In 2006, Greg Goodfried helped Web video grab Hollywood’s attention. Now he has a Hollywood gig: Goodfried, one of the co-creators of the breakthrough YouTube series lonelygirl15, is now an agent at United Talent Agency’s digital group.
Lonelygirl Guy Greg Goodfried Joins Hollywood Agency UTA
The co-founder of EQAL gets a gig working with new digital stars.
Image courtesy of UTA
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Goodfried started out as a lawyer, but ended up working on lonelygirl, which became one of the Web’s first viral-video series. That led to the creation of EQAL, a venture-backed startup that was supposed to generate other Web video hits, with an eye on building franchises that would cross over into TV and movies.
Within a couple years, EQAL had scaled back its ambitions, and ended up becoming a video services company. In 2012 the company was acquired by Everyday Health, and Goodfried stayed on for a year after that.
At UTA, Goodfried joins an agency that has been trying to make a name for itself in digital. Last year the company scored a big win when DreamWorks Animation bought AwesomenessTV, a YouTube channel the agency had invested in and represented.
It’s an interesting journey for Goodfried, who got into Web video when optimists assumed that it would merge overnight with Hollywood.
Things didn’t work out that way: “There was a moment where we and a lot of people thought big budget content, narrative content going directly to digital, and that didn’t happen,” he said. “Instead, what’s working in digital is personality-based content.” Goodfried’s job will involve working with some of the those personalities that UTA reps, like Andrew Bachelor, a.k.a. “King Bach“, a breakout star on Vine’s six-second clips.
Here’s an episode of lonelygirl. How does Goodfried feel about being best-known for a video series that’s nearly a decade old? “That’s okay,” he laughs. “I’ve come to terms with it.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtH7DTu-DgI
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
