Website, branding and distribution · 2019 to 2022
Black History in Two Minutes (or so): a Webby-nominated website
AONE Creative designed and built the series website and its digital branding, set the release calendar and published all 88 episodes as a video podcast and on YouTube and social, from 2019 to 2022. The site was a 2022 Webby nominee in Websites and Mobile Sites, Education, and the series won five Webby Awards.
- Black History in Two Minutes (or so)
- Website and video podcast
- 2022 Webby nominee
- Five Webby Awards
- Black History in Two Minutes (or so)
- Website and video podcast
- 2022 Webby nominee
- Five Webby Awards
- Black History in Two Minutes (or so)
- Website and video podcast
- 2022 Webby nominee
- Five Webby Awards
The brief
Accurate history, made to travel
The series tells Black history in short, factually accurate episodes with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., some with teaching guides for the classroom. It needed a home online, one look across every platform it went to, and a release plan that kept a younger audience coming back.
AONE Creative designed and built the website and the series’ digital branding outside the episodes themselves, planned the release calendar, hosted the episode files and the podcast feed, and published each episode everywhere it ran.
The website
A home for every episode
- Episodes
88 episode pages
Each episode has its own page with the player, the story behind it and its credits, and the episodes page and the menu sort them by season.
- Classrooms
Two teaching guides
A Season One guide with lessons, graphic organizers, text-dependent questions and plug-and-play activities, and a Season Two guide, so teachers could take the episodes into class.
- Phones
Built for the small screen
The audience came to the series mostly through apps on their phones, so every page was designed to read and play well there first.
- Recognition
A 2022 Webby nominee
AONE Creative entered the site in the 26th Annual Webby Awards, and it was named a nominee in Websites and Mobile Sites, Education.
- Today
Kept as an archive
The site ran at blackhistoryintwominutes.com from 2019 to 2022. AONE Creative keeps it online as an archive at bhitm.aone.la, with every episode playing from the series’ YouTube channel. About this archive
Digital branding
One look on every screen
AONE Creative built the series’ look for its digital channels: key art that pairs the series logo with black and white portraits, and a title card for every episode, archival photography in black and white with the title set in orange and white.
The same cards ran on the website, the podcast apps, YouTube and social, so an episode was recognizable wherever someone found it.
The release calendar
A new episode every Friday
Full episodes went out on Fridays on every podcast app, Facebook and YouTube, and on Instagram TV on Mondays. Each week also had a 60-second cut-down for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and a 15-second vertical promo for stories. 80 of the 88 episodes were released on a Friday.
Season 1, 61 episodesSeason 2, 27 episodesEach dot is one release, by the date it went out.
- June 4, 2019Launch week: three episodes in three days, starting with Reconstruction: The Vote.
- June 19, 2020Land: Giving Rise to the Famous Phrase 40 Acres and a Mule, released on Juneteenth.
- October 30, 2020Barack Obama’s 2008 Election, released four days before the 2020 election.
- October 19, 2021Season 2 opens with The History of the Black Soldier.
- February 2022A release every Friday of Black History Month, from Black Feminist Organizations to Black Greek-Letter Organizations.
- May 27, 2022The final release, The Origins of Black Service Organizations.
All 88 release dates
Season 1, 61 episodes
- Reconstruction: The Vote
- Convict Leasing
- Madame C.J. Walker: The First Black Millionairess
- Maya Angelou: 20th Century Renaissance Woman
- Separate But Equal: Homer Plessy and the Case That Upheld the Color Line
- The Fisk Jubilee Singers: Perform the Spirituals and Save Their University
- The Tulsa Massacre | Black Wall Street
- Ida B. Wells: Fearless Investigative Reporter of Southern Horrors
- Harriet Tubman
- Sojourner Truth: ‘Oprah’s No. 1 Black History Heroine’
- Freedman’s Bank
- Robert Smalls: A Slave Who Sailed Himself to Freedom
- Shirley Chisholm: The First Black Congresswoman
- Booker T. Washington
- Malcolm X: How Did He Inspire a Movement?
- Martin Luther King Jr.: Was His ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech Improvised?
- The L.A. Riots
- The Birth of the Black Panthers
- Jesse Jackson’s Run for the Presidency (1984)
- The Double V Campaign of World War II
- The Birth of Jazz
- Affirmative Action
- The Harlem Renaissance
- The Tuskegee Study
- The Civil Rights Movement
- Black Power
- The Harlem Hellfighters of World War I
- Black Feminism
- Ella Baker: ‘The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement’
- Henrietta Lacks: The Woman with the Immortal Cells
- Katherine Johnson
- Frederick Douglass | The Most Photographed American of the 19th Century
- Abolition in the North | Elizabeth Freeman Sues for Freedom
- African American Higher Education
- The Black Church
- 19th Century Black Discoveries
- Black Explorers
- Jack Johnson: Winner of the 1910’s “Fight of the Century”
- First African-American Patent Holders
- The Black Press: From Freedom’s Journal to The Crisis, Ebony and Jet
- John Lewis: The Fight for the Right to Vote
- Lynching
- The Red Summer
- Land: Giving Rise to the Famous Phrase 40 Acres and a Mule
- Fort Mose: The First All-Black Settlement in the U.S.
- Civil War and Emancipation
- Hank Aaron: Breaking the Home Run Record
- Soul Train
- Jackie Robinson Integrates Baseball
- The Beginning of Black History: Juan Garrido
- Protesting the Birth of a Nation
- Marcus Garvey: Leader of a Revolutionary Global Movement
- Barack Obama’s 2008 Election
- The Birth of Hip Hop
- The Transatlantic Slave Trade
- The Second Middle Passage
- The First Underground Railroad
- Migrations: From Exodusters to Great Migrations
- School Integration
- W.E.B. Du Bois: The New Negro at The 1900 Paris Exposition
- Oscar Micheaux: The First Black Indie Filmmaker
Season 2, 27 episodes
- The History of the Black Soldier
- The 15th Amendment
- The History of Black Farmers
- Mamie Till Mobley
- The Clotilda
- Segregated Travel in Jim Crow America
- Chicago Sound: The Birth of Modern Gospel
- Job Ben Solomon
- The GI Bill of Rights
- Integrating Wall Street
- Black Feminist Organizations
- Black Power and the Birth of Black Studies
- Brenda Travis
- Black Greek-Letter Organizations
- The Women’s Club Movement
- Black Liberation and Womanist Theology
- Black Women Laborers
- The 1893 World’s Fair
- The History of Negro League Baseball
- The Roll Back
- Free Black Americans Before the Civil War
- The Movement and Campus Violence
- Poor People’s Campaign
- Congressional Black Caucus
- Father Divine
- Elite Black Public High Schools in Jim Crow America
- The Origins of Black Service Organizations
Release dates: the episode pages in the archive at bhitm.aone.la. Release plan: AONE Creative’s 2021 distribution plan for the series.
The platform map
One episode, every platform
Each release went out from one plan: the website, a podcast feed in video and audio, the full episode on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, promos for social, and a partner channel.
- Home
The website
An episode page with the player, the story and the credits, plus teaching guides for classrooms.
- blackhistoryintwominutes.com
- Teaching guides
- Podcast feed
Video and audio podcast
One feed, hosted on Blubrry, reaching every major app.
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts
- Spotify
- Amazon
- iHeartRadio
- Stitcher
- TuneIn
- Full episodes
Video platforms
The full episode, posted to each platform’s own player.
- YouTube, Fridays
- Facebook, Fridays
- Instagram TV, Mondays
- Social
Weekly promos
Cut-downs for the feed and vertical promos for stories.
- 60-second cut-downs
- 15-second vertical stories
- YouTube
- Partner
ReachTV
A partnership that extended the series’ reach and opened a revenue stream.
- ReachTV
- Podcast
A video podcast from 2019
We published the series as a video podcast when most podcasts were still audio only. It won the 2020 People’s Voice Award and the 2021 Webby Award for documentary podcasts.
- Social
Campaigns for younger viewers
Campaigns on Instagram Reels and Twitter reached younger viewers and brought in new ones, and several episodes went viral.
- Awards
The Webby campaigns
We ran the series’ Webby campaigns, including the People’s Voice vote in 2020, and entered the website in 2022.
Recognition and reach
A Webby nomination for the site, five Webby Awards for the series
- 2022Webby nominee for the website, Websites and Mobile Sites, Education
- 5Webby Awards for the series, 2020 to 2022, including one People’s Voice
- 3Years in a row with a Webby Award
- 2022: a Webby nomination in Websites and Mobile Sites, Education, for the website, and a Webby Award in Social, Education & Discovery (Video)
- 2021: Webby Awards in Podcasts, Documentary, and Social, Education & Discovery (Video)
- 2020: a Webby Award in Social, Education & Discovery (Video), and the People’s Voice Award in Podcasts, Documentary
Awards: The Webby Awards.
- 7.6MYouTube views since the channel opened in May 2019
- 37.4KYouTube subscribers
- 70K+Followers on Instagram (47.7K) and Facebook (23K)
- 3.06MFacebook post impressions in 30 days, summer 2019
Audience: the series’ YouTube channel and its Instagram and Facebook pages, November 1, 2026; a 30-day Facebook Page report in AONE Creative’s archive, summer 2019.
What it taught us
Distribution is part of the story
Great content still has to be found. A clear website, one look on every screen and a release every Friday helped an educational series win five Webby Awards, and put its site among the Webby nominees. We plan series launches the same way today, and AI content production now speeds the versioning, cutting each episode for every platform it goes to.
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