Is AwesomenessTV THE Prototype?

I read over on Pando Daily last week about AwesomnessTV, a YouTube that’s gunning for the tweens and their eyeballs. It’s an interesting concept that with the serious funding it just announced is clearly aiming for Nickelodeon and Disney territory. That’s no bad thing; the more the merrier and so forth. It got me thinking about whether it will be the prototype for any subsequent network.

Sure Disney and Nick have the young ‘uns sewed up, for now. But what about the kids born today? They will be growing up in a world where network television is a dying (or dead) beast and their may not have the same brand loyalty that today’s kids do.

AwesomenessTV has an advantage in being internet-based. As the Pando Daily article points out, the networks inhabits a space where a lot of teenagers and tweens reside already.

The question I’m interested in is whether or not it can be considered a prototype. While we will undoubtedly see animated content aimed at kids and teenagers for the forseeable future, Mark Mayerson has a post yesterday where he laments the increasingly fractured media landscape and what lower budgets will mean for animation.

I don’t entirely disagree with him, but I do see a difficulty in the medium term as to how funding is obtained. If AwesomenessTV can create a viable funding model and retain an audience, we might have a winner on our hands.