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DEFY Media had the audience. Who had the money?
Smosh, Clevver and Honest Trailers made DEFY Media hard to ignore. Its 2018 collapse exposed the awkward economics of owning the show while somebody else owns the screen.
Zefr knows what your ad is sitting next to
A business born around movie clips now helps advertisers judge the company their ads keep. Its wager: understanding one video is more useful than fearing an entire channel.
Electrify buys into YouTube’s brains trust
Behind Veritasium, Mentour Pilot and fern sits a company buying stakes in curiosity. Electrify’s wager: a creator’s audience can support a bigger business without losing the voice that built it.
YouTube
Twenty years after three ex-PayPal employees uploaded a clip from the San Diego Zoo, YouTube pays creators more than any studio and gets watched more than any TV network. Here is how the video site became infrastructure.
The company that indexed the web is now betting everything on an AI it calls Gemini - and for the first time, the search box has competition it built itself.
Telfaz11
Telfaz11 is a Riyadh-based creative media studio that pioneered Arabic online video in the early 2010s and has since grown into one of Saudi Arabia's leading film and content producers. Founded in 2011 by Alaa Fadan, Ali Al Kalthami and Ibraheem Alkhairallah, it began as a YouTube-first network aimed at Saudi youth and evolved into feature films, streaming originals and branded content. Its 2022 wrestling comedy 'Sattar' became the highest-grossing Saudi film ever, and the studio holds a multi-picture deal with Netflix.
GGContent (GC Social Media marketing Inc.)
GGContent (GC Social Media marketing Inc.) is a global influencer-marketing firm that connects game publishers and consumer brands with creators across Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. Founded in 2017 and led by CEO JH Kim, the company pairs a hands-on gaming background with an AI insights platform, ContentFlux, that mines live streams, videos, and social posts across YouTube, Twitch, CHZZK, and SOOP to identify trends, sentiment, and the influencers actually moving a market. With 600+ campaigns and a database of hundreds of thousands of global creator channels, GGContent has helped launch titles like Dave the Diver and Blue Archive.
1stCollab
1stCollab is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered influencer marketing platform (YC W23) that automates the entire creator-campaign workflow - sourcing creators, outreach, negotiation, contracts, payments, and taxes - while optimizing for ROI. Founded in 2022 by ex-Pinterest leaders Leon Lin, Varun Bansal, and Andrew Liu (with Carina Cater leading influencer strategy), it connects thousands of creators each week with brands like Notion, Character AI, Quora, Framer, and Gamma, letting marketers do in hours what once took teams months.
Chronicle Studios
Chronicle Studios is an AI-driven entertainment company building the growth platform for global franchises. It reverses the traditional Hollywood development model - instead of betting on a script and hoping audiences show up, its agentic AI platform finds emerging creators and IP, tests audience demand early, and automates audience discovery, distribution and monetization across social platforms. Founded in 2025 by tech entrepreneur Aaron Sisto and former DreamWorks Animation president Chris deFaria, the company raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round to back creators across animation, gaming, music, comedy and podcasts.
UPROXX
UPROXX is a Los Angeles-based digital media and entertainment company that grew from a music and pop-culture website into a connected-TV and social-video powerhouse reaching more than 160 million monthly viewers. Founded by Jarret Myer and Brian Brater, it owns brands including UPROXX, HipHopDX and Dime Magazine, produces original music and culture programming, runs a content studio for brand campaigns, and - after going independent again in 2024 alongside will.i.am and Rich Antoniello - sells media across YouTube and CTV while folding AI into how it makes and monetizes content.
vidIQ
vidIQ builds AI-powered software for YouTube creators - analytics, keyword research, thumbnails, scripts, and an AI Coach trained on channel data. Founded in 2011 by veterans of Viddler, the San Francisco company helps more than 20 million creators figure out what to post, why it works, and what to do next.