YouTube is on track to overtake Disney as the largest media company by revenue by the end of 2025, with viewers watching over 1 billion hours of content on TV screens daily, Wall Street predicts. The platform also hit a high for a third straight month with 12.4% of total U.S. TV watch-time, surpassing Netflix by 4.9%, per Nielsen.

As YouTube reshapes the media field, digital media company Electrify Video Partners is developing a new model that transforms individual channels into global media franchises  by scaling the volume of content, monetizing audiences on new platforms, launching ancillary revenue streams and using data and AI to optimize throughout.

“We invest in creators, but we’re not an investment fund. We are an owned and operated media company with over 100 people working across our brands,” explains co-founder and co-CEO Ian Shepherd, whose background includes executive roles at Disney, Universal Music, and WarnerMedia. 

Founded in 2021, Electrify targets established YouTube creators who have hit a growth ceiling. The company buys majority stakes in these creators’ businesses while providing the expertise, team, and infrastructure to transform them into global media brands.

“It’s really important to distinguish between new and emerging creators and established creators with an audience and profitable businesses,” Ian emphasizes. What these successful creators often lack isn’t audience or content quality, but the operational expertise to scale beyond their individual capabilities.

This operational focus is what differentiates Electrify from traditional investors, who might provide capital but have limited hands-on support. “A core part of our investment is always to diversify and de-risk the key person risk within the business,” Ian explains. “How can we take more of the responsibilities away from you? And if you’re on screen or you’re narrating the content, how can we introduce new talent alongside you so that the audience continues to enjoy the content, but it’s not so heavily dependent upon you?”

He notes that the results can be transformative. “There’s a great example of one of the creators we’ve invested in where he was spending 80 hours a week producing the content in the business on his own, and now he spends 80 hours a month on the business. But he has a much bigger team of people working with him,” Ian notes.

Data Science at the Core

The foundation of Electrify’s modus operandi is data-driven content optimization. The company has built an in-house data science team focused on developing proprietary tools that connect to the YouTube API and third-party analytics platforms.

“We have three members of that team who are focused on building tools and dashboards for our teams to optimize content,” Ian reveals. “It enables us to view data or the data on our channels in ways that enable us to optimize the content. It could be for changing thumbnails and titles, it could be around the ideation of ideas.”

This data-first approach extends to content development itself, with Electrify embracing AI to generate video concepts. “There’s a great example from one of our channels over the last three months where the video got more than 10 million views and the idea for that video was generated by AI,” Ian shares.

As validation of this strategy, Ian reveals that Electrify has grown revenue tenfold in just two years, and every major brand in its portfolio achieved record performance in Q1 2025.

Content Production Efficiency

With over 100 employees working remotely across more than 20 countries, the vast majority of Electrify’s team is directly involved in content creation rather than finance or business development.

“More than 90% of my team work in content production. Whether that’s a scriptwriter or an editor or a graphic designer, or an animator, they are creatives at heart and they are very passionate about producing content,” Ian says.

This production-first approach shapes how they work with creators. “We don’t want to tell them how to run their business better, and we don’t really want them to go, which is why we would prefer a partnership rather than 100% investment,” Ian emphasizes. “We want to enable them to do more. And so that’s about buying into, amplifying, and elevating their content rather than changing the course of the channel or changing or damaging the authenticity of the channel.”

To strengthen its creative leadership, Electrify recently appointed Timothy Shey as Chair of the Board. “Tim and his team at YouTube were the ones who coined the word ‘creator’ that we use every day,” Ian explains, adding that Shey led YouTube’s original content division before spending six years at Duolingo, giving him unique insights into both content development and AI implementation.

A Portfolio Approach to Creator Growth

Electrify primarily invests in YouTube creators focused on factual, informative content. Their portfolio spans channels in science, astronomy, aviation, coding, and history—categories that benefit from YouTube’s growing consumption on television screens.

“What we’ve seen is that the percentage of people that are viewing our content on a TV versus a mobile or tablet has gone from maybe 20% to 40% on the TV, which is great for us,” Ian notes. “On that device, viewers spend more time. The average view duration, which is a really important metric for us, is far longer on the TV.”

Beyond growing individual channels, Electrify takes a portfolio approach that creates synergies across its investments. “We have lots of synergies across the business so that there are shared resources and opportunities, and we’re really seeing the value of a portfolio of creators working together,” Ian explains.

This strategy allows them to expand in multiple directions. For their first investment, an astronomy channel, they’ve “increased both the volume, the amount of videos that we’re producing on that one channel, and the length of those videos and the sponsorship on those videos,” Ian shares. “We’ve also launched two additional brands within the astronomy space. And so there are now three channels producing even more content. We’ve also launched a consumer product and a podcast for this brand.”

Recently, Electrify has diversified beyond YouTube, investing in podcasts and course businesses as well.

Branded Content and Global Expansion

Ian highlights the untapped potential in branded content outside traditional sponsorship integrations. “Typically, creators just invest in or have integrations that feel like 60-second adverts. But what they don’t do very well is work with a brand on a whole series of content, but not a series of adverts, but elevated content,” he explains.

Electrify plans to continue expanding by growing its existing investments and bringing new creators into its portfolio. “We have some really exciting discussions with creators and founders who can see the potential, and they’re in different genres than we’ve invested in already,” Ian reveals.

For established creators seeking to scale beyond their individual capabilities – and for the creator economy as a whole – Electrify combines investment capital with operational expertise and data science.

“Our core brands are all having a record quarter in the history of the business,” Ian says of their current investments. “That’s really exciting for us to see, and it’s really demonstrating the value that we add.”