Rather than spending months or even years hiring a production staff and building an in-house studio, however, the company decided to buy Jukin Media, which has led a distributed video operation for over a decade, to help direct TMB’s path forward.

Founded in 2010 by CEO Jonathan Skogmo, Jukin was grew its portfolio of brands like FailArmy, People Are Awesome and The Pet Collective on social media platforms and more recently streaming on 30 different OTT channels. Following the closing of the sale, Skogmo will stay on under TMB to continue growth strategy for Jukin.

Jukin is a profitable company, Skogmo said, and 2020 was a growth year for the digital publisher, despite the pandemic’s impact on brands’ advertising budgets. TMB is profitable as well and its EBITDA was up over 40% year over year, according to a company spokesperson, who declined to share hard revenue numbers.

While Jukin’s video expertise is a major appeal to TMB, Jukin’s audience size and franchisable brands are also attractive assets that Kintzer said justified this acquisition as an immediate growth opportunity.

Jukin presently has a staff of about 270 people while TMB has approximately 400 employees. Kintzer said she is confident that the teams are “complementary” to the growth goals that she has for both TMB and Jukin and is going to “spend some time to listen and learn” before identifying redundancies in staff or operations, meaning there are not any planned layoffs at the moment.

“This deal is all about growth — the revenue synergies are incredible and I’m sure that we’ve only touched the surface, so we’re not focusing on cost savings,” Kintzer said.

Pivot to video

Kintzer has four first priorities once the deal is finalized: launching an OTT channel for Family Handyman and for Taste of Home, and building out The Pet Collective and FailArmy into larger digital brands with their owned-and- operated websites.

Both Family Handyman and Taste of Home already have a degree of video content being produced — like FH’s paid courses business, DIY University — but Kintzer said that TMB does not have the in-house skillset on its own to build its video business out further than what it currently is.

The content strategy for TMB brands’ OTT channels is not set in stone, but Kintzer said she is relying on Skogmo’s team to determine what will work best with the resources that the Taste of Home and Family Handyman teams have.

“It’s a really smart, aggressive move by TMB to make this acquisition,” …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron