NYT. “‘The audience thinks they know them.’ And that, he says, can be monetized.”
Google is now expanding its efforts by identifying and seeding separate categories — including Next Chef, Next Comic, Next Vlogger.
“YouTube is doubling down on content creation as a core feature of its site,” Richard MacManus argues on ReadWriteWeb. “It is doing this across the whole spectrum of content creation: from amateur to professional, with a lot of gray in-between.”
Los Angeles is placing a new focus on technology and entrepreneurship, according to Investor’s Business Daily.
