Anywhere you look, there’s a growing sense of consolidation in digital media & video of note: Buzzfeed Sold Hot Ones, Brat.tv acquired Electric Monster. In Q4 alone, I got four inbound expressions of interest in a month. If these are any indication, expect a ton of M&A in 2025: strategics haven’t addressed video/YouTube while institutional investors have cash they need to deploy which explains the sharks encircling YouTube.

Been there, done that: Flashback to 2019

Considering I not only published a whole article in 2019 entitled “Why I finally hired an investment bank” & followed it up with a video (even I’m caught off by the transparency through which I managed the business, but I digress), I suppose it was only fair that a “hater” would email me anonymously to ask “what ever happened?” 

Well, while we didn’t do any fanfare (largely because we didn’t want to “gloat at a time when others are suffering,” in 2020 we concluded a transaction selling 25% of the business to a NY-based PE firm. In my memo to the team at the time I explained that after spending the 2010s worried about copyright & platform risk etc., who could have guessed that the externality that hit mankind would kibosh half the industries… and spare us! But instead of gloating, my takeaway was to avoid finding ourselves alone to manage any such eventuality, so I decided to sell 25% of the business to a PE fund. This, I felt, gave us “the best of both worlds:
a) we retain our independence to some extent,
b) the management team stays in place and
c) we collectively continue our path to further professionalize the organization” and fulfil our potential.“

Bankers, like all professional services firms, add value, but value is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, bankers will
i) create the Confidential Information Presentation or Memorandum (hence CIP or CIM),
ii) manage the data room and ultimately
iii) shepherd the parties and respective counsel/accountants across the finish line. That has some value. In 2020, I had spent 15 years building one of the more impressive media businesses but admittedly grown a reputation for never closing a deal. The same way that winning the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2016 served as a bit of third-party, arms’ length validation of the business… selling 25% of the business to a NY-based firm was the kind of milestone that an entrepreneur is judged on, unfortunately. I definitely do not regret it, but realize “what got us here won’t get us there.”

At 46, having spent 20 years building WatchMojo, I realize my next deal may be my last as founder/CEO. I will advise, invest, and support anyone who needs help but the odds I ever start a business as founding CEO is slim to none. There’s a ton of luck & timing that is required. For that reason, why would I not cast a net far and wide?

“Glad I did it once, but I won’t do it again.”

When I used to read that a company had retained an advisor to “explore strategic options,” I and others thought that was BS, but considering that each week I get a couple to handful of people reaching out to express an interest in WatchMojo, I kinda understand the sentiment, finding myself repeating the following. 

Profitable (since 2013), with cash in the bank and no debt, I should stress that we don’t have to do anything. And that’s the best time to do “something.”

  1. “Everything is in market.”

One thing I’ve learned is that the macro-environment drives everything in the economy, in any industry, and that includes M&A. When rates are low, money is more accessible and costs less. When GDP is growing, business leaders have a sense of urgency to capitalize on opportunities. 2022 saw the end of ZIRP, or Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon. Overnight, everything cost more. Everyone, be it investors or advertisers scaled back.

  1. Macro landscape: media, content, advertising, video, AVOD, YouTube.

But even within our industry, everyone finished 2024 realizing they were under-indexed in video, namely, YouTube, which has gone from pariah to belle of the ball. First time I alluded to this was in 2012 when covering the industry for Media Post (you can read the article sans paywall here). The LA Times got the memo in 2021. 

Today, YouTube is even more dominant in video than Google is in search (market share notwithstanding, Google won for these reasons but its dominance stems from the triple crown of 1) superior product, 2) distribution moat, 3) built-in monetization (Adsense/Adwords); YouTube won in video and is dominant as it has the largest collection of broadband programming, managing this is an altogether different beast than managing textual content and directing the glow of traffic. What YouTube executed on is simply on a scale and scope different than any other technical and commercial endeavor: it usurped from television what cable began to gnaw away from network television. What the portals Yahoo, MSN & AOL did to cable, YouTube & Netflix did to TV and portals. But whereas Netflix is the leader in SVOD, or subscription video on demand, YouTube is the king of AVOD, or advertising video on demand. But as cord cutters & cord nevers become the larger segments of the media world, connected TVs allow for audiences to watch linear programming via FAST, or Free Ad-supported Streaming TV.

It feels funny when people talk about Youtube to me, because for the first decade when I focused on the platform, people were generally befuddled.

Today, that graph is outdated, with Disney blowing up its business model to put its best offerings online! Timing is critical in entrepreneurial success.

The leader in desktop video dominated mobile and is now going to win CTV – Tubi/Pluto & Roku/Samsung won the early games in the best-of-7 series called video.

  1. “Dearth of investable/acquirable assets on YouTube.”

To paraphrase Animal Farm: all platforms are equal, but some are more equal than others. 

Years ago, when we’d get asked about our “revenue concentration” on YouTube, being more exposed to Google’s video platform was seen as a negative even though to me, from the early years, it was clear to spot YouTube’s potential, as “content emerged as the new software” (with minimal distribution costs), YouTube evolved from pariah to bell of the ball. Here’s a keynote I gave at Vidicon in 2019 covering YouTube’s evolution.

Like sheep, many hoped for revenue from Meta’s Facebook or pinned their revenue diversification hopes on TikTok. Today, Facebook is seen as anything but reliable and the spectre of a ban on TikTok makes people better appreciate YouTube’s emergence as the leading media & entertainment platform in the world, having shelled out tens of billions of dollars to creators.

The challenge is that you cannot buy some of the most popular channels in the world because they belong to the record labels, or managed by WWE, etc. Others are influencer channels, a profile that is not obvious to a corp dev executive or an institutional investor. Mr Beast deserves credit for building a media organization, but if he’s MIA, there’s not much value left behind. Tomorrow I can get kidnapped and WatchMojo may not miss a beat. Forbes recently ranked the top earners, but suspect they focused on individual creators, since in 2023, WatchMojo’s earnings would have put us in this “mix.”

  1. A Proxy or Index Fund vs Beta < 1

That said, while we are a pretty good proxy (think an index fund) for “programmatic advertising revenues on YouTube,” reality is that our “beta is inversely related to the market: we are now more appealing, more coveted when the bottom line matters. Beta is a concept that measures the expected move in a stock relative to movements in the overall market. A beta greater than 1.0 suggests that the stock is more volatile than the broader market, and a beta less than 1.0 indicates a stock with lower volatility. During the 2015-19 ZIRP era, acquiriers and investment bankers were chasing the high-flying bellwehthers like Vice, Buzzfeed, VOX. But when markets are more sanguine, suddenly the bottom line comes in vogue… and we shine as our relative appeal/value rises thanks to our
a) strength in video,
b) reach on YouTube, and
c) profitability, which comes into zoom.

  1. Social Capital still requires investment

As Michael Milken would say “The best investor is a social scientist,” inasmuch as kids who grew up reading comic books went on to run Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue and Wall Street, kids who grew up on YouTube and saw WatchMojo videos are now decision-makers. 

Despite my tendency to say “I’m a nobody” and “we’re an unknown startup from Montreal,” that’s intellectually dishonest and BS false modesty. We have an incredible brand, a ton of goodwill… but even that kind of social capital needs investment to untap and unlock value. Throughout the 2010s, we earned “Abnormal Returns” on our investment strategy (35,000% return on my initial investment) by identifying:

I) The Right Programming

  • Differentiated
  • Strong IP 
  • Brand-focused
  • Timeless/Evergreen
  • Coveted by distributors and licensees
  • Brand safe

II) With the Right Margins

III) which allowed us to command the Right P/E Multiples in our partial sale.

We have so many assets and IP – technology, IP, games – but we cannot do it all at once. Focus is good, but being trigger-shy isn’t when you have built a strong base. The possibilities around AI are also boundary less, with an opportunity to leverage the latest technology the way Lucas Arts did with CGI and Pixar did with animation. But, that comes with risk, uncertainty and an unknown payback period, if any.  

  1. Fiduciary Duty

When Viacom brought in the lawyers to steer the ship, they were DOA. MTV became a shadow of itself, especially once cable was disrupted by the web.

While our investors have been great, reality is investors will never truly share an entrepreneurs’s time horizon let alone one’s risk profile. We jump off mountains and worry about safe landings on our way down. Investors are not like this. 

Today we enter our 5th year, usually what is the time horizon for most investments. As advisory mandates can take anywhere from 9 months to two years, that means I may be in the 7th year of my courtship before I can deliver to my investors a liquidity event. I know where markets are in 2025, but in 2027? No one knows.

The media world has changed for good, a growing malaise exists due to the Trends & Themes prevalent today. You can’t MBA yourself onto a hit: it takes patience, serendipity and luck. WatchMojo made no sense from 2006-11, then in 2012 there was a glimmer of hope.

The value investors bring in areas of governance and best practices are not immaterial but ultimately not necessarily areas I needed most help with. When during due diligence our investor suggested we hire a consulting firm to do a competitive analysis, I said I was all for it – always very coachable – but to ensure we optimize the learnings, I would prepare something for them. If they hadn’t suffered enough, I created a 97-slide deck for them to peruse. The idea wasn’t that I didn’t want to hire a firm to research said market, but I wanted to challenge them back that I welcome the oversight, governance etc. they would provide. They’ve been great partners, but as a minority investor not really focused on media, their value is mainly in serving as devil’s advocate, auditing, etc. There are certainly diminishing returns over time when you are in the empire building mindset. 

  1. The Team & Culture

Aside from our reach, brands, partners, catalog/library etc., our key intangibles are our Culture & Best Practices.

Our Tale of the Tape starts not just with a community of 25 million subscribers (50 million if you include MsMojo, and the international channels) but our library of 25,000 videos that have been adapted into both Shorts and Longer Form FAST offerings totalling 100,000 assets.

Our practices are industry leading, not solely our expertise in fair use (or fair dealing) & copyright, but overall reputation we’ve developed wrt best practices for digital video production & publishing especially on the leading AVOD platform, YouTube. With a client roster that includes Disney, Paramount, Netflix etc., we have certainly started to diversify away from programmatic, even though programmatic revenues are the holy grail that come with higher margins and less variance. Our strong customer service explains how much partners like to work with our team. My foundation of taarof, married with a servant leadership mindset and stakeholder management philosophy explains our success thus far, but it takes the right partner to really grow things 10X in the next decade.

But whereas in the 2010s investors and acquirers overlooked culture, in 2025, given WFH/RTO balance, post MeToo/BLM movements, any buyer will put considerable focus on culture aka workplace risks. I take great pride in the fact that all 5 co-founders remain at the firm, we have 10 other managers with 15+ years and another handful celebrated their 10th year – job satisfaction is good & we have a strong culture. It takes a certain someone to be able to manage the super disparate concerns of employees, viewers, business partners, investors & community at large in a market as “being disrupted” as media but the credit for buying into & growing that worldview goes to the team.

It’s really more about my team, than me. Inasmuch as I was open to give up the CEO role if we raised financing for the greater good (from the 10-Year Overnight Success):

“When a VC asks a founder about the CEO role, it’s more psychology than actual negotiation. I think that if a founder insists on retaining the CEO role, the VC may view it as a turn off. Alternatively, if a founder is too eager to relinquish the role, then the VC may insist that without the founder in the CEO role, they’d balk. So I was open to any scenario, stressing my desire to run WatchMojo for the foreseeable future, but willing to do anything reasonable that would benefit the company and its stakeholders.”

Today I see the same dynamic: any buyer would both want me “tied to radiator” as an insurance policy, but realizing any day, my fate may be akin to Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas, entering an otherwise unassuming room.

Who’s the ideal partner?

Admittedly, throughout the 2010s, like many ambitious entrepreneurs, I was driven by insecurities, a desire to prove myself. Thankfully, I have turned the page on such complexes that are harmful and live in one’s mind. Today, I/we don’t need to do anything, which is why it makes sense to have such conversations, especially as the world has delivered on the vision we saw 20 years ago, and morphed into a brave new world.

Throughout our 20 year history, we’ve certainly had strategic convos with a plethora of companies who fall in the following buckets:

  • traditional media companies: Disney, Paramount, Warner etc were big buyers of companies like Machinima, Fullscreen and Maker. Discovery Warner’s informational and entertaining ethos maps well with our vision to inform and entertain, but let’s be candid, right now, none of these companies wake up and think “what we need is more exposure on YouTube.” But in a few years, as cycles continues, they will. 
  • new media companies: Buzzfeed, VICE are a shadow of their former selves, right now. They are struggling for survival and relevance, but kid yourself not: in a few years both will be leaner and meaner, and whether their owners change or not, they will seek to add more brands for scale and scope. 
  • marketing focused companies: Ziff Davis, Red Ventures are too value-oriented and would not really value us as pure play content producers. Ziff is usually derided by bankers as “bargain hunters,” though to me, they’re just smart operators and savvy investors. We were close to selling to Ziff in 2019, but they changed a material term at the last second (fully within their right), and I balked. We ended up selling 25% of the business in late 2020 for the amount they wanted to acquire the whole business in 2019. But as executives, we knew we had found new growth opportunities.
  • digital video centric new media companies: Trusted Media Brands was known for its legacy brands but pivoted by acquiring Jukin. Backed by a PE firm, while they in particular may not make sense, having a holding company backed by a larger institutional investor looking for scale is a profile worth exploring. While it doesn’t make sense to merely replace one II with another, a PE fund that has invested in a WM-like asset and has the runway and appetite to roll up is indeed interesting.
  • ad networks looking for content: this cohort considered content as a differentiation method in the early/mid 2010s, but never really took content seriously. They are in the intermediation business, and more power to them. Content is messy.
  • telcos experimented with content and divested (AT&T, Verizon) and in Canada, Rogers is only focused on hockey rights while BCE is doubling down on their 5G capex needs, limiting Bell Media’s scope. Altice acquired Cheddar, who focused on live news programming, which is very tricky to build a profitable business around, especially online on-demand (vs linear).
  • entertainment/content streaming platforms needing original content have relied on licensing (i.e. ROKU, Disney, Apple) or developing their own (Apple), I suspect some may have the acumen to realize that adding an Entertainment Tonight kind of platform to curate and showcase new shows makes sense… but these folks are driven by vanity these days: the shinier the mouse trap, the better… 
  • roll up efforts: Candle Media raised a warchest and focused on celebrity-associated IP owners, i.e. Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, etc. While again critics may argue that it overpaid for assets like Moonbug, reality is they also bought quality assets that can serve as building blocks. I know Warren Buffett said it’s better to buy great businesses at fair prices than buying fair businesses at great prices, similarly, it is better to acquire great businesses and overpay a bit, than buying crappy businesses at a discount. DEFY Media was amalgamation a lot of sub-par brands while positioning itself as the next Viacom. It was not. Lunar X and Electrify are the latest belligerents in that racket. Time will tell how they roll-up assets, execute, and grow. 
  • peers and competitors: Valnet, Static Media et al. would be merger candidates, but the reality is Static sold a majority stake to a PE firm and Valnet is part of Valsoft, who’s building a Constellation kind of holding company of software businesses. I do not think media is a focus whatsoever, given the lower ROI. 
  • DTC (direct to consumer) firms realize that focusing on performance marketing efforts will only get you so far. Inasmuch as AMEX bought travel content publishers, you have seen other DTC marketing firms buy content platforms as it is no doubt a lower marketing approach. 

So who are good profiles now? It always boils down to people. My investors are high integrity individuals, but they are neither operators nor “entrepreneurs” in the strict sense (they are entrepreneurial no doubt in their own right).

Frankly, I won’t lie, a “born on 3rd base” fella who was given the keys to an investment and media empire, who gets our value and brand and wants to grow the business to dominate in AVOD, video, social platforms etc. is an intriguing fit. A Rupert Murdoch may not have gotten the value of Tubi, but I suspect his son Lachlan did.

But I also realize a fan of what we cover is a key intangible. You have to love the art and your craft. Inasmuch as (I can only presume) financier Thomas Tull grew up reading comic books and immersed in such fandom/IP and then founded Legendary Entertainment to capitalize on both his interests and the sociographic changes, I think someone who grew up watching WatchMojo and is now running a fund or media company and “gets our value” would be more interesting than someone who just views as from the lens of IRR and ROIs. Yes, as a finance guy, I can engage and articulate why and how WatchMojo turned my investment of $250K and grew it 35,000% (do the math if you want to guess our 2020 valuation), reality is WatchMojo is an institution that transcends P&Ls, KPIs and ROIs. i wrote about how we can turn WatchMojo and build not only Viacom but Liberty Media, but people don’t really listen to me, either. 

The bottom line is I’m prioritizing someone who would be a true partner to go out and fulfil our purpose, potential and promise.

The Pied a Terre Factor

In 2016 when Donald Trump entered the white house, his first initiatives revolved around immigration bans. We saw an uptick in interest in global firms who sought a base to grow out of in North America. As such, another viable partner would be a global company that’s always wanted to invest and expand in North America and South America. One reason we launched a myriad of international editions – Español has 8M subs, Italy has a vibrant community, etc – was to use it a as a springboard.

Montreal is 55-min flight away from Manhattan, perfectly situated in between London/Paris and Los Angeles/San Francisco. Trust me when I say that all non-American media companies strive to be present in America, but America isn’t necessarily the most welcoming place. We give any international buyer a footprint and base to expand into America out of bilingual cosmopolitan Montreal. 

Without further ado, here’s a deck with a 30,000 foot view.

What This Isn’t About

Again, because some ignoramus will misinterpret this post, we don’t have to do anything and most likely won’t anytime soon… but you have to be lost at sea not to realize a change in the direction of the breeze.

In 2018/19, when I published that Why I Finally Hired an Investment Bank article, I then didn’t say a word until now. So this may be the last you hear from me re this…  but if you have any thoughts, ideas, feedback, questions… you know where to find me.