Ms. Day.

Q: How long does it take to find a new CEO after you raise $12 million? A: Not that long, it turns out. Go figure. Brooklyn-basedNew York-based Blip, which recently dropped the .tv and added a Networks, may not be a startup anymore. It's more than six years old, its founders have already flown the nest, and it just hired a grownup CEO after a four-month search.

Kelly Day, EVP and general manager of digital media and commerce at Discovery Communications, will "take responsibility for the Company’s next phase of growth for its industry-leading advertising and distribution platforms," according to a press release that comes about a month after Blip announced the fresh millions.

It struck us as odd that Blip chose someone with an ecommerce background to head up a video site; Blip's representatives did not immediately respond to a question about whether that was odd.

But then again, former CEO and cofounder Mike Hudack is a high school drop-out whose resume includes Time Inc., the National Hockey League, and starting his own small Internet security and privacy company in Connecticut at the age of sixteen, according to CrunchBase.  (Mr. Hudack took a medical leave from the company in November.)

"[Ms. Day's] experience and expertise in building audiences and establishing deep distribution partnerships aligns perfectly with Blip's strategic vision of providing producers the opportunity to distribute and monetize their content as broadly as possible," Jeffrey Glass, board member and managing director at Bain Capital Ventures, one of Blip's investors, said in a statement. Ms. Day added that she was "thrilled" and Blip is "uniquely positioned to take advantage of the tremendous growth in online video."

Sounds like Blip is going into money-making mode. Blip hosts and distributes independent video content, helping content creators syndicate their videos to iTunes, YouTube, social media and set-top boxes. The company recently launched its own destination site, which it says now accounts for 12 percent of the company’s “overall monetizable views,” or videos that can run ads. What kind of shows can one advertise against on blip.tv? Try The Aimless Cook, desultory culinary adventures, or Dealership, a comedy show about four car salesman who "do everything but sell cars." The company says it gets more than 300 million views a month.

blip

The folks at Form D landed the SEC form for what appears to be a new round of funding at Blip Networks, the corporate name of blip.tv. So far the company has sold $6 million in shares on what would be its Series D, with the option to sell another $5 million still on the table. 

The new money was first noted by Erick Schonfeld, who also pointed out that measurement from Quantcast and Comscore show blip's traffic to be flat and even down over the last year, averaging 1.4 million per month in recent months.

These numbers are clearly not a great reflection of the company's reach. Before blip.tv poached some of Youtube's biggest stars, the company was reporting monthly unique views over 300 million. That's across dozens of different video platforms, including the web sites of their video stars, big sites like Youtube and connected TV services like Boxee and Roku.

So the overall viewership on blip's network is larger than the monthly unique visitors to their website by a factor of several hundred. Schonfeld is right to point out that blip made a point back in May of announcing a new site that they hoped would become a destination in its own right, and the traffic stats seem to indicate that is not happening. "That's the benefit of having a network that is so much larger than your home site," Evan Gotlib, blip's SVP of sales told Betabeat. "You can take your time and really get it right without having to worry about growth."

There is also a lingering question of leadership at the company. Speaking with blip this morning Betabeat learned that co-founders Mike Hudack and Dina Kaplan have both officially left the company. Cable industry vet Steve Brookstein is the acting CEO as the company continues a public search for a new leader.

Steve Jobs at MacWorld, New York City, July 17, 2001

After the news about Apple founder Steve Jobs death broke last night, Betabeat reached out to a few members of the New York tech community and asked them to share their thoughts and impressions of the ultimate CEO. Here's what they had to say:

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures:

Steve Jobs is the iconic entrepreneur of the information age. He impacted everyone and everything. It is a great loss.

Marc Cendella, The Ladders:

We’ve lost our Jobs. Life

swipes by, fingerprints reveal:

He adopted us.

David Tisch, Techstars:

When I sat down with the 60 entrepreneurs in the TechStars program last night, we had a moment of silence… No one even blinked. As I addressed the group, the message was simple: Steve Jobs created things people dream of, he changed the world in ways people can only dream of, he impacted each one of our own dreams. As you embark on your journey to create something, I can only hope each of you strive to impact the world in a profound way.

To know that for the next 100 years, companies will be inspired by what Steve Jobs has created, will care about design and user experience, will focus on the customer… that is an impact. It is an impact that every child growing up will inherently and unknowingly feel, as they use his computers, phones, and what's yet to come. My first computer was an Apple IIGS. My computers today are all built by Apple. Hopefully my last computer will be an Apple, too. Only visionaries can impact the future and leave it a better place; he did. I hope we can also make a "dent in the universe", or at least dream to.

Dina Kaplan, blip.tv:

When I think about Steve Job's legacy for entrepreneurs, I think about two things. First, your product has to be good. So good people are excited to use it and feel happy interacting with it. When you're managing a start-up you're juggling a number of glass and rubber balls--some of which can drop and survive, but others which have to always be in the air.  Thinking about what Steve Jobs accomplished at Apple focuses your mind on the importance of a strong base for your company, which is always product.

Second, I remember hearing him say that the Apple Store was the best marketing the company ever did. I love that. Build a great product and showcase it in a wonderful way, and your hard work is done. It's simple, clean, inspirational and motivating.

Scott Heiferman, Meetup:

A friend I haven't heard from since 1990 just tweeted: "@heif Heard the news. Became teenager again. Heard you preaching the gospel of Jobs."

Obviously, he was a lifelong hero.

Chris Dixon, Hunch:

My entire life has been shaped by computers and from the Apple II to the iPhone it was always computers invented by Steve Jobs.  Every technology entrepreneur looked up to him as the greatest innovator and entrepreneur we'd ever seen - and will likely ever see again.  His passing is just an incredibly sad day for the tech world but most importantly his family and friends.

Bre Pettis, Makerbot:

My family had a software company called "Software Productions" that made children's software for the Apple II+. The programmers that worked on the software were 17 and 18 year old hackers and as a 10 year old, these guys programming software for the Apple II+ were magicians that could make the computer sing. Those programmers were my childhood heroes. I daydreamed that I would be as cool as them when I grew up. I remember being in school and there was an Apple II+ in the classroom and I was so proud that I knew how to make it work and could edit the hex code and hack it to make my characters in the game wizardry have 10 million gold pieces. That computer opened up the world for geeks like me in the 80's and inspired a generation of young people to understand technology and use it creatively.

Those early computer experiences have led me to start a 3D printer company called MakerBot to bring 3D printing to average person and to the classrooms of the world so that young people can have that same rush that I felt with the Apple II+. Every creative project I've ever done was done on hardware that Steve Jobs had a hand in. The beautiful style and the focus on user friendly interfaces changed the face of computing and made it easy to use for people to be creative. His work is an inspiration and he was taken too early and will be missed by everyone who has ever appreciated an Apple product..

Charlie O'Donnell, First Round Capital:

I teach a course called Intro to Tech Ventures at Fordham.  I don't really care too much if they write a winning business plan or build an app that gets a million downloads.  I want them to walk out of the class thinking that they can change the world driven by passion for quality, caring about customers, and being resilient--and that's what Steve Jobs did.  He went from being some kid in a garage to changing the way we live and how we interact with each other.  It's probably the second greatest story ever told.

Avner Ronen, Boxee:

Like many other entrepreneurs I am an Apple fanboy. Standing in lines to get the latest device. Hitting 'refresh' on my browser reading a "live" blog covering their latest product announcement. Jobs have changed the world for the better in numerous ways. He challenged and inspired everyone else to build better products. He made users expect more. He is responsible for spreading joy among millions of people.

His commencement speech from 2005 has been an inspiration on a personal level as well. Like many others I will share it with my kids when they grow up. It is sad he died at such a young age, but it seems he lived a full and great life, true to his principals and leaving behind a legacy that will live on for generations.

Mike Brown, Aol Ventures:

I remember buying my first iPhone and thinking to myself, 'wow, this is a truly unique user experience and what an amazing device.' It was a surprise and delight moment that I'd only experienced once before in my life when interacting with a consumer product [the other being flying on a Virgin Atlantic plane]. He really entrenched my belief that the true winners are those that make beautiful and highly functional experiences for consumers. Overall, his legacy will likely be unmatched and he already serves as an awesome inspiration to me and others who aspire to be the next generation of Jobs, Branson, etc.

Ricky Van Veen, College Humor:

Like many now, the way I tend to hear about notable deaths is via text message. And my reaction is usually "Oh, that's too bad." With Steve Jobs, it was different. I didn't even know how to respond. And that's how I felt when I read it--a full-body visceral reaction to the news. I then realized what a subtle and odd tribute it is to a technology innovator to have the news of his death carried by a product that was his brainchild.

Few things upset me more than unrealized potential. Steve saw industry after industry for what they *could* be, and not for what they are, and then made them better for everyone. He unlocked their potential. And I think about that in terms of Steve's life. Even with all he accomplished in his unfairly short time here, I'll still always wonder what else was bound to come out of that curious and brilliant mind. For people in the technology industry, yesterday we lost more than an innovator. We lost a role model, and a paragon of excellence. An example to the rest of us of how good we could be -- if we could just be Steve Jobs.

Apple Store on 5th Avenue, with a tribute to Steve Jobs spray-painted on a temporary construction barrier. October 5, 2011

Anil Dash, Activate:

The lesson I take from Steve Jobs' life isn't about any products or software, but much more about the channeling of ambition. Many, many people are driven and have lofty goals, but he made clear that you can only really capitalize on grandiose ambitions by channeling the energy of lots of other people towards that vision, and that's an amazingly powerful skill.

It's akin to James Brown; He's enormously influential on even the music we hear on the radio today, but he didn't play the drums or the horns on any of his big hits. He wasn't even that great of a singer. He just knew how to articulate a vision for how things should be in a way that would bring the best out of others.

And Jobs was similar to that, especially in that he recognized he wasn't just making technology, he was shaping _culture_. He acted like that from nearly the beginning of his career, at a time when such a idea seemed ludicrously grandiose. Just as Gates seemed wildly ambitious for imagining everyone would use a computer and use software, Jobs seemed crazy for imagining everyone would use a computer (in perhaps an unrecognizable form) to shape the way that culture is created. But as ever, what seems crazy is often just early.

Lauren Leto, Bnter:

Steve Jobs was a role model for us all in the most true sense of the word, not just a name to repeat as someone you'd like to resemble but an imposing persona to have in mind while we pitch, while we plan, while we provide. The generations before Jobs believed invention came from making objects fancier, adding bells and whistles, Jobs decided innovation was making objects simpler, making them intuitive. It's because of Jobs that our generation is no longer inventing, we're breaking things down.

Cody Brown, Commons Labs:

The first computer I ever owned was an iBook. I was 13, the processor was a blazing 600 Mhz, and my friends and family wanted me to buy a Dell. I could see their points about Apple being too 'niche' but I caved and I bought the iBook and I became a Mac person in the generic way a lot of people become Mac people. I'd spend hours on the MacRumors forums, I'd try to convince everyone I met to switch to Mac, and I repeatedly tried to get my parents to buy Apple stock. They didn't, but my grandma eventually caught wind of this and gave me 50 shares of stock for my birthday. Half those shares were sold this year to keep my company running when it was on the verge of falling apart. I made a long bet on Jobs and he returned the favor.

When I read that he passed last night I got quiet and I wanted to be alone. I never met steve jobs, I never even emailed him but I feel like he's been with with me and he's been a friend since I bought my first mac 10 years ago. There is nothing more anxiety inducing than the constant creation of new technology and Jobs, for so long, has countered this emotion with awe. When Jobs is on stage, Moore's Law and our own potential have always been positively correlated but he's never taken for granted that this happens naturally. I wanted nothing more than to meet him because I, like so many, craved to see what he was like off stage when things are hard and the answers aren't clear. But we don't have that option anymore, we only have recording of his life and his art which we often clutch in the palm of our hands. We've lost our leader in technology and I think we'd be lying to ourselves if we didn't also accept that we lost a moral and religious leader. Jobs spoke with a lucid philosophical clarity that was unmatched by anyone in tech and his endorsement meant everything. Those who had it, no longer can take it for granted and those who tried to get it, now need to think about why. I think we're going to do a lot of wandering now and I think we have a lot of hard questions to ask ourselves that we may have previously ignored. I think he'd say that this is good.

All pictures via Getty Images

Well traffic is no longer a problem at blip.tv. Monthly video views have tripled over the past six months to 330 million. That means the network, which has 3 billion video views to date, expects to clock 1 billion more each quarter.

"Our focus now is discovery," says co-founder Mike Hudack. With that in mind blip has redone their website, aiming to create a destination portal that will help users find new content, not just watch the show they stumble on through search or social.

The old blip.tv site had no notion of categories. Now an editorial team is curating verticals like comedy, sports and tech. "The thing we heard again and again from viewers was, 'we want to be programmed to',"  says Hudack. When a user arrives at a channel now, a playlist featuring several hours is already cued up.

Big brand advertisers can now sponsor site takeovers and brand specific channels, with Reebok backing Health and Fitness and T-Mobile USA as the official launch sponsor for the new site. Blip is so focused on the production values for their new site, they even designed the Reebok ad in-house.

The company, which just moved into new offices, has 50 employees and is still hiring. Of the 50,000 or so shows in the blip catalog, only 1,800, or roughly 5% are being featured on the site. The aim is to drive traffic to these programs and provide an incentive for the producers who didn't make the cut to step up their game. "We're drawing a line in the sand and saying you need certain elements," says Hudack.

The new blip.tv site is live here.

A senior citizen vlogger with a handlebar mustache pitched The Observer on his idea, a men’s grooming series, focusing largely on ornate facial hair. “Getting into the market is easy, because anyone is a publisher today,” he intoned. “Making money off of your ideas, that’s another story.”

That seemed to be the rub at this conference, entitled The Future of Digital Hollywood. “People think you’ve got great content, that will be the key,” said the panel’s host, Gary Delfiner, SVP at Screen Media Ventures. “But the whole mentality, build it and they will come, that doesn’t work anymore.”

Delfiner took a dramatic pause, or perhaps just a deep breath. “But for those of you who think there is no business here, well just take a look at Dina.”

Dina Kaplan, co-founder of blip.tv, smiled, cupping her chin in one hand. Blip is a New York based network for independent web shows ranging from videogame strategy seminars to tween singing sensations. “I can tell you that our tops shows are now pulling in hundreds of thousands and we expect that to be millions this year,” Ms. Kaplan said.

Ears around the room perked up. “For a long time people thought of us as the little engine that could,” she went on. “But this is the year people are going to realize we’re serious business.”

When it was founded back in 2005 blip had a simple thesis. There would be a huge market for a network of independently produced web series. This, of course, was a longstanding dream. Josh Harris had tried and failed with Pseudo back in 2000, despite telling the major networks on 60 minutes that he was coming for their heads.

“If you looked at the market back then, there were a lot of companies in the space who had raised gobs of money,” says Blip co-founder and CEO Mike Hudack. “But then we Youtube took off, their boards started pushing them to be “me too”, and chase the viral video world of dogs on skateboards.”

In the beginning the founders kept their days jobs and paid the bandwith costs out of their own pockets. “There was really just one web show at the time, Rocketboom,” says Kaplan, “So the whole thing was kind of built on a dream.”

Warren Lee, a venture partner at Canaan specializing in video, passed on blip when the company pitched him in 2008 but invested 18 months later. “It became clear that they really understood where they fit into the market, and that this was a business with a ton of potential to scale,” says Lee.

This year of blip’s more than 50,000 shows will earn six figures, enough to pay full-time employees and health insurance. In 2010 the company saw its ad revenue increase five fold and expect that to double or triple again this year.

The recent acquisition of New Next Networks by Youtube north of $40 million has put the spotlight on the business of original content for the web. “For a while everyone was focused on the bottom and the top,” said Ms. Kaplan. There were the amateur videos on Youtube which might go viral and there were the well produced corporate shows which got funneled to Hulu. “Now people are beginning to see that the value in the middle of that pyramid.”

The key to this success has been scale. blip does 140 million video views a month on 33 million uniques, with the average viewer sitting down for a 25 minute session. Shows on blip end up pretty much anywhere the eyeballs are, from Youtube to AOL. Ad revenue is split 50/50 between the folks producing the programs and blip. Even with their size , however,  blip has no interest in producing its own content. “We’ll never play in the Hulu sandbox,” says Kaplan.

The independent ethos is a key part of the success of programs on blip.tv. The most popular show on the network insists on keeping its growing business private. “I keep encouraging them to tell people about it,” says Kaplan. “But they feel like they might lose of their street cred with the fans if viewers knew they were making $450,000.” The joke around the blip office these days is that the stars of the network are now earning far more than the execs, says Kaplan. “But that just means we’re doing our jobs right.”