("T@gged" star Lia Marie JohnsonT@gged)
There’s something that adult observers — from analysts to regular joes — just don’t get about the way teens watch video, according to "t@gged" writer-director Hannah Macpherson.
“They are watching hours of shows on their phones,” Macpherson told Business Insider.
Older people assume teens are only watching things like YouTube videos, or short viral clips on Facebook, on their phones. But they are actually binge-watching whole Netflix shows on the small screen.
It’s a totally new way of watching premium TV, and the producers of the future have to be ready for it.
Macpherson came into contact with this behavior in a huge way when she sold "t@gged" to Verizon’s go90 streaming service, which is primarily a phone app. While go90 as a whole has struggled to find its place in the premium video landscape, "t@gged" has been one of its few runaway hits, with episodes getting thousands of comments from viewers on the app, and its first episode sitting at over 1.2 million views on YouTube. (Like Netflix, Verizon won't even tell Macpherson the exact in-app viewer numbers.)
If you watch "t@gged," it's easy to see why it has teens hooked. It's an addictive murder-mystery thriller, set in high school, and the 11- to 15-minute episodes live very naturally on your phone. Each episode has a cliff-hanger scary ending that makes you want to jump straight to the next one. Even as someone way outside the show's intended demographic, I can recognize its quality.
But while it might sound like "t@gged" is a poster child for a new generation of bite-sized TV shows, Macpherson said that Season Two will actually have longer episodes, with 12 “half-hours” that clock in at 22-23 minutes each (a standard length for a TV show with commercial breaks).
The reason: since go90 releases "t@gged" weekly, it was a bit excruciating for people to only have a dozen minutes to hold onto. Turns out that old-fashioned TV had a pretty good length for weekly shows.
(YouTube star JC Caylen (middle) was a big draw for the audienceYouTube)
TV for the YouTube generation
So some things haven't changed for a show where most people are watching it on their phones instead of their TVs. And Macpherson said there were even some traditional networks interested in buying "t@gged" before go90 put up the winning bid.
But even though "t@gged" is moving to longer, more TV-like episodes for Season Two, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still huge differences in making a show for a generation raised on YouTube, according to Macpherson.
A big part of understanding that came from Macpherson’s partnership with AwesomenessTV, the $650 million YouTube-centric juggernaut, which has made a name for itself by understanding what teens love.