The writing was really on the wall for over a year, as rumors began to circle last summer that Revision3’s longtime hosted buddy-tech flagship Diggnation was coming to an end. The show’s hosts, Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose became the beer-loving laptop cowboy faces of the network, as it first staked its flag on the internet TV scene in in July of 2005.
Now with 340 episodes, by the official count at least, Revision3 announced today that its Streamy-winning longest running show ever will be calling it quits this December with a final send-off.
“After close to 7 years of sitting on a couch each week, drinking copious amounts of different types of beverages while discussing the top tech stories submitted to and voted on by the community at digg.com, Kevin and Alex have decided to retire their weekly series to focus on the next phase of their careers,” wrote producer David Prager in a post today.
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To be sure, the moniker of flagship show may be more of an honorary than actual revenue driver, as Prager told The New York Times, Diggnation and its nearly 250,000 weekly views represent “under 10 percent of video views and under 10 percent of revenue for the company.” Three of the network’s shows—Epic Meal Time, Tekzilla and Film Riot—all have higher view counts.
“Tekzilla is our new longest running show,” Rev3’s CEO Jim Louderback told us, with “it, Epic Meal Time, Scientific Tuesday and Film Riot are our “tent poles” as it were.”
In effect, the live Diggnation show at Comic-Con with the upstaging crew from Epic Meal Time was a changing of the guard at Revision3 as the network shifts away from its once pure tech sphere and into a more mainstream—while still heavily male—frontier.
Both Rose and Albrecht will remain close to the network, as Albrecht continues to host The Totally Rad Show and Rose is keeping up with his startup-founder interview show Foundation.
As for Diggnation, its legacy will still influence the content DNA over at the network, according to Louderback. “We all learned a lot from it,” he added. “The focus on authentic, real hosts, who are experts not actors, and who talk directly to the audience turns out to be an amazingly effective model for growing communities and delivering results to advertisers. It’s also a model we we continue to refine.”
