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“YouTube is a phenomenal place to build a brand; it’s not a phenomenal place to build a business,” said CEO and executive producer Shabnam Mogharabi of SoulPancake. “What we’ve learned is you have to diversify to be able to sustain your business.”
SoulPancake, which grew its viewership largely thanks to its viral Kid President videos, now has over 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and is expanding its brand to new media channels. Co-founded and seed funded by actor Rainn Wilson, SoulPancake has been operating successfully for about five years without the sort of venture capital funding that is typical in the YouTube content creation space.
“We are very mission based and that can be a hard thing to do in Hollywood,” said Mogharabi. The startup has had offers before but declined investments so it doesn’t have to give up creative control. Instead, it has sustained itself by being a YouTube partner, a sort of advance on advertising revenue YouTube once gave to top content producers, and by producing branded entertainment. According to Mogharabi branded content is now the company's most profitable division.
But SoulPancake has bigger ambitions for more visiability and higher profitability; its current intiatives weren't cutting it, so the company began looking to other platforms. SoulPancake has launched a couple of notable ventures on cable. Its flagship program Kid President this summer launched an original show on The Hub Network, a cable channel owned by Discovery Communications and Hasbro. And it is rehashing some of its YouTube content into a variety show called The Mixtape on cable channel Pivot TV. The Mixtape includes content from Rain Wilson’s YouTube show Metaphysical Milkshake, a quirky, back of the van talk show about spirituality.
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Metaphysical Milkshake and Kid President represent the SoulPancake brand well. “We want to provide content that has purpose and mission that isn’t cheesy or precious,” said Mogharabi. “We want the conversation to feel like it is fun and irreverent. We never want to hit below the belt but we want it to feel like a debate that is full of life.”
Though it is now producing cable content, it is not certain that a lovable, yet off-beat, brand like SoulPancake in years past would have gotten its start on cable. Despite attractive content, its appeal isn’t as broad as normal television channels usually accept. SoulPancake’s path to cable is part of a growing trend amongst YouTube producers. Because YouTube takes a 45 percent cut of advertising dollars, and digital advertising revenue tends to be much lower in the first place, many of YouTube’s most successful channels and Multi-Channel Networks are finding more profitable partnerships on cable. For example, AwesomenessTV, a YouTube MCN now has a show on Nickelodeon and Univision has contracted YouTube MCN Mitu to produce shows for it.
“YouTube is this giant playground where you can experiment,” said Mogharabi. And cable television, it seems, is where you can profit.
