Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine had an idea: create some short videos about ninjas — and how they like to kill — and put them on the Web. Today, Ask a Ninja is so successful in video podcast form and on DVD, that the guys have created their own social network for fans.

Blogger & Podcaster: You recently launched a social net­work, and what else is going on with Ask A Ninja?

Kent Nichols: We’re launching a new fan site for our community at fans.askaninja.com.

Douglas Sarine: It’s going to have forums, videos. You could upload videos, pictures.

KN: MP3s, the whole thing.

DS: It’s going to be a phenom­enal place for Ask A Ninja fans to meet up, talk about anything.

KN: And for us and for the ninja to interact with the fans. A lot of it is going to be allowing fans [to] create little clans based on their own interests. As it evolves, we’ll probably put more content just for the fans on that site, like maybe outtakes. And in every ninja episode there’s at least a good minute of high-quality comedy that we just cut for pac­ing reasons.

We’re also working on a book right now, deep into that. That’s coming out in … late summer ’08. It’s going to be a parody of The Boy Scout Manual. It’s The Ninja Handbook: A Guide for Non-Ninjas To Become More Ninjalike. That’s really fun, but boy writ­ing a book; that’s not a metaphor.

DS: Some people reached out to us and then for some reason we thought, oh, that’d be a great idea.

KN: That’s a great idea! Let’s write a book! Some publisher came to us. We got a great literary agent in New York and we wrote a sample chapter and basically based on that we got a lot of interest in the New York publishing community.

B&P: Are you going to build new media content around it, with lots of illustra­tions and fun stuff like that, too?

KN: We’ll probably build some new media, but then also use the social network for people to create their own groups so they can actually try to start becoming more ninjalike and work through the merit-badge system.

DS: Yes, they can actually go through the book and track it on the social networking site.

KN: And the illustrator came through the fan community, actually. We hired him originally to do the DVD artwork, and now we’ve brought him on to do the ninja artwork in the book. And it’s a huge project and he’s a great guy named Mike Lee out of New Orleans.

B&P: How did Ask a Ninja get started?

KN: Well, we’d started writing this long animated screenplay, like it was going to be an online series. And we learned so much about writing for online in that process because…

DS: And we learned that neither one of us are animators.

KN: Or can draw. But we learned [that] shorter is much better, cramming as [many] jokes in there as possible. So, we started Ask A Ninja as kind of a way to reinvest ourselves into that ninja world that we’d created, and it was this rich, lush ninja situation. It was just kind of a side project, something that was easy for us to do and then it took off.

DS: And Kent came up with a way to do it for free, or nearly for free. Shoot it at his apartment against a wall that was painted chroma-key blue. And using — the first episode just used his dirty laundry.

KN: Yeah, as the ninja costumes. I had really become like a self-taught expert in digital filmmaking. So I knew how to do all the production aspects. My goal was always to do short films and more filmlike cinematic things. And that we shot to success with just a ninja yelling in front of a wall. It’s kind of antithetical to what we had been trying to do.

B&P: What is the division of work like?

DS: It’s actually a nice creative flow between us because each one of us gets to make enough creative decisions. But also, at the end of the day, it’s only the two of us. We don’t have a network or a studio telling us you have to cut this or you can’t do that or it needs to be this, that, or the other. We can have an episode that’s two minutes. We can have an episode that’s four minutes. It all depends on what we find amusing. We’re the only gatekeepers; like Kent says, when he hits send on it, there’s nothing stopping it. There it is. It’s out there for a million people to look at.

B&P: They’re obviously mostly short, but do you have a target length? You don’t want 20 minutes, maybe?

KN: Doug wants everything to be two minutes and I’m happy when we get them under four. Closer to three min­utes is probably our sweet spot.

DS: Yeah, but there are judgment calls, like the movie-pitch one. How long is that one?

KN: Yeah, some, like the movie-pitch one, I let go basically all the way just be­cause it was so intricately constructed and it just amused me, the whole thing. So, I was like, you know what, let’s just keep …

DS: It’s just trusting his judgment on it.

B&P: How about advertising? Are your audiences OK with that? I remember you used to just have an ad at the end. I don’t recall when you started the lower third.

DS: We took time and we explored a couple of options. Revver worked very well for us for a while, with the clickable ad at the end. And then [the lower-third ad] was the one we found that was most acceptable to us as content creators, palatable to our audience, and that was advantageous to advertisers, as well.

KN: And it’s actually pretty slick. We just had a meeting with someone in Hollywood and she was like, you’re sponsored by ask.com, but where do you have advertising? She was totally aware of which brand was sponsoring us, what was going on, but she had no idea — our advertising was so seamless that she was unaware of where it was.

DS: And the Ask campaign had, on aver­age, an 8.4-percent click-through rate, which was 400 percent higher than any other one that Federated Media had ever had.

B&P: What partnerships or alliances have you guys done to get the show going?

KN: Federated Media, you know, we’re all Hollywooded up with adult supervi­sion to kind of help negotiate deals and [help] with time management and things.

DS: People doing the things we [don’t necessarily] want to do. Amplifier’s been great for helping us blow out our store a little bit.

KN: And we’ve partnered with Ning to launch the social network, which has been great. We’ve been able to get up and running with a full social network in under a week.

That’s the great thing about Ning: you can totally customize it. Their back-end powers it all, but you can fully customize the front end.

B&P: Could you talk about numbers in terms of downloads?

KN: Yeah, we’re [at] about 2.7 million video downloads a month. It’s definitely been growing. It’s funny: during the college summer hiatus, our numbers went down a little bit. And then the last two weeks of August, when school was back in session, it went zoom! I think [because] kids are coming back and they have broadband.

B&P: You talked about being “Holly­wooded up” earlier. I know you’ve done some stuff with film, but is going into traditional media what you want to do, or have you had offers from mainstream media?

KN: Probably. We just want to be a creative team, and the representation that we chose, we’re fortunate enough that they were passionate about us. They had a tradition of taking pre-You­Tube-generation Internet-video creators and helping them create careers in Hollywood. That’s why we were excited about signing with both United Talent Agency and Mosaic [Media Group], the Miller Company, because they had expe­rience in growing talent. And we don’t want to be just the ninja guys. We want to have rich, robust careers.

DS: And like you just said, going into traditional media, those are both com­panies that don’t see it that way. They just see it as are you a quality content creator. They don’t [care] whether you’re traditional or new media, though they have support mechanisms.

KN: And we educate them on new media all the time. We had to say, look man, we can get money from an adver­tising deal here. We don’t have to be so dependent on Hollywood money. And so, that was a first for them, honestly, because…

DS: And then they got a big check and they’re like oh, OK, yeah, absolutely. We show them a business opportunity and then they enhance our ability to optimize that business opportunity, and they get their piece of it.

B&P: A lot of people have aligned themselves with networks. I assume that you’ve had those kinds of opportuni­ties and you’ve stayed on your own. What was your thought process about whether to join up with other organi­zations, whether through networks or partnerships?

KN: Oh well, honestly, by the time we — we were too big. We were growing throughout 2006 and we would talk to some people and they’d be like, “We will give you this bag of magic beans if you join our network.” And it was just like, “Well, why would we give away rights for that?” And so, we were in kind of a painful adolescence for a little bit there, where we were too big for a lot of things, but too small for other things. We’re not big, big, media, but we were way too big for some of these early networks and things.

DS: Yeah, and that being said, I don’t think we’re opposed to future partner­ships with people, depending on — for other projects and new things that we’re developing.

KN: Absolutely not.