Zennie Abraham Talks YouTube, Vlog History With Paul Kilduff Of The Monthly

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Paul Kilduff, the well-known San Francisco Chronicle Writer and maker of some very cool political cartoons, contacted me about an interview for the legendary publication, The Monthly. The talk was pretty much whatever I wanted, within reason, so I elected to talk about YouTube and video-blogging, giving a kind of oral history from my perspective. Vlogging’s history pretty much parallels my own history of making vlogs, with, perhaps a two year gap ahead of me (2006).

At any rate, our edited seven minute conversation (the real one was quite long), called “Zennie Abraham and his vlogger universe,” is above; the distilled text version is below, and with it, a link to the original page.

I noticed that, for some reason, The Monthly’s page did not have settings allowing me to quickly share that content with the public via social media. Thus, I took the file Paul created, and uploaded it to my Soundcloud account, and in turn, that allowed me to embed the audio for replay here, above.

Here’s the text (the original is here):

 

Undoubtedly you’ve seen Zennie Abraham’s visage at one time or another on one of several Internet portals. He’s a YouTube vlogger, has blogged for the Chronicle’s website SFGate, and had his own interactive vlogging TV show on the former Colors TV. But what really brings home the bacon for Abraham is his website empire, a platform for blogging and vlogging about politics (Dems preferred), news, sports, technology, and the latest comings and goings of Kim and Kayne. Suffice it say if it a topic’s “trending” on Google, it’ll be covered by Abraham and his team of nearly 50 blogger/vloggers who travel to and pontificate about newsworthy events through the sprawling Zennie62.com blogging network. He makes money when advertisers attach their messages to the posts and pay per hit. How does he do it? I called him to find out how his vlogging universe has evolved (and to get some much needed career advice).

Paul Kilduff: Vlogging started out with people like yourself on camera talking about serious issues. It was like an on-camera diary. Now that’s sort of gone the way of the woolly mammoth, and people just want to do shows and parodies and so on.

Zennie Abraham: Right. There’s been this push toward making online television shows, but the problem is that the kind of conversation that you have, there’s still a hunger for it. But guess what? It happens now in short form on Vine or on a platform like Tout, which allows you to make a 15-second video.

PK: If you hunger for more of the kind of thing that you do, you’re not necessarily going to find it on YouTube, is that what you’re saying?

ZA: It’s not that it isn’t there, but YouTube hasn’t designed its website to encourage it anymore. Whereas when YouTube was first becoming hot between 2006 and 2007, the conversationalists were driving traffic to YouTube. And their exchanges—not just one video but their exchanges—were driving traffic. And now you have snippets. You’ve got maybe a video that shows Jean-Claude Van Damme doing his split thing. And so there’s not anything that you can draw meaning from. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for it. In fact, it’s pent up. But somewhere along the line, there’s a group of people that decided that they wanted to do shows with actors who are out of work because of the Internet. And now there’s this little industry that’s grown up. Look at what Kevin Spacey started with the House of Cards on Netflix, right? But what’s happened is that there’s been such a rush in that direction that everyone just sort of skipped over what some people call the conversationalist vlog or the live vlog. With so much that’s happening in our society like the Duck Dynasty conversation, there is a desire and a hunger to have an exchange about these dramatic shifts in our society.

PK: Have you thought about doing some other things? Maybe you should get in to talk radio.

ZA: No. Because it doesn’t monetize, OK? I hate to say this, but traditional media types have to understand that you really have to become an engineer. I, for example, I’m a media publisher. If someone wants to deal with a legal issue, they have to deal with me. They don’t deal with somebody that I work for, my editor, or anything else. It’s me. And people who go in to digital media have to realize that they have to be cognizant of what kind of media is going to monetize and pay the best and the fastest. And talk radio is not it. What people want right now is video. Video monetizes the fastest. It connects; we’re visual. We want to see what others are doing.

PK: What about doing a talk video format on television. Do you think that would work?

ZA: I’ve done that. I had a TV show called The Vlog Report with Zennie62 through Colors TV, and it ran for 2009 to 2011. The only reason it’s off the air is because Colors TV no longer exists. I was at SFGate.com as a City Brights blogger, and I actually made money because I put a playlist of my videos at the top, and some people thought, “Oh what’s that doing there?” It was churning money for me. But I was trying to send a message to SFGate and the Chronicle that this is how you can pay your reporters and media producers of the future.

PK: I think what you’re saying is, if you’re going to go into digital media, you’re working for yourself.

ZA: Yeah. That’s it. The magic marriage is if you can get on radio, television, and Internet all at once. You have to be multimedia now. If you can manage that then you really have a platform to say to an advertiser, “Hey, look, I can give you bigger bang for the buck,” and that’s what matters.

PK: Not everybody reading this wants to be a media superstar like me, Zennie, but at the same time, if say some behemoth old school television network came to you and said, “Zennie, we want to set you up with some kind of a Charlie Rose thing with an oak table.” All of a sudden you’d be answering to bosses. Could you handle that?

ZA: Well, I did at Colors. It’s not so much answering to bosses; it’s working with people whose skills are complimentary to what you do. I mean, what happened with SFGate, I’ll tell you straight out. There were allegations that [Texas governor] Rick Perry had a gay relationship with Geoff Conner who was his secretary of state in 2005. True or not, the bottom line is it was all over the place in the blogs, not mainstream. I wrote about it but [my then editor] blocked what I was writing and I walked. And it was actually better for me because I was putting up 3.2 posts on their site per day, OK. That translates into content that because I knew how to write and hit Google News [and] was bringing them traffic. They lost that.

PK: How is writing for the internet different from writing for traditional media?

ZA: You can’t write a pithy title and think, “Oh, someone’s going to find my title.” And if you think about it from a deeper standpoint, it’s very narcissistic to think that way. You can’t be a narcissist and write effective content for the Internet. You’ve got to say, “Hey, look, how do I get people to see what I’m doing and find it over everything else?

Thanks, Paul!

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