At Frederator I oversee the health of our audiences and channels across numerous video platforms. In particular I’m concerned with audience growth of our O&O channels such as Channel Frederator, Cartoon Hangover, and The Leaderboard on YouTube.
I started out helping my friends market and manage their bands in exchange for free shows, a take at the door, some booze, and a good time. Since then I’ve gone from planning decadent parties at New York’s worst dives to marketing the world’s biggest bands, developing innovative digital products, and building one of the largest video networks on YouTube.
Before Fred convinced me to leave the music business for cartoons, I ran audience development at The Orchard, in the process building a network of 2200 channels pulling in 25 billion views per month and 12 million subscribers. That’s a lot of data to experiment and we did a lot of experimentation! I built the programming team that created owned & operated brands across multiple verticals and acquired or helped to acquire top metal, indie rock, action sports, latin, and kids channels to fuel our network growth.
In a bit of a twist, I actually cut my teeth in product development at a metal label. Roadrunner was that special job every metalhead dreams about. My application consisted of a coding and design test I had to pass to get a gig as the company’s webmaster and first junior “online guy.” I taught myself how to tackle all the problems over a weekend and from there Roadrunner grew into a career.
I ended up managing a ten-person team of marketers and developers, rebuilding the company’s entire D2C infrastructure and creating a white label CMS supporting 40 web sites and the most visited label web site in the world. You can ask me about the tech we used some time, but it was all in support of getting the maximum connection to our artists’ fans.
On top of that I got the privilege of being the company’s face online, marketed huge releases from Slipknot, Nickelback, Megadeth, Dream Theater, Trivium, Stone Sour, Killswitch Engage, and Rush, and headed up the team building the most forward-thinking label A&R web site in the world. I’m extremely proud of what we did at Roadrunner.
There’s some other jobs and gigs in there, but I’ll skip over those to mention one more thing: Axes & Alleys. This was a humour magazine I co-founded, creating “fan fiction for the Universe” for six years. While many of the subjects were wholly-imaginary, we ran really-real interviews with bands, physicists, entrepreneurs, publishers, and local celebrities. 40 issues and supplements were published online and in print to thousands of readers each month.
Apart from making great shows and channels I run the biggest pickup kickball game in New York City and have knocked out five continents on my quest to visit all seven. If you’re ever in Astoria, Queens, ask after the red-bearded fellow.