SourceFed was the brainchild of Philip DeFranco, who decided to create a YouTube channel based on a show he already had called The Philip DeFranco Show. This new channel was created to curate events from popular culture, current happenings, the news, and things from the world of technology. This was not the only internet-based venture of DeFranco, who had multiple properties that were running on the internet. SourceFed can be rightfully described as his most popular internet venture. We take a detailed look at the lifecycle of the channel.
All You Must Know About Sourcefed
SourceFed channel was first created in 2011 but became non-operational a few months after before it was re-launched in 2012. This was as a result of YouTube’s funding of original content on their streaming platform under the $100 million project which failed. The deal that was made with the creator; DeFranco, limited his creativity to only one type of content even though he wanted to have different types of programs on the channel – and so, SourceFed was created on the 23rd of January 2012.
It began operations and started with the show 20 Minutes or Less which was for the News. In the same month, five other shows were added to the channel’s lineup. They were; Curb Crash The New Movie Thing Show, Bloopers, Comment Commentary, and DeFranco Inc.: Behind the Scenes.
For content, the channel reached into a pool of political topics, social events and in 2012, they attended that year’s episode of the video convention VidCon. As the channel continued to grow, DeFranco created spinoff channels that were more centric on certain topics; most notable was the nerd channel SourceFed Nerd and some of the shows on the original channel were moved to this channel.
For effective running of the shows, there had to be an employment of hosts and a crew for production, writing, and video editing. Some of the crew members would include; Jeremy Azevedo, who executively produced content for the entirety of the channel’s existence till its shutdown. Owen Carter was in editing, Ricky Mizuno worked as a production assistant, operations were managed by Sophia Rocha, Starline Hodge was the graphic designer for the channel and Audrey Davy worked on the production of content.
The cumulative number of hosts was over twenty. Some other presenters included; Steve Zaragoza, Whitney Moore, Meg Turney, Steven Suptic, and Sam Bashor among many others. The original hosts on the show were Joe Bereta, Lee Newton, and Elliot Morgan. They also had guest hosts on the programs, some of whom are Laci Green, George Watsky, and Timothy Ferriss.
Sourcefed was the source of controversies on more than one occasion, but what is a news outlet without some controversial news?
Why Was It Cancelled?
Things began to change when in 2013, June precisely, DeFranco sold the channel to the internet television network Revision3, which was eventually bought by the mass media company Discovery, Inc. Upon selling the channel to them, most of the creative power he had over content that the show released was transferred to other people.
With this came a decline in their viewership and because of the way YouTube works where the number of views is directly proportional to how much is made, it affected the channel’s revenue. The decline in their ratings can also be linked to the rate at which hosts left the show.
Hosts that had garnered an audience for themselves would come to see no reason to continue visiting the channel since the reason that they came to watch it is no longer there. The network did not do enough to keep their hosts and as each host left, a chunk of the audience left, until it became financially unwise to keep running the channel.
Of all the channels that were started with the $100 million YouTube project, Sourcefed outlived every other one, got to a 100 million views mark, and had subscribers in the millions.
Where are They Now?
DeFranco is still into content production and the hosting of various shows. He is currently working on his show; The Philip DeFranco Show. Four of the previous hosts on SourceFed came together and started a new show called The ValleyFolk which in some way is connected to SourceFed. The other hosts also moved on to other shows and continued in the line of media and content creation. The same applies to the crew members as well.
