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YouTube's ninth most-watched channel has been bought out by an agency

YouTube's ninth most-watched channel has been bought out by an agency

One of YouTube's biggest channels has been bought out. 

Little Baby Bum, a channel famous for its renditions of children's nursery rhymes like the contagious Baby Shark song, has been bought by an agency named Moonbug.

Moonbug was founded by Rene Rechtman, Alfred Chubb and John Robson. Rechtman is an ex-Walt Disney co. employee, while Chubb and Robson come from DHX Media, a company that holds the rights to brands such as Ben 10 and The Teletubbies.

Rechtman is already keyed in to huge YouTube deals; he oversaw the $650 million dollar sale of Maker Studios to Disney.

Multichannel networks often fall in to the crosshairs of traditional media companies. Disney's Maker purchase is an example of this. DreamWorks Animation bought AwesomenessTV, and  RTL Group bought fashion MCN StyleHaul.

Baby shark, big profits

Little Baby Bum was founded by Derek and Cannis Holder back in 2011. The 16 million subscriber-strong channel now boasts some incredible stats; its the ninth most viewed channel on YouTube with 17 billion views. It's top video - a compilation of nursery rhymes - has over 2.1 billion views.

According to Holder, Moonbug hopes to take the Little Baby Bum brand to traditional TV. However, a condition of the deal means that the Holder's can no longer produce any content for the channel, which means the videos will be in the hands of a new team.

Details of the sale were not disclosed publically, but Harry Hugo of social media firm the Goat Agency estimated that the purchase price might fall between £6 million and £8.5 million.

“I can foresee that a lot of YouTube channels will be bought out or merged with OTT platforms or television-channel owners looking to get to new audiences or audiences that have switched to this new platform.” Hugo said.


Editor

Danielle Partis is editor of PocketGamer.biz and former editor of InfluencerUpdate.biz. She was named Journalist of the Year at the MCV Women in Games Awards 2019, as well as in the MCV 30 under 30 2020. Prior to Steel Media, she wrote about music and games at Team Rock.