🔴 Inside NowThis's fastest-growing show ever

Welcome back to Self-Timer, our written Q&A series. For today’s issue, we spoke with Michael Vito Valentino, two years into his tenure as Editor-in-Chief at NowThis, to discuss Standup Desk, their fastest-growing Instagram show to date.

In this issue:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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This year, Standup Desk has put 74 comedians in front of an unlikely audience — people at work at the office. The premise has been a hit; it’s the fastest growing show in the NowThis portfolio.

Michael Vito Valentino is the editor-in-chief at NowThis, where Standup Desk is one of several shows in circulation.

In his two-year tenure, he’s also led the development of the company’s viral, 92M+ follower short-form universe, Are You Okay?, Judgy, and Crosswalk Crush, along with NowThis Impact — the branch focused on news across politics, culture and social justice.

In February, Standup Desk launched with its first guest, Meredith Dietz, setting the tone with this caption: “welcome to standup desk, where your favorite comics stop by the @nowthis office and try to disrupt the workspace in a different way than the tech bros mean.”

The show’s format is simple — a comedian performs at a standing desk in the middle of a NowThis office, and the employees sitting and working around them try not to laugh. Think NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series meets Impractical Jokers (an American hidden camera and improv comedy show).

The challenge, for the comic, is performing to a silent room, and turning the awkwardness of an office into part of the bit. Most recently, they’ve featured:

Follow Standup Desk on Instagram and TikTok.

The answers below have been edited for tone and clarity. Bolding and italics our own.

Michael Vito Valentino: Someone on the development team pitched it a couple of months before it was greenlit, and I thought it might be too on the nose. Then a new producer came on, started going through things looking for inspiration, and made a pretty solid case for it. When two really talented people on the team, Sheena Oglesby (VP, Digital Originals) and Taryn O’Connor (Senior Development Producer) are both telling me there’s something here, maybe I should open up my mind. There’s nothing I like more than being proven wrong.

So we did a demo, and the demo was great. I said, “Oh, there’s something here.” Then we worked through the little things we’d have to fix to make it really pop off, and the rest is history. It blew up to 100,000 followers in a matter of days.

A lot of those little things were about the gameplay:

We also talked about making it more of an elimination game, where anyone who breaks gets removed and you see how many people are still standing at the end. But that’s a hard story to tell in 90 seconds. If we expand into a longer format, that becomes possible.

Also, we A/B tested a POV overlay — the “try not to laugh” framing — to see whether the audience needed the game explained or whether the content explained itself.

Michael: Our North Star is a Gen Z female audience, and comedy can skew a little more male, so the form itself lets us bring new audiences to comedians whose content wouldn't normally get in front of them.

Beyond that, it's taste. We have a celebrity talent team looking at pitches, producers who are very involved, and meetings with comedy clubs across the country and improv institutions like UCB.

We're incubators; we can give an up-and-comer a platform, and when a great set gains them ten or twenty thousand followers, that changes a career. Then we use the A-listers to further legitimize the space, which makes the show more valuable for the up-and-comers too.

Michael: We consider “a pilot” as the first eight episodes. Within that window, we're making all kinds of tweaks and adjustments to get it right. Usually within those eight we can see what the audience is responding to, and we either greenlight it to continue or pivot to something that's hitting a little better.

We believe in our failures. We want to fail fast and fail big. Last year we did twenty shows, and the hits were bangers. This year we're doing even more.

Michael: Viewership and engagement rate are the top two. Revenue is something people forget about, and it's vital. We're not a charity. These shows cost money, and there has to be a pipeline to validate them. Sometimes a show is just too early, and we'll put it on the shelf and bring it back in a couple of months as advertiser demand changes.

Follower growth matters, but followers aren't everything. The only institutions that truly care about followers are us, for vanity, and advertisers, who use it as a gateway into what comes next. The audience doesn't think in followers. They're discovering us through completely different avenues.

Standup Desk's best-performing episode, featuring SNL writer Asha Ward as the guest comic, pulled 15M views and 2.53M engagements across platforms.

Every episode posts to Standup Desk's own accounts across platforms and runs as a collab with NowThis (which, as of this writing, has 3.8M followers) and the guest comic. Michael says that's standard practice on everything they publish.

Standup Desk has become the fastest-growing NowThis show ever.

From Q1 2026 (it launched in February) to Q2:

The better the show performs, the more options it opens in terms of brand and talent deals, and the more it opens up possibilities for bigger comics to come to the desk.

For independent creator guests, Self-Timer usually runs a monthly income breakdown here. Since this show sits under a network, we’ve swapped dollars for mechanics: what the show has to prove, who pays for it, and how a comedian gets in the room.

Our sales and revenue team is always looking for creative ways to have brands tap into our shows, and Standup Desk is no different in that respect. The first brand we partnered with was Uplift Desk which is…you guessed it, a literal standing desk. We actually opened the episode with our comic rising ON the desk, and it was hysterical.

We’re intentional on keeping branded content from feeling like an ad, and because of that our branded engagement is equal to or better than unbranded episodes. For our partnership with Uplift Desk, we really leaned in and made it a little more obvious by playing around with the desks features throughout the set. 

Eight episodes is the pilot window, and the greenlight decision depends on audience response. Shows that don't clear the bar get shelved rather than killed, and can likely come back when advertiser demand shifts.

We’re always looking for new talent — and can be reached by DM and our team will be in touch to chat further. For Standup Desk, any links to sets you’ve done is always helpful so we can get a feel for your style, how you’d perform in our space.

It’s one thing to be funny, it’s another to play into the awkwardness of a quiet room!