Creator startup Jellysmack is on the hunt for old YouTube videos.
It's setting aside $500 million to buy licensing rights to influencers' back catalogs, using its internal algorithms to identify which evergreen content has the best shot at generating future ad revenue for the company.
In exchange, Jellysmack will pay creators an upfront sum based on what it thinks their content libraries are worth. Its president Sean Atkins said each deal will be creator-specific, but payments could land anywhere from $50,000 to $50 million. The company declined to share the time frame over which it plans to spend the $500 million in capital, saying it will depend on how fast it can identify creators to work with.
"We have a very good view into the performance of how their catalogs work over time," Atkins said. "There's a lot of value in the library that, particularly in YouTube, that these creators have generated, but they have to wait generally a long period of time to extract the whole tail of that value."
The company said it's been testing out its catalog licensing program with dozens of creators, but declined to share specific names of participants due to non-disclosure agreements.
It's one of several companies that have been experimenting with new business models for investing directly in creators. VC firm Slow Ventures paid YouTube creator Marina Mogilko $1.7 million last year in exchange for a 5% cut of her future earnings. And payment startup Creative Juice paid out $250,000 to four YouTube channels in exchange for a percentage of AdSense revenue, brand deal earnings, and other revenue streams over about a 2-year period.
Unlike Slow Ventures and Creative Juice, Jellysmack is honing in one particular aspect of a creator's earnings: ad revenue from evergreen videos on YouTube. It's taking an exclusive stake in a creator's older content rather than their future work, and there are no terms around what an influencer can do with its Jellysmack payment.
"We basically allow them to invest against their back library so they can invest in things that they're passionate about in terms of growing their brand and their channel," Atkins said. "These have become capital questions and investment questions, which, like in any sort of emerging business, particularly in the creator ecosystem, even broader than the kind of digitally creative ecosystem, there's not a lot of financing systems."
Founded in 2016, Jellysmack told Insider it now has over 1,000 staffers that are focused on helping creators monetize video content across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat.
It's partnered with some of the internet's top stars, such as MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) and PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg). The company confirmed in May that it had raised a Series C round from Softbank's Vision Fund 2 for an undisclosed sum. And last week, it announced a new program where it will help "high-profile public personalities" become content creators on apps like YouTube and Facebook. Its first partner for the initiative is UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou.
