From FM radio to MTV/VH1 back to FM to My Damn Channel to “Next Job, Best Job”
When Rob Barnett founded My Damn Channel at the end of July 2007, I’d just earned a promotion from freelance to full-time reporter at the New York Daily News, covering entertainment and general features for the venerable big-city tabloid. The NYDN and I had a short-lived relationship that year, and four years later, at the end of July 2011, Barnett invited my independent comedy website, The Comic’s Comic, into the My Damn Channel fold as its first in a planned series of partnerships with non-video sites to expand his own brand. We worked together for a year and a half before My Damn Channel decided to revert back to a full focus on video in 2013.
In those first six years of My Damn Channel, Barnett introduced David Wain’s “Wainy Days” to the people, partnered with folks such as Harry Shearer and Don Was, recruited Grace Helbig to host daily vlogs to give visitors a reason to keep coming back to My Damn Channel, later recruited Beth Hoyt to host daily livestreams from My Damn Channel HQ in Hell’s Kitchen, and also gave voice to webseries from A.D. Miles (“Horrible People,” before he became Jimmy Fallon’s first Late Night head writer in 2009), Josh Gad, Maria Bamford, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Murderfist, Mark Malkoff, Coolio and more. I remembered Illeana Douglas starred in a series set in an IKEA, but I’d forgotten Keanu Reeves also starred in a series about a Swedish DJ? Or Keanu played a Swedish DJ? Either way. Lots of amazing times in those early years of online comedy video.
So I was delighted to get the chance to reconnect with Barnett all these years later over Zoom, not just to hear him share some stories I’d never heard before about what almost could’ve happened with My Damn Channel and YouTube, but also what did happen when Grace Helbig became a star, and even more, stories from Barnett about his early years in radio and MTV/VH1, and his years now as a headhunter who just wrote a book called “Next Job, Best Job.” So with that, here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. Enjoy it!
We jump right into the middle where Rob talks about creating and launching My Damn Channel.
Sean L. McCarthy: So take me back. Since I know you’re you’re foggy on years, I will say July of 2007, which is when My Damn Channel launched. Yeah. So when you launched, it’s hard to even try to describe to Gen Z, what the landscape was like then. I mean, you had a still new YouTube.
Rob Barnett: No Twitter, no iPhone. OK. I remember these dates. Okay, Funny or Die launched April 2007. And I launched July 31. But they had a zillion dollars from Silicon Valley. And I had money from my ex in-laws, my ex brother-in-law, some severance from (Les) Moonves who had kicked me out of CBS Radio. We were the scrappy fuckers, you know?
Sean: Well, I guess that’s why you could put damn in the title of yours.
Rob: Because it’s such a bad word. When I came up with the name, it was really hard to come up with the name. And I wasn’t gonna name it anything unless Harry Shearer gave me the go-ahead. So I called Harry and I said, ‘Alright, I got it.’ He goes, let me hear it. I said, ‘It’s My Damn Channel.’ He said, ‘Yes,’ with one caveat. ‘Don’t fall into the trap of calling it My Damn Email, My Damn T-shirt, My Damn… If you burn it out like that, you’ll kill it. But if you just call it the name, it’s great.’ So I said, ‘Alright,’ so then we thought, well, we need a tagline. What’s the tagline going to be? And we fought and fought and fought for months trying to come up with how do you explain it? And we decided that the tagline would be ‘No Tagline.’ The closest we ever came, and we did this the week of launch, as we said, ‘It’s not TV. It’s not HBO. It’s not really that good. My Damn Channel.’ That’s the closest we came.
Sean: And David Wain was like I’m in. Yeah, sign me up for that.
Rob: (laughs) Yes. He liked that.
Sean: What also strikes me as so crazy to think back on this is that, you know, and I’ve talked to Sam Reich from College Humor. Like all of you guys had your own proprietary video players also. It wasn’t tied to YouTube. There was a moment in time when everything was was kind of free floating on the web. And you could embed a video from any sort of company.
Rob: I didn’t want to. I was afraid! I didn’t trust anybody except me. I wanted to have our own destination that we could control completely, because I didn’t want to put all the eggs in the basket of some other platform that could crap out at any moment. So we did launch Day One on our site and on YouTube. Don’t laugh, well laugh, you’re supposed to laugh. It’s a comedy show. We also launched on MySpace. Ladies and gentlemen, MySpace. It was maybe in its last legs.
Sean: Harry Shearer could have said that you could have been confusing people that perhaps you had an allegiance or partnership with MySpace. MySpace, My Damn Channel?
Rob: Yeah. Um, weren’t they owned by Fox then?
Sean: Fox bought bought MySpace in 2005 (corrected, I said 2006 on the pod). But what was your thinking about moving into the digital comedy space? Like all of your previous stuff have been? Yeah, music or celebrities?
Rob: Yeah, well, listen, I worked for the, you know, MTV VH1 CBS the biggest media companies in the world with A-list stars. What I got out of those last years is I realized that digital was the new punk. It was coming up literally out of garages and basements, and Moonves, and all these other a-holes didn’t really focus on it at all in the beginning. So I thought, well, they’re not even looking at this, they’re not paying attention. And I can see something that’s going to be coming up. So I better hurry up and jump in there and learn as much as I could learn with as many years as were left before the FOXes and the Viacoms and all the rest came into wreck that. So I realized that I wanted to go out and do a couple of things. The first thing was I wanted to hire amazing talent, and give them not just money, but give them the one thing they hardly ever get, which is 100%, total creative control. I knew that if I offered that, I’d be able to sign people that really mattered. And at the time, most of the videos that were on YouTube, were dogs, cats and babies, there weren’t stars on YouTube. So that was my first simplistic idea that, you know, if David Wain put up a comedy series starring Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks, it would be better than everything else out there at that time, and I could build a business. But I also didn’t want to offer David Wain a bullshit revenue share off the views that he may or may not get. I wanted to write him a check that he could cash, and pay him and pay him well. And so that was our philosophy.
Sean: What then did it tell you when in that first year so, I think you know, even though I watched Wainy Days and Horrible People and pretty much most of the stuff on your channel, what did it say to you? That I think the the real breakout hit was You Suck at Photoshop? Because that was not based on a celebrity or existing or talent.
Rob: That really was a game changer for us. So I know I have to launch the channel. And I realized that I’m going to need some branding. I’m going to need a logo, I’m going to need some people that can help me do what actually was as much the magic of MTV as anything and it was promos. Nobody on the internet, still, to my knowledge does promos. But promos really, really drive a lot of how you can build a brand. If you’re doing something that we envisioned, which was for lack of a better phrase, like a futuristic television network. I wanted promos. So a friend of mine gave me a list one day, excuse me of all these, don’t laugh, Webby winners that had won for online web design, that sort of stuff. And I looked at 50 of them, and I didn’t like any of them. And then I picked the 51st one and I found these two freaks doing a website to promote their little branding firm that was literally the closest thing to an acid trip I’d ever seen. And they had a contact button. So I press that and I type in: ‘would like to have a conversation about a new company. I’m launching.’ Hit. And in 10 seconds, the guy calls me. I put my phone number in. I said ‘Hey, how’s it going? Where are you guys? LA’ He goes, no. I go New York? He goes no. I go Boston. He goes, No. I said San Francisco. He goes, No. I said, All right, no more guesses. So I said, ‘Where are you?’ He said, we’re in Covington, Kentucky. So I said, that doesn’t work for me. So I’m gonna fly you, there were two guys, I said I’m gonna fly you to Newark. I live about 10 minutes from Newark, and I want to have lunch. So will you do that? And they said yes. And I flew these two guys in from Kentucky named Matt and Troy. I always told them they were one vowel away from South Park, right, just one vowel away. And I met them and I said, I need you to do logo, I need you to do branding. Let’s do some promos. Let’s have some fun. And right away at the first lunch. They’re like, well, we’d like to make original series and I said yeah, that’s okay. We have Paul Rudd and David Wain. And like we’re good with that, you know, you guys just shut up and make the logo. And they kept pitching me. I guess you’d have to call them pilots. And some were okay, but I just wasn’t getting excited, and the end of this story, of course, is something that anyone listening to this can go find on YouTube. Just Google ‘you suck at Photoshop,’ because when I saw the first episode, I just freaked out, I lost my mind. It was the most original idea I’d ever seen. And within about a year, we were getting a bajillion views every time we uploaded an episode. There was one Webby Award. And yes, I know everyone in the world won Webby Awards. But there was one year where they go and the winner of the Best Comedy Series is and we walk up on stage and there’s Lorne Michaels sitting in the front row, waiting for his Saturday Night Live digital award. But it’s my guys from Covington. They were great. They really they really, really changed everything for us.
Sean: A victory for the little guys. So what was what was the first video you ever saw from Grace Helbig?
Rob: Grace was doing a couple of videos with Michelle they were Grace ‘N Michelle then. And I just saw that and had this thought that in addition to the people that we’ve discussed, like Harry Shearer, David Wain. By the way, we always had a music channel run by Don Was, who was arguably one of the most magical souls and greatest guys in the world of music. So my A game was going to be go with the sure bet, right? Go with the go with the best best people on the planet Earth. That was always the A game. But I also saw the early idea of what years later became the horribly overused word influencers. And I also remembered The Lonely Island breakout, and thought that I should get into that world. But the original concept for Grace is a funny story. Like we said a minute ago, that I believe that the internet needed promos to build a brand. I also believed it needed a host. I didn’t just want to have a website with a whole bunch of boxes on it, and you’re supposed to click stuff. I wanted to have somebody who was an incredibly powerful personality, someone you could really build a relationship with. And I wanted that person on a Tuesday morning to say, ‘Hey, how’s it going? Listen, we have a new episode of Wainy Days that’s going to blow your mind, we’re premiering it today, please go to the Wainy Days channel and click on it. And by the way, you know, it stars Jonah Hill.’ You know, I wanted someone to do that. But I wanted them to do it in their own way. So I started having meetings with Grace. And talking to her. I was gonna say talking her into it. So I did that, too. Talking to her about this idea. And so built this relationship where you know, every single day, hence Daily Grace, she was there with something original. And of course, it built into one of the most successful things of all time, I had Grace working with us for about five or six years. At its height, Grace was getting a million views every single day, Monday through Friday, 5 million views a week. It was a beautiful thing. And you know, we took a lot of shit in the press because when she got famous, she got the agent, the lawyer, the manager, all the fucking assholes came in. They hated the the idea that I had. Everyone else was doing these rev share deals. What I was doing was I was paying Grace a lot of money. But I was owning the content. That was my way of doing it, not rev share. And every couple of years we do a new contract, I pay her a lot more money. But then when Hollywood really started to come a-knocking, there were these negotiations where she wanted ownership. I’m going to tell you the story that’s never been told. I’ve never told anyone this story, because it broke out in the press, and it got really bad. I blame my ex partner who was a dick, and I blame her handlers who were disgusting. What happened and what has never been told, because I didn’t want to argue this out in the press, is that we were willing to give her a ton of the ownership that she never had. But what they were doing was kind of turning us into the bad guy so that they could then go make a lot of noise and go make big Hollywood deals and all that. It literally broke my heart, you know, that it looked bad and and we looked bad but but like so many things that happen when somebody breaks out. You have your time as the, what is it farm team, the farm team before somebody goes to insert name of your favorite baseball team here, but I’m really grateful to Grace because we did have regardless of how it ended up in the press this beautiful thing that built in over years to launch into something that was was really successful. So I loved every minute of what it was. I still love her. And then I still have a little bit of a broken heart because Hollywood assholes fucked it up.
Sean: The first time I met Grace and Michelle was at your first anniversary party. And was it your apartment? Hmm. It was it was an it was in a commercial building. It was an office that seemed like it could be an apartment.
Rob: Oh, I remember that one. We were in the center for most of the 10 years, but I’m remembering the one you’re talking about. I was I was sitting in my office one day. And it was the top floor, same street as The New York Times, 40th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue. And I had the top floor of this shitty Garment District building, really old and funky, but we had the top floor and we had roof access. But the roof leaked. So that’s where that party was.
Sean: I remember I came out of the the elevator and Grace was right there outside the elevator with a microphone and Michelle had the camera. And they were just interviewing everybody who came out.
Rob: The party was content? Oh, that’s great. You just made me remember that. We sent Grace and Michelle once to interview Sam Seder and Marc Maron when they were a duo on Air America. That was an early My Damn Channel road trip, I’m just remembering.
Sean: Right. That was Marion’s pre precursor to WTF, him and Sam in the break room. Also at that first anniversary party in 2008, that also was the first time I met Mark Malkoff, who later became big My Damn Channel guy with his Celebrity Sleepovers.
Rob: Who is gloriously being scene in all the repeats of the CNN late night comedy series, Mark’s very prominent in these episodes.
Sean: He’s become the Johnny Carson expert. So okay, so with My Damn Channel, so there was those early days, then I know you, you finally did get some money in 2010. And then the next year 2011 was when YouTube did the radical thing which I don’t know, well, I want to hear how you feel about it in retrospect. But in 2011, they announced, YouTube announced this thing where they were going to have deals with 100 different channels and give them all a big pile of Google money. How did that upend not just your universe, but everybody else who was trying to do their own thing at that point?
Rob: Well, this is a really great story for me. It’s the reason I write about this in in my book, and it’s a lesson to anyone who’s ever believed that social media is a waste of time and isn’t something that can really help your career or your business, they’re wrong. Because in 2009, right after Twitter was born, a person on my staff named, you remember Maria Diokno? Maria was one of my first right hand people, and just a brilliant, brilliant soul and a billion times smarter than me about all things social media. And a couple of weeks after Twitter, Twitter was born, she’s giving me a lesson one day, teach me how to not suck. So now I’m trying to take that lesson on my own. It’s about 10:30 at night. Do you remember Brad O’Farrell? who worked for me? Brad was Keyboard Cat. Okay, Brad did that (produced it).
Sean: I didn’t know you had Keyboard Cat!
Rob: Well, it wasn’t mine. Brad did that before me.
Sean: But I didn’t know he was sitting there like in the office.
Rob: He might have been all of 19 years old, maybe 20. I don’t know. The world’s biggest beard. He was just the teddy bear nerd of all time. And it’s about 10:30 at night, and I’m in my office trying to tweet and Brad’s still there out in the big room. And I get a message, a direct message on Twitter..It says I love ‘You Suck at Photoshop. I love My Damn Channel. Next time you’re out here, let’s have lunch.’ And I look at the tweet, and I look at the message. And I scream out into the hall, Brad! Get in here! Brad comes in. And Brad usually didn’t talk. And he probably didn’t like me so much. And I point to the screen and I go, ‘Is that him?’ and Brad goes, ‘Oh my God.’ And it was Chad Hurley, the inventor, founder, creator of YouTube, reaching out to me on Twitter with props for what we’re doing, right. So I look at this message and in my head is exploding because now I’m thinking, I’m gonna be a dot-com zillionaire doo-dah-doo-dah, that dude. And what do I say? What do I do? How do I try to act? Cool? How do I not blow it? So I’m thinking, how do you respond to Let’s have lunch? I came up with one word, four letters, and I type D, E, A, L. like deal, we’ll have lunch. I’m the no patience, immediate, everything has to be done now guy. I fucking waited for 21 days. I counted off the days, to make believe that I happened to be flying out to the West Coast. So that I could casually go, ‘Hey, Chad, let’s have lunch.’ And I waited 21 days for this. But on maybe the 20th day, one of my top investors says, ‘hey, guess who I met last night at the such and such conference?’ I’m like, oh my god, he fucked this up. I said, What did you say to him? He goes, Well, I told him that he emailed my CEO and I’m like, fuck. So now. I send a message to Chad and I said, I hear you met “dad” last night. And I’m sorry. Now can I make believe that I’m coming out to the west coast so we can have that lunch. So I fly out there. And I fell in love with him. He was the nicest half a billionaire I’d ever met my life. And we really got on, you know, we started having lunches over the course of many months. Now it’s 2010. And Chad decides, I’ve also never told this story, Sean. I’m telling you this story, okay, never told it. Chad decides that My Damn Channel is going to be the first content investment for all of YouTube. And we have multiple meetings. And in the final meeting, I’m in the Google offices in New York down across from the Chelsea Market. And there’s two huge screens in this video conference. One is in San Bruno in Chad’s office, and the other is in Mountain View in Google, and they’re not buying us, but they’re going to put in a big, big fat check. And I realized that when the world hears that, then we’re going to have something even better than a Webby Award. We’re going to have some real credit to be able to get some more capital and start paying you and all the other creators a lot more money, right? This is it. This is the moment. But Chad’s sitting in the back of his office. And there’s some other guy in front of the camera. And that guy’s staring at me with a bad vibe. I can just smell it. It smells bad. And I’m doing my little spiel because, well this is Rob and My Damn Channel. And I just feel like whatever’s coming out of my mouth, he doesn’t like and the guy leans back and looks at Chad, and goes, ‘What are we doing here?’ and Chad says we’re investing. And that guy’s like, ‘Well, why would we do that?’ And the whole meeting’s fuckin’ unraveling. And I’m sitting next to the mergers and acquisitions guy of Google, right? So the video conference ends and I go, what the fuck was that? And he goes, ‘Well, this is a new guy who’s very senior in the company, etc, etc.’ About two weeks go by. And we find out that I had just met the incoming new CEO of YouTube. Because Chad and Steve, the two originators were getting their Google buyout. They were leaving. And that couldn’t be discussed, I guess, because it’s illegal, or something you can’t, you know, reveal these big corporate changes. So we missed our moment, Sean, by a hair.
Sean: It’s a classic showbiz story. One suit says yes. And then the suits get replaced. And the new suit says who are you? No.
Rob: And so it took about a year to the moment that you describe, which again, you’re my encyclopedia, you’re saying this is 2011, that sounds right. I think. Where they give us and about 90 something other companies a big check to go make quote unquote the good stuff. Right? And that was a really nice moment. It just wasn’t the moment. You know, we’re sharing it with 99 other assholes. But in all seriousness, it was great for all 100 of us that got the money because what what I did, you were probably at this party, we bought out the SVA Theater on 23rd Street for an event. Do you remember this? It was, I think we closed the New York Television Festival with this great event and Harry Shearer was our guest. And we had about 300 people because we’re celebrating some of that YouTube money, which in all seriousness, wasn’t paying for a party. It paid for 30 original comedy series, all done in that same year, and we lit up My Damn Channel LIVE. I built a teeny little studio in our office. My ex-wife is an architect she designed it, you remember? It was tiny. Yeah, every day at four o’clock. We were live on social media and everyone used to say in 2011 like, why would you do a live show on the internet? I mean, they these people thought it was dumb. You know, but we, we had so much fun. We had movie stars, TV stars, comedians, great ones. Marianne Ways was booking it for us.
Sean: And that was being hosted by like a rotating group of hosts? Grace and Mamrie were part of it with Beth?
Rob: It was really for Beth Hoyt. Yeah, I interviewed 69 people for that I remember the number and, and hired Beth, who was just the perfect host for that show. And then one day out of the week, we had Grace host it. So many great comics came in every single day and did that show without fail. We did it in a little teeny, $5,000 TriCaster. You know, it was so great. And 100 years ahead of its time, but really, really fun.
Sean: I know from talking with Sam from CollegeHumor that, there was a combination of YouTube money being spread around and then not being spread around. But then also when Facebook did a big pivot to video, that that kind of ended up screwing with everybody’s metrics and everybody’s budgets. And I know that that really was kind of the beginning of the turn for CollegeHumor. Was that also what happened with My Damn Channel? Or were there other factors at play?
Rob: For me, I had to do two things, right? As a CEO, I wanted to set the table on the creative side. But I also wanted to make sure that as futuristic as the tech and the content was, I wanted a futuristic business model. I never believed that getting a shit-ton of views on YouTube would equal more revenue shared ad dollars, and that was going to build a business. I just thought that was chump change. So I had had those 12 years at MTV and VH1. And for a lot of the years, I was one of the heads of programming. But they also would lock me in a closet once a year. And I would put together the television Upfront for ad sales. And creatively, you would be in a situation every year where the Monday through Sunday, Nielsen ratings of an MTV or a VH1, say at three o’clock in the afternoon, were relatively small. I don’t want to go into the rabbit hole now of describing how small, but let’s just say for the argument’s sake, they were relatively small. The way that we made big money was that we would put together things like the MTV Movie Awards, VH1 divas, a golf tournament, you name it. These were so called tentpole events that were designed, first and foremost, to charge advertisers a premium, that in and of itself was tenfold what they’d be paying to advertise with spots and dots and interruptive advertising on the channel. So when I started, I thought that the game was not get the most views and get more revenue share dollars from advertisers. I thought that game was convince advertisers to get into a little swimming pool and create premium content together that they would pay premium dollars for. And so we started to do that. Very, very early on, we were lucky, we met a man named Tony Pace. And Tony, for I believe more than a decade was the Chief Marketing Officer of Subway. And we were both from New Jersey. We both worship Bruce Springsteen. And most importantly, Tony saw that we were doing something that he needed to pay some attention to. But think about the math. Subway was spending a billion dollars a year on television. So for him to peel off a million to a little schmuck like me to do something premium and special and interesting and original, was just experimentally genius on his part, and was enough for me to then pay my whole staff for a year. So we came up with, it wasn’t my idea. I can’t take any credit at all. We came up with the Subway, Fresh Artists Filmmakers Series. College students were making original comedy series for My Damn Channel, sponsored by Subway. And then we’re I got involved as I said, Well, you know, (Dan) Pasternack’s at IFC, and Kent Rees, my friend was running marketing, and they had a house every year at South By Southwest. So I said, well, not only will they make comedy series, Tony, let’s pick a winner. And let’s throw the winner a red carpet premium party at South By Southwest to show their series and treat them like rock stars. And for some really strange reason, even though this sounds this sounds completely impossible to believe Subway didn’t have a lockdown presence itself at SXSW when I pitched that idea. So we brought IFC in. And this little simple thing was good enough to bring them back as a repeat advertiser four years in a row. Four years! That money paid my whole staff, just that one deal, you know, so we weren’t like playing that game of ooh, if the algorithm changes, we lose views, and then there’s less revenue. But Sam’s right, a lot of companies went down, you know, they went down, when the platforms change the rules.
Sean: I know Funny or Die, the way they adapted was twofold. The first was leaning heavily into branded content like you’re talking about with Subway. But the other was, instead of focusing on viral videos or webseries, they just reverted back to an old traditional production company, selling TV shows and movies.
Rob: Right. Well, we tried that, too. I begged David to do Wainy Days for IFC. They wanted it. But David didn’t want to do it as a TV series because it had this perfect feel online. And then you remember, I hired Josh Gad to do a series called Gigi, and I purposely timed it so that episode one of Gigi premiered on My Damn Channel the exact same night Josh opened on Broadway in The Book of Mormon.
Sean: I remember that party.
Rob: So I thought, that’ll work, and then I’ll bring Pasternack to the opening of that party, and then he’ll hang out with Josh, and we’ll get it to be a TV series on IFC. Except if you’re listening Josh, we were right! You should’ve done it! Because instead, he took, remember this one, 1600 Penn or something? It was a White House series. It was the move his agent wanted him to make. It paid I’m sure a lot more than IFC.
Sean: It was network for NBC.
Rob: But Gigi was his baby. It was his show, and could’ve would’ve should’ve been an IFC show. So we were trying this stuff, too.
Sean: I’ve been cranking away online along since 2007, same as My Damn Channel, so how did you get to the point in 2016 when you realized, I guess this is not going to keep going?
Rob: Well, we went to the altar, not once but four times to get married, merged or acquired by a bigger company. Four times. Each time for a variety of reasons it just wasn’t meant to be…the truth is, we were all looking for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That Maker/Disney thing. Very few were able to get that, because I think in the end it was Netflix and Amazon that took that original DNA that we all started mixing and ran with original series online in a way that none of us could.
You can listen to our full chat over on my previous Piffany post:
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