On a separate but related note to my previous post on RvB, while doing some research for my original post I noticed an interesting ‘news update’ on the Roosterteeth site. The Dec 8th post entitled “War on Oprah” (note: language may be offensive to some) caught my eye. Now, seeing that Oprah is normally viewed as a relatively peaceful person I was interested to see what was going on. Username: DGeoff from Roosterteeth (RT) headquarters noticed that the RT YouTube channel (45,577 subscribers) was right behind Oprah (47,888 subscribers) in the list of all-time most subscribed directors. He then wrote the news update to plead to the RT community (of some 725,536 members) to help RT over-take of Oprah in YouTube subscriptions and “topple her multi-media empire…” That one blog post received 774 comments to-date and in one week RT had gained 17,223 subscribers to reach 62,800 subscribers (As of Today, they are at 63,215 subscribers and have over-taken the BBCworldwide channel) . Now that’s really impressive. Communities like this are great examples of the power of wikinomics, community and the Web 2.0. It goes to show the power of a healthy, strong, loyal community. The RT team is super involved, constantly posting interesting, funny content – that gives their 700,000 + users a reason to keep going back.
I’d be interested to hear about any other examples of strong communities you have come across.