Amateur Hour

Comedians Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine, in another era, would be working day jobs and eagerly awaiting return calls from TV comedy shows and casting agents. Instead, after a few years of tinkering around with Web video, the young comics already have their own series on the Internet. Ask a Ninja is a minimalist kind of comedyno martial arts, just a black-garbed goofball who gestures wildly while answering questions like “How do I find out a ninja’s name?” (you don’t) and “Do ninjas lie?” (only in wait.) The Ask a Ninja enterprise now generates more than $100,000 monthly, according to Nichols. About 80 percent of that comes from advertisers, who pay $25,000 to get a short personal endorsement from the ninja himself in all videos downloaded during one week. (In recent weeks he’s praised Verizon’s FiOS wireless network and Intel Centrino processors.) While Nichols and Sarine got a big push from YouTube and social networking sitesthey just received the “YouTubey” award for most popular seriesnow they’re big enough to draw most fans to their iTunes podcast or their own site, which together are seen by 3 million viewers weekly.

The online video “clip culture” that arose with YouTube, combined with social networking and widespread broadband, is pushing Web 2.0 into a heady adolescence, a flushed mix of profit and uncertainty. The universal ability to publish ideas and artwork for the price of an Internet connection will surely cause broad social change: The Economist magazine has opined that user-generated content will have an effect no less profound than Gutenberg’s printing press, which paved the way for widespread literacy and gave birth to new religionsand new wars. (The Movable Type blogging software is named after Gutenberg’s innovation.) And in the last year video has emerged as the new superstar of user-generated content. By the middle of last year, more than three-quarters of U.S. Internet users were watching video online, viewing 7.5 billion videos in November alone, according to comScore, Inc. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that daily traffic to video-sharing sites doubled over the course of 2007.