Brette Borow launched GirlsGuideTo way back in 2006 when she was a post-college, LA-based early-twentysomething with a mission to “help young women embrace life, love themselves, and evolve into the women they want to be” and a vision to “create a multi-platform digital network that will become the premier destination for young women to help develop and share in their individuality.” In the past six years, Borow’s been able to realize at least part of that vision.
GirlsGuideTo has garnered a sizable online and social media following (it’s currently topping 140K fans on Facebook) as a fun, friendly, and fabulous place for individuals in possession of two X chromosomes to get and give advice on things relevant to ladies who are at that interesting/difficult life stage that’s somewhere between “teenager” and “adult.”
The part of Borow’s early vision for GirlsGuideTo that the site’s founder hadn’t been able to realize in the past six years is all that stuff about multimedia. But then Borow found Big Frame.
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The YouTube network that recently closed a $3 million funding round just launched GirlsGuideTo TV, an online video offshoot of the female-oriented website that’s marketed as “Cosmo for the Facebook Generation.” The series stars familiar faces from online video screens – including ExoticJess aka Jessica Lizama, Nikki Phillippi, Sh*t Girlfriends Say’s Kelsey Darragh, and Miranda Mayo – who sit close enough to one another so they can all fit into the same frame, but are somehow still able to maintain a kind of conversation that feels uncharacteristically casual, in a good way.
“Much like traditional television and film, we held casting sessions to find the hosts, who were relatable to GirlsGuideTo.com’s existing audience and strong online presence,” said GirlsGuideTo TV’s Executive Producer and Big Frame Talent Manager Rachel Skidmore, ”It was the individual stories of each host, and the way that they are experts in their own right, that really inspired us to cast them.”
Those hosts will appear on camera in new installments of GirlsGuideTo TV released every Wednesday by way of the GirlsGuideTo YouTube channel. “The show will cover topics similar to those you might see on the website,” Skidmore explained. “This means anything from relationships to self-esteem, love, career tips, college-life, and more.” Every episode will also feature a question submitted by a GirlsGuideTo.com reader, which will be answered individually by each host.
The program is credited as a joint creation between Borow and Big Frame and marks the latter’s first foray into developing original programming with organizations that have pre-existing audiences outside of YouTube. In GirlsGuideTo TV, the YouTube network plays the role of production partner and helps cast, develop, package, market, and finance the show. While new for Big Frame, it’s a model that’s not uncommon to the online video space. Revision3 has been working to bring video to pre-existing websites with substantial audiences for years, with titles ranging from The GigaOm Show to io9’s We Come From the Future.
Considering an online video offshoot for your popular website is a relatively regular occurrence and GirlsGuideTo has been around since the mids-2000s, one wonders what took so long for GirlsGuideToTV to launch. “Up until now, GirlsGuideTo.com has been developing its audience, voice, and editorial content,” noted Skidmore. “Also, YouTube has historically been dominated by viral hits and narrative, but now there’s greater receptiveness to the talk show format.”
Check out Borow and Big Frame’s GirlsGuideTo TV on YouTube.
