Private Equity (PE) Firm Owns Your Favorite YouTubers Channel (feat. Veritasium & Fireship)

YouTube once looked like a wild farmers’ market: everyone with a camera could grab a stall, greet viewers, and make rent.

In 2025 the landscape feels closer to a strip mall.

Private‑equity funds have bought many of the busiest booths, bundled them into mini‑studios, and standardised what shows up on screen.

The classic Pareto curve—20% of players driving 80% of results—now unfolds in real time on your home page.

Money Floods Creator Land: Billions Chasing Eyeballs

SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a Series C into Jellysmack in May 2021, giving the aggregator fresh fuel to sign high‑output channels.

Blackstone‑backed Candle Media paid about $3 billion for Moonbug the same year, adding CoComelon and Blippi to its roster.

London outfit Electrify Video Partners followed by investing in Veritasium, Fireship, and Simple History between 2023 and 2024.

Private equity controls more than $12 trillion in assets and needs fresh places to park capital.

Mid‑tier YouTube channels look perfect: dependable ad revenue, modest overhead, and sale prices that still sit in the single‑digit EBITDA range.

The Private Equtiy Playbook for YouTube Channels: Buy, Centralise, Optimise

After a fund steps in, each channel plugs into a shared back‑office:

• thumbnail and title testing

• ad‑sales and sponsor matchmaking

• merchandise design and fulfilment

• short‑form syndication across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts

Upload volume rises and costs spread across the portfolio.

To reduce reliance on any single host, new presenters start appearing—visible recently on Veritasium—so the brand survives if the founder leaves.

The end product leans toward safer topics, familiar pacing, and thumbnails that all carry the same polish.

The product, however, suffers from slop as has been the case with Fireship for a real long time.

Spill‑Over in Adjacent Industry: The 80/20 Pareto Principle

The curve repeats in other markets:

• Dating apps: Match Group’s stable—Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and more—delivered roughly 3.5 billion dollars in 2024 revenue, a majority of the category total. Match Group owns most of the dating market.

• US news: Six conglomerates—Comcast / NBCU, Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount, News Corp, and Fox—still supply about 90% of mainstream news impressions.

• Smartphone operating systems: Android held 70.93 percent of global share in 2024, with iOS at 28.32 percent—virtually the entire market.

• Reddit Communities: 5 moderators control 92 of Reddit’s top 500 subreddits.

Once a distribution network matures, a minority of owners often commands the majority of user choice.

Once you recognize the 80 / 20 pattern, you start seeing it everywhere.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

People love the underdog story. So all the CEOs and celebrities always use them even though it is not true for the narrative.

History is written by winners.

2/

Love this.

3/

This might be the most profound insight of AI Coding I've seen so far in 2025.

What blew my mind away was o3 with Agents mode going through GitHub and finding actual docs to code something for an unpopular library.

Generalized insight is tool calling is where its at. It makes sense right since the people who get far in any industry and make the most salary are the ones that can communicate with all the people in the company. And sometimes they make it far without the skills to back it up too.

So it again boils down to communication. #1 lesson of talking to AI is brushing up on your communication skills.

Rabbit Holes

1. Everything I Learned From 60 Days At Acquisition.com by Leila Hormozi

2. Don’t get AI to write emails. Get it to fill in the blanks. by Matt Redler

3. Amp Is Now Available. Here Is How I Use It. by Thorsten Ball

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