Once Upon a Social Network

Bebo-hosted serial from LonelyGirl team tests interactive storytelling capabilities of social-networking sites.

Social-networking site Bebo debuted the new online video serial KateModern only last week, but already the fictional main characters have extended the drama of their daily lives into the comments, polls, quizzes, and other areas of the Bebo site, interacting with real-life Bebo users and creating a richly drawn world where real and fake become difficult to decipher.

It’s the kind of Internet-specific storytelling that KateModern’s producers, the folks behind the popular LonelyGirl-YouTube fake-out that had the world baffled and enthralled a year ago, have become experts in. And London-based Bebo is hoping that by scoring an exclusive for KateModern, it can profit from the experimental form of interactive storytelling emerging on the web and show that in a competitive online video landscape, social-networking pages can become the natural home for interactive serial dramas.

“YouTube is a great place to broadcast linear video, as you can only comment on things or forward them,” said Bebo President Joanna Shields, who on Monday officially announced the debut of KateModern. “In social-networking sites, if [KateModern’s main character] Kate uploads a photo from a mobile phone, people can react and speculate and give her clues, and you know the plotline is feeding into the community. I think there’s a potential to build a new form of entertainment here.”

That emerging genre is transforming social-networking sites like Bebo, the top such site in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand, from sites where the primary purpose for users is to personalize their own pages and connect with others, into full-scale entertainment destinations. The idea is to give sometimes-fickle users more reasons to visit a site, even after they’ve done just about everything they’re going to do to their own profile and met just about everyone they’re going to meet. Video serials also become a chance to cash in on the lucrative promises of video advertising. KateModern was profitable before it even started airing, Ms. Shields said, as Bebo and the show’s producers, working together, have already sold advertising incorporated into the storyline to six brands.

But Bebo, not alone in its attempts to become a destination site for online serials, is entering a suddenly competitive arena. Last April, with the debut of Michael Eisner’s Prom Queen series, MySpace began to focus on incorporating online video serials into its social-networking pages and separate video site, while interactive online game shows that incorporate user contributions—such as recent forays by Mark Burnett and AOL—are popping up all across the Internet. Not to mention that numerous video-focused sites are tripping over themselves to sign up a limited pool of proven web video talent.

Ms. Shields said the way to entice video producers like the LonelyGirl production team, Telegraph Ave. Productions, is to offer more personalized services that let them overlay their content on top of a richly networked community.

Telegraph Ave. bought that pitch. Miles Beckett, KateModern’s executive producer and co-creator, said that after meeting with the likes of Google, MySpace, and numerous Hollywood production studios, he preferred the controlled environs of Bebo that included tons of natural areas of the site for the fictional characters to inhabit. He figures the deal will let the makers earn about the same amount of money in advertising revenue shares as they would through other deals. Plus, the team liked the idea of a U.K.-centered site that could expand the basic idea behind LonelyGirl into new territories.

But the LonelyGirl team could be a special case. The producers have been at the forefront of attempts to create alternative reality storytelling online—the kind of storytelling that’s particularly suited to social-networking sites. And they’ve already proven themselves attractive to advertisers, with a built-in audience of 250,000 to 300,000 viewers per LonelyGirl episode, as well as several large-scale deals with teenage-friendly brands like Neutrogena.

Ms. Shields said Bebo has fielded countless pitches for new web serials, with two more shows on the way in the next few months. With the competition for attention online fierce, observers will be watching to see if this new genre of storytelling has enough in it to convince users to flock to social-networking sites for entertainment, rather than just to connect.

Link to Red Herring Article