Moonbug buys one of the world’s biggest YouTube channels

The Moonbug agency has bought Little Baby Bum, the ninth most-watched YouTube channel in the world, Bloomberg reports.

News Deskbdnews24.com
Published : 15 Sept 2018, 10:20 AM
Updated : 15 Sept 2018, 10:20 AM

The channel’s 54-minute compilation of nursery rhymes set to 3D animation has over 2 billion views is the 20th most popular video in YouTube’s history. The channel has over 16 million subscribers and 17.5 million views.

Moonbug was started by investor and former Walt Disney Company employee Rene Rechtman, and Alfred Chubb and John Robson of WildBrain.

The agency beat out four other bidders for the channel, said Little Baby Bum co-founder Daniel Holder, who started the channel with his wife Cannis Holder in 2011.

The terms of the deal were confidential, but according to a market firm cited by Bloomberg, the purchase price could have been between £6 million and £8.5 million.

The new owners plan to try to take the Little Baby Bum brand to TV, while also making episodes around the characters from the YouTube videos, Holder told Bloomberg.

They also plan to increase output from two videos per week to four or five and to try other steps to appeal to the YouTube algorithm, which decides what to promote on the platform, he said.

The Holders will be barred from creating content for children in the future under the terms of the deal.

“We’d come to a crossroads to take the company to the next level,” Holder told Bloomberg. “To get from that to what really needs to happen now for the brand is that it needs to have a proper team to upscale it.”