Veronica Belmont is sitting in a downtown San Francisco office cubicle, emailing from her BlackBerry. A handwritten sign pinned to her wall reads ‘talent’ in large letters. Although Belmont is as comfortable with irony as she is with technology – she used to tinker with the gadgets her parents brought home from their jobs in the toy industry and hooked up a modem to the family telephone line – her geeky girl-next-door persona has made her a star, of sorts. After she began co-hosting the web TV show Tekzilla, which started as a tiny blip on the vast YouTube radar screen, viewers jumped to 10 million a month. Tekzilla is a mix of tech tutorials, thinly veiled “sponsorships” and diatribes about wireless routers and the latest gizmos. In the fickle realm of internet video, a show such as this does more than offer brands a way to reach such a coveted demographic: it can turn a small company into a major internet network.

The firm behind Tekzilla, Revision3, was created in Los Angeles in 2005 by a breakaway group of employees from the cable network TechTV. Its chief executive is an improbably fresh-faced 49-year-old, Jim Louderback, who has racked up numerous media technology jobs, most notably as a presenter on TechTV and as editor-in-chief of PC Magazine.

Louderback says the business model is simple: attract a large audience for niche channels, and advertisers will follow. Tekzilla, which attracts more viewers than any of his company’s 30 or so other shows, is aimed at tech enthusiasts aged 12–35. Advertisers such as Adidas and Anheuser-Busch love the show not just because of its huge audience, he says, but because Revision3 can feed exact click-through data, including where viewers come from and how long they stay, to help advertisers develop their campaigns.

“We do things you can’t do on traditional TV,” he declares. “We distribute our daily tips from Tekzilla all over the place. It’s easy to put on YouTube. What we really need to do is show them the results. We can say: ‘You spent $100 and you had these exact results.’ We need to show that with third-party research, go to advertisers and say it’s working and it’s great.

“We’ve seen tremendous results from putting brands next to our long-running programmes – those with real communities, high comment- to-view ratios and predictable views,” he adds. Shows that deliver 100,000 views an episode are far easier to plan for and monetise than the viral-focused videos that obsess many online advertisers and producers.

Aside from its focus on video, Revision3 runs like most other websites, with cool offices in a new warehouse district near the San Francisco Giants baseball stadium. There are no green rooms to prep guests (they rarely even have guests), no hair and make-up stylists, and a slim budget.

“Tekzilla does well because it’s targeted and advertisers like reaching the show’s tech-savvy, smart, early-adopter audience,” says Daisy Whitney, host and creator of the New Media Minute, a web TV show that analyses the medium. “Younger generations are particularly engaged with online video I absolutely believe a web show could get more viewers than a traditional show.”

Mike McGuire, a senior analyst at Gartner, adds that web shows have the potential to reach a much wider audience, in aggregate, than any network TV show. “There are hundreds of millions of smartphones and computers, and internet TV shows are always just a click away instead of only being available four times per month for 30 minutes or an hour.” The only hurdle, he says, is the advertisers’ preference for “concentrated” viewing, when a large group watches all at once.

“Another challenge is the context of users,” says McGuire. “[Traditional] TV formats are well-established – sitcoms are 30 minutes, dramas 60 minutes – and those don’t translate well.” Yet he is confident web shows could reach critical mass once we all start being more selective about our TV shows and tune in to the web from our living-room HDTV.

Belmont points out that there are countless ways to watch Tekzilla now, including YouTube and Digg. “What will take internet TV into homes is a set-top box,” she says. “People like the comfort factor if they’re going to watch a 40-minute show. We’re limited to work or home computers. We’re available on the Roku digital video player, but once the capability is integrated into every at-home device we’ll see an uptick in viewers because it will be just as easy to access as any other traditional TV show.”

Of course, for now, Tekzilla feels a lot more indie. Belmont and co-host Patrick Norton make snarky asides on air. Norton slurps a Diet Coke during the taping, studiously disinterested. Belmont taps on her BlackBerry between takes. Some of the writing uses a goofy lingo only the Facebook faithful understand. There’s also a sense that anyone could make the show – if they had a high-def camera and a little insight into the latest tech news.

Indeed, McGuire notes that new shows are popping up each week, each enticing a niche audience and a narrow band of advertisers. It is not far-fetched, he says, to surmise that soon there may be thousands of web TV shows, each with a small following but contributing to a total viewership greater than that of traditional TV. For the viewer, this can only mean more selection and more choices, whatever the quality threshold.