Remember Lonelygirl15, that fake YouTube vlog filmed in some guy's bedroom, starring an actress pretending to be adorable jailbait? It's now a $5 million web production company. Business Insider explains how this happened.

Long before Justin Bieber was famous for his album and looking like a lesbian, he was just a little 12-year-old Canadian boy uploading videos on YouTube. But unlike the millions of others who do the same, Bieber got lucky.

Remember LonelyGirl15, that fake-ass scripted YouTube series that got really popular for a minute when everybody thought it was real and turned into a media phenomenon? Well it's coming back in a major way! Which means its rabid fans are still lurking out there, and have been doing who knows what for the last several weeks waiting for this. "LG15: The Resistance" (*chuckle*) will debut 12 new weekly episodes next month, produced by a CBS-funded firm and "integrated" with advertisements. Resist, yes. The show's promo—a total ripoff of those 'Anonymous' anti-scientology vids—after the jump.

Click to viewBuried in Kara Swisher's piece about EQAL, the new "social entertainment company" from Lonelygirl15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, is the dilly that one of the previously unnamed investors providing $5 million in funding is none other than Google's cupcake princess, Marissa Mayer. What's the next project from the YouTubepreneurs made good? Well, it's going to be kind of like lonelygirl15, except with a shot of social-network frosting. [BoomTown]

EQAL, the L.A. Web-video studio which first brought you Lonelygirl15's bedroom antics, today announced it's raised $5 million in funding. The moneymen backing Bree's braintrust include angel investor Ron Conway, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, reality-TV producer Conrag Riggs, former Google exec Georges Harik, and Spark Capital. Bree, who made the cover of Wired is gone from Lonelygirl15, having been killed off, but the series continues, as does EQAL's KateModern, which now runs on Bebo. EQAL CEO Miles Beckett and president Greg Goodfried told the Wall Street Journal the company is already profitable, having earned money with product placements woven into plotlines. Sounds more plausible than selling online ads.

Jessica Rose, the actress who played LonelyGirl15 in a series of Web videos, is back on YouTube. The new show is called Blood Cell and judging by the trailer below, it has all the elements your looking for: shaky handheld camera work, a bedroom set, and Bree Rose in a tank top and boxer shorts. No P. Monkey, though.

The company that was supposed to replace YouTube is now for sale for $300-500k and the assumption of $1 million in debt. Revver promised big bucks to video creators who used the video sharing service. That money was supposed to come from lucrative video ads; that money apparently never came. The story of Revver's mindblowing incompetence (with exclusive cocaine anecdote) follows.

Online video platform Revver announced it has paid out $1 million dollars to video producers from its ad revenue sharing program, just in time for its one year anniversary. That puts Revver's total revenue at around $2-$2.5 million, since it splits fees 50/50 after paying 20% to a distributor. Sounds great. But it doesn't prove that Revver has a sustainable, profitable model—not after the year it's had, losing key staff, being banned from MySpace, losing LonelyGirl15 and several other notable video producers like Ze Frank and Ask A Ninja, and a rumored buyout. Why?

LonelyGirl15, the runaway YouTubes hit that we once watched for 15 seconds and never returned to after deciding we didn't care if Bree is a real person or not, has just wrapped its first season. Yay? [CNN.com]

Also, somewhat unrelated: if the Lonelygirl15 videos are going to continue, can she please stop overplucking the middle of her eyebrows? So much room for improvement there.

The Times credits the local tech columnist who (as we said) first identified YouTube star LonelyGirl15:

Ah, New Media never felt more like Old Media. Here's Jessica Rose, aka YouTube videoblogger LonelyGirl15. She's not a geek like her character. She lives in Hollywood, and she wants to be in movies. (Granted, she also did this project for very little money.) After a professional acting education, Rose earned her fame with a vlog that kept thousands guessing whether she was real. Which is kind of New Media, but kind of Blair Witch redux.

Times couch potato Virginia Heffernan can finally sleep at night: Lonelygirl15 — AKA Bree, a YouTube user whose video diaries of her life as an beautiful, home-schooled nerd captured the hearts of chronic masturbators near and far — has been definitively exposed as a fake, a calculated effort to create an online drama in hopes of developing a movie from the resulting buzz. You care, right? Maybe someone in marketing should, because at one point, over 700,000 YouTube views were devoted to this girl. On her corporate blog Screens, Heffernan has made Lonelygirl15 into her great white whale, first proclaiming the girl deserving of her own television show (July 28); since then, Heff's devoted 15 posts to the cult of Bree. And today, finally, Lonelygirl15 earns her place in the "real news" pantheon with Heffernan's story published on actual newsprint.

LonelyGirl15 has a name. The YouTube video blogger who acted in a fictional show about a homeschooled religious girl, her daily life, and her boy friend (and got on CNN in the process) was outed as a fake last week when bloggers traced messages and video blog posts back to a Beverly Hills talent agency. This weekend, the still-unnamed creators of the vlog saga posted a forum message admitting that the show was scripted.

• An unscrupulous LiveJournaler posted a fake Craigslist sex ad and published nearly 200 responses, including that of Microsoft employee Jerry Cummings (Warning: Dongs), pictured here. While this was a real asshat stunt to pull, that won't stop us from tittering at Jerry for sending dick pics using his work address. [Waxy.org]