Kent Nichols: ‘Grow Through Addition, not Subtraction’

Ask A Ninja co-creator Kent Nichols spoke this past Monday at the monthly TransmediaLA event. He shared his knowledge about cultivating a core audience of true fans as well as changing modes of distribution by drawing on his knowledge gained from both creating a hit web show and working for Partner Outreach at Blip.tv.

Consistency. A key piece of advice that Kent stressed over the course of the evening was that in order to become a success and grow a large audience there is a need for a consistent and constant flow of content. “If you are not producing at least 20 episodes of your narrative show that is probably not going to be enough. You need a certain mass of content to find that audience, and that needs to be put out there,” Nichols said. “And that is just narrative content … you need bonus content, reward content that will drive people back to your domain site.”

In speaking about growing your fan base Nichols advises, “You’re never going to grow by shutting down your YouTube channel and saying ‘Everyone go to my website.’ That doesn’t work. You need to grow through addition, not subtraction.” As you diversify your content and distribution methods and locations this will allow you to create true fans that are invested in you and the success of your project. Also important is diversifying over a variety of social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. It is important to be the places your audience would be found so they can easily share the content with others they believe would be interested.

“As a creator you should always be thinking: what’s the book? what’s the film?” posed Nichols.  You should be thinking of new ways to tell new stories or different parts of your story across the various platforms available to you. An example he gave was that Ask A Ninja was originally developed as an animated show about Ninjas in Orange County. When they were unable to do it as an animated series the webshow was born so they had a way to keep playing in that world.

According to Nichols, being successful on Blip means being or having interesting and constant content. In his words, “I think anything ultimately can be successful. The average person on Blip spends 30 minutes watching videos, and they watch a couple videos. You’re starting to see longer and longer time frames spent watching the content. It’s only limited in what you are doing.”

Kent’s newest webseries, The Guilty Crafter debuted this week on Blip:

TransmediaLA is a group of like minded individuals in the LA area who meet the first Monday of each month to discuss Transmedia and share their current projects, ideas and lessons learned. If you are interested in joining or speaking at meeting please visit www.transmediala.net for more information.