‘RadNerd Show’ Bows on New Home CraveOnline

RadNerd’s Beau Ryan, Andre Meadows and Damien Beurer have been staples on the LA web video scene, often popping up at Tubefilter events—Ryan’s signature thick dark rim glasses making him an easy find even in crowded mixers.

A year ago it was a pilot run on live streaming channel TheStream.tv, an earlier incarnation of the series that would land The RadNerd Show a Streamy Award nomination for Live Production in a web series.

Now The RadNerd Show is back as a more polished, non-live version picked up by entertainment site CraveOnline for an exclusive distribution run. The 15-minute weekly web series premieres today on site with new episodes out every Friday.

The 15 minutes will break out into four segments, blending tech, comic book, gaming and entertainment news rundowns with comedy sketches and a ‘friendly interview’ with a different ‘Weblebrity’ each week. Taking a nod from their well-received live show, they will still solicit questions for their guests from their fan community through Twitter. Andre “BlackNerd” Meadows (BlackNerdComedy.com) is the newest addition to the show, and comic book wiz Beurer running down the latest in comics news.

But for web series fans, the ‘weblebrity’ interview segment is the real gem here. First up is actor Craig Frank (Compulsions, A Good Knight’s Quest) who gets an extended intro with a back-and-forth about “the Craig Frank Rule.”

Andre: I guess you don’t know about the Craig Frank Rule.
Beau: What is the Craig Frank Rule?
Andre: You’ve never heard of the Craig Frank Rule? … Every time Craig Frank hears about a web series, he’s required to start in it.
Beau: What?
Andre: That’s how he rolls. He’s the star of the show. Compulsions: Bernie Su showed a first draft of Compulsions to Craig Frank, BOOM, he’s the star of Compulsions. … That’s what he does. If he hears about a web series he takes over. It’s real. It’s on Wikipedia.
Now he’s going to come on to our show … and he’s going to replace me.
Beau: Well he does have two first names like me.

For CraveOnline, the male-leaning movie and celebrity culture site is stepping forward into more original web series. This spring it bowed Nar Williams’ quirky Fanboy Funhouse

, and later a weekly sports talk show called Balls.

We asked CraveOnline’s Jason Hargrove what made him pull the trigger on bringing the show over to the site. “After having some of our original series up on CraveOnline,” he said, “several people from the Crave community brought RadNerd to our attention and once we watched we knew this was a valuable show that would resonate well with our audience.”

“A handful of networks took interest after shopping it around, said creator Beau Ryan. “but CraveOnline in particular really caught my eye. We wanted to try something different since they didn’t have the tech yet to do a live show. So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a new formula that still had the same elements of our live show and put it into a “zipped” edition that viewers can finish in 15 or so mins.”

In terms of business model for their CraveOnline’s web series, they are turning to their in house ad sales team to sell pre-roll and other advertising around the overall audience for the site, which now reaches over 1.5 million monthly uniques. “Our business is unique because we get top tier brands to sponsor some of our series as well subsidizing great producers through licensing fees,” added Hargrove.