{"id":13939,"date":"2019-01-16T04:39:16","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T04:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/more-investors-are-betting-on-virtual-influencers-like-lil-miquela.html"},"modified":"2019-01-16T04:39:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T04:39:16","slug":"more-investors-are-betting-on-virtual-influencers-like-lil-miquela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/more-investors-are-betting-on-virtual-influencers-like-lil-miquela.html","title":{"rendered":"More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brud<\/a>, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela<\/a>, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic<\/a> and Toonstar<\/a> are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars \u2014 including ones that don\u2019t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.<\/p>\n

The investors backing these companies say it\u2019s the rise of a new kind of studio system \u2014 one that\u2019s independent of the personalities and scandals that have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube and Instagram <\/a> stars \u2014 and it\u2019s attracting serious venture dollars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way I look at it\u2026 a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,\u201d says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm\u00a0Betaworks Ventures<\/a>. \u201c<\/span>In 2019 and 2020 we\u2019re going to see a lot of these\u2026 we\u2019re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million<\/a> from investors, including Sequoia Capital<\/a>, BoxGroup and other, undisclosed, investors.<\/p>\n

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The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million led by Spark Capital, <\/a> according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela \u201cherself\u201d teased that \u201cshe\u201d had something to \u201cshare\u201d<\/a>\u00a0with her roughly 1.5 million followers.\u00a0Brud declined to comment.<\/p>\n

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.<\/p>\n

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz \u2014 the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP \u201cTomorrow Comes Today<\/a>\u201d in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast<\/a>,\u00a0the mid-1990s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku<\/a>, who\u2019ve captured the imagination and hearts<\/a> of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he\u2019s not alone. Gatebox<\/a>,\u00a0the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At Betaworks, <\/a> the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters \u2014 and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company\u2019s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls \u201csynthetic reality,\u201d including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,\u201d says Rojas. \u201cAlgorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools that enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe celebrity part comes into play where we\u2019re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic<\/a>, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz, the founder of the alternative social network\u00a0ello<\/a>\u00a0and Budnitz Bicycles<\/a>. Budnitz is perhaps best known for Kidrobot<\/a>, a manufacturer of branded collectibles and toys for adults and kids everywhere. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no reason why you won\u2019t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,\u201d says Rojas. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn\u2019t kill television, it just became Netflix\u2026 T<\/span>hings can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There\u2019ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we\u2019ll see stuff that\u2019s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At Toonstar<\/a>,\u00a0co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,\u201d says Attanasio. \u201cWe saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. \u201cWe looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it\u2019s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform that initially focused on letting user-generated content flourish \u2014 a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar\u2019s own site and app.<\/p>\n

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Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. \u201cWe do daily pop culture cartoons\u2026 and partner with creators and influencers,\u201d says Attanasio. \u201cOur whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost\u2026 50 times faster and 90 percent cheaper than typical animation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. \u201cWe had no shortage of content, but it was shitty content,\u201d Attanasio says. \u201cThat\u2019s when you realize\u2026 what we\u2019re doing\u2026 there\u2019s three ingredients\u2026 One is tech, one is process and the third is creative\u2026 if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, they\u2019re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly <\/a> app (now rebranded<\/a> under its new owner, TikTok<\/a>), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe launched a channel called Poppy.tv. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,\u201d Attanasio said. \u201cWithin three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fan base for Poppy and her cast of characters.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds \u2014 and it was based on cartoon music videos. \u201cThat validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged?\u2026 and the answer was \u2018Yes,’\u201d said Attanasio.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the \u201cSpace Ghost\u201d phenomenon. \u201cWe started doing cartoon live streams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,\u201d Attanasio says.\u00a0\u201cIt was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on Musical.ly come in with a FaceTime\u2026 And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. \u201cWe understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we\u2019re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We\u2019re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa \u2014 a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar\u2019s recent seed funding, a round led by Founders Fund <\/a> partner Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22<\/a><\/p>\n

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, of Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, <\/a> who left to start his own company.<\/p>\n

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.<\/p>\n

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, <\/a> the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. \u201cI still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I\u2019ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Flinn, the virtual element of what\u2019s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to create humans,\u201d he says. \u201cWe look up to the Mickey Mouses and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters, it\u2019s so close to the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. \u201cWhen I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, \u2018What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?’\u201d Flinn says.<\/p>\n

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own.\u00a0That\u2019s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren\u2019t going to go away \u2014 at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are totally fine with things that are artificial,\u201d says Rojas. \u201cPeople totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to 40 years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/d5fdF-XHVN4\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-13939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t