the j. botter weblog

Amanda Congdon announced this morning that she has left Rocketboom, the wildly popular daily videoblog she co-created with Andrew Barron. Apparently Andrew doesn’t want Amanda on the show anymore, and since he owns 51% of Rocketboom, Amanda had no choice but to accept it.

In no way will Rocketboom succeed without Amanda. The show wasn’t popular because of the format, it was popular because of Amanda’s personality and humor. It certainly didn’t attain the viewership it did because of Andrew’s camera skills.

Update 12:14PM – Apparently, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. Andrew responded on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group about the situation:

I have just learned of this myself from watching Amanda’s video. I guess it is in fact over.

I’m not sure what I will do – I have no one else to take Amanda’s place and haven’t really ever imagined Rocketboom without her except for the past week as everything has been up in the air

I also have no doubt too that Amanda will go on to do great things, that this is still only the beginning

I’ve also been alerted that Amanda and Andrew were not dating and have not dated. I still hope this is resolved in a different manner; Rocketboom won’t be the same without Amanda, though I have no doubts whatsoever that I’ll follow her wherever she ends up.

Update 3:59PM - Andrew Baron has responded to Mathew Ingram’s inquiry about the situation. He says that the issues came about because of Amanda wanting to move to Los Angeles for personal opportunities. Baron says that the Rocketboom team had asked Amanda to wait a few weeks while they figured out how to continue the show, but Amanda wanted to get out of New York immediately and informed the Rocketboom team (along with the rest of the world) that she was leaving….via her videoblog this morning.

We wanted her to get to L.A. to pursue her personal opportunities as soon as possible, but her demand to move this week without waiting any longer, without a justification, and without an adequate proposal for a plan for how the show itself would work, we were unable to uproot Rocketboom from NYC at this time.

Andrew also posted a notice on the Rocketboom website, where he says the following:

We wanted to meet her demands to move production out to L.A., however, we are a small company and have not been able to figure out a way to make it work, financially and in many other ways at this time. While we continue to remain with open arms, Amanda has in fact quit and left Rocketboom.

Andrew also says that Rocketboom will be back this coming Monday, July 10 with an interim host and that they are in the process of looking for a replacement for Amanda right now. As for Amanda, Jason Calacanis has made her an offer that, in my opinion, would be hard to refuse: whatever she wants in terms of money AND exclusive rights to her videos. All Jason asks for is a six-month window of Netscape exclusivity for her to be the daily face of Netscape. And hey, it’s not a bad face to have.

Dave Winer is a friend of both Amanda and Andrew, and he has this:

I’ve been talking with Andrew Baron about this for a few weeks now, since my trip back east between Vloggercon and BloggerCon on June 17. I’ve read some of the correspondence between them, and from my perspective, it’s totally unfair to say that Amanda was fired.She says Andrew was no longer interested in being her partner, but that contradicts everything I’ve heard Andrew say. Amanda is not an authority on what Andrew is interested in.

I’m pretty sure Amanda wanted to take the show to Los Angeles and leave Andrew and the rest of the people at Rocketboom behind. It’s not clear whether she was going to pay Andrew (he hasn’t been drawing a salary, while Amanda has) or if she had offered to buy him out.