WebProNews

Rocky-historied video blog Rocketboom has a new sponsorship model and a major new sponsor. The first sponsor paying out to associate its name with Ms. Joanne Colan is online video phenom YouTube.

Andrew Baron, Rocketboom's founder, announced the new model and sponsor on his blog. Companies can buy a simple text frame (reminiscent of the old "brought to you by" announcements on daytime television) that says "This Episode Sponsored by".

And that'll run you about $3000 a pop. It raises to $5000 after September.

Baron also has set up a Rocketboom channel on YouTube, where you can make yourself with all that Joanne (and maybe some Amanda, too, but I didn't look that far.)

What was most interesting about Baron's blog post was a short history detailing how much the site struggled in the beginning and about how difficult it was to keep the show afloat.

He writes:

Just over a year ago, we ran out money for Rocketboom. We were not mature enough to consider investments and so I decided Rocketboom had to go forward with an E-bay auction….

I'll never forget the fear of failure that buit up to 5 seconds before the auction ended a loser, followed by a final refresh click with just 2 seconds to go that suddenly showed a $40,000 winner. To this day, I had never publicized that $40,000 was actually our reserve, helping to set the high market value.