Jason Y. Lee had a clear principle when he launched Jubilee Media in 2017: build a company that does not depend on any one person, including himself. That decision has shaped everything from how Jubilee develops its formats to how it monetizes them.

Jubilee, headquartered in Los Angeles, reaches 380 million monthly views across platforms through a catalog of dialogue-driven formats including “Middle Ground,” “Surrounded,” “Odd One Out,” and “Spectrum.” Jason, who studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and worked as a consultant at Bain & Company before founding Jubilee, sees the current moment as a structural inflection point for digital media. 

“The most talented creatives or storytellers will start creating digital-first,” he says, “not because they want to make a feature film later, but because this is where they will grow the fastest and reach the most people.”

The company started not as a media business, but as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Jubilee Project, which Jason founded in 2010 to create viral content for social causes. The organization raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and produced videos with tens of millions of views before Jason relaunched as Jubilee Media in 2017. The for-profit pitch, which he describes as “chocolate-covered broccoli,” content that is equally entertaining and purposeful, drew more than 80 rejections before a first investor said yes.

Every Video Is Built to Run 100 Episodes

The foundation of Jubilee’s operating model is treating every video concept as the beginning of a potential franchise rather than a standalone piece. Jason describes the approach as Silicon Valley discipline applied to content. “We almost never make a video that we don’t think could be a show that can have up to 100 episodes,” he says.

Development begins with hackathons: intensive sessions where the team generates up to a thousand ideas without filtering for quality. The goal is to take a concept from a whiteboard to a pilotable episode within a month. Once a pilot airs, the evaluation window is short. “You’ll know within seven hours or probably within as little as 70 minutes,” Jason says, citing engagement, click-through rates, and platform data. 

Most formats do not survive, and Jason frames that rate as structural rather than problematic. “If you’re hitting, like, a baseball average, meaning like one in four or one in three, that’s excellent,” he says.

The catalog that results runs deep. “Middle Ground” and “Spectrum” have each produced more than 100 episodes. Jubilee’s current flagship, “Surrounded,” posts an average viewer watch time of over 40 minutes per episode, a number that challenges prevailing assumptions about young audiences and digital content. “Those myths around young people that they can’t pay attention,” Jason says, “are being busted.”

Casting as Competitive Advantage

Format development is the system; the selection process is what makes it run. Jubilee maintains a database of hundreds of thousands of candidates, and the casting team’s job is to find people who can deliver unguarded, unscripted perspective regardless of ideology or background. 

Jason describes the team’s orientation as fundamentally about listening: “Tell me what matters to you. Give me your raw, authentic take.”

The payoff is audience trust that compounds over time. Jubilee regularly hears from viewers who watch its content with family members holding opposing views, specifically because they trust the formats to represent all perspectives. “I watch this with my brother. We are very different ideologically, but this is one of the few things we can watch together and have an interesting, productive conversation,” Jason paraphrases a common response.

That trust has a commercial dimension. Brands integrating into Jubilee’s content are buying an environment that audiences perceive as balanced. The casting standard that makes the content credible is also what makes it a commercially differentiated advertising context.

Brand Partnerships Are Outpacing Programmatic

Jubilee’s revenue rests on two pillars: programmatic advertising and direct brand partnerships. 

Brand partnerships are growing faster. Jason projects they could “double, triple, quadruple” as the company expands its sales team. “Our brand partnerships, our direct sales, will grow by an order of magnitude faster,” he says. The structure of those partnerships has changed as well. Jubilee’s model has transitioned from 30-second product mentions to episode takeovers to multi-episode season sponsorships, with full-season deals now under discussion. 

Jason describes a Netflix-backed episode built around Ava DuVernay’s documentary on the 13th Amendment, where Jubilee’s team designed the creative concept around the subject matter. “We had a conversation within the Black community between Black teens and Black grandparents,” he explains. The move toward longer commitments creates stability for production. “When you’re thinking about it from a longer perspective rather than every individual video, it has a very strong stabilizing force,” he says.

Beyond advertising, the company has expanded into events, merchandise, and technology. A recent event at UCLA drew a thousand attendees. The Nectar app for dating, launched alongside Jubilee’s “Nectar” channel, benefited from a built-in cold-start advantage: Jubilee’s existing audience meant users were ready to participate from launch. 

“No one wants to go to an empty nightclub,” Jason says, describing the standard problem facing new dating apps. “One of the benefits we had with our built-in audience is that as soon as we launched, we had tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, who were downloading and participating.”

Photo: Jason Y. Lee & James Talarico

Long-Form First, Everywhere Second

Jubilee’s distribution strategy is sequential by design. All formats are built for long-form video first, then repurposed as clips for TikTok, Instagram, and other short-form surfaces. “Anything that works well on long form, if we have a hit, it will perform well on short form,” Jason says. “Going the opposite way is very difficult.”

Short-form now generates real advertising revenue, and brands increasingly value its reach. Jason draws a clear distinction in how the two formats function: long-form is where audience relationships are built and where brand integrations operate at depth; short-form clips serve as distribution infrastructure for that core investment.

The logic also explains why Jason chose early on to build Jubilee as a production company rather than as a creator channel. He saw that prominent YouTubers faced burnout cycles every two to three years, constrained by the demands of continuous on-camera performance. “If I got burnt out or got hit by a bus,” he says, “this vision couldn’t live beyond myself.” 

The decision not to tie the company to his own on-camera presence is, by design, what makes Jubilee scalable.

Traditional Media Is Now Coming to Jubilee

Jubilee’s format library is beginning to function as licensable intellectual property. “Middle Ground” has been adapted for Israeli broadcast television. Conversations are now underway with production companies about versions for France, Brazil, and other markets.

The company recently announced a distribution deal with Tubi and is in discussions with additional streamers and traditional media companies about development partnerships. Jason sees a structural shift behind that inbound interest. “We’re seeing a lot of formerly very traditional media companies say, ‘I need to develop a YouTube strategy or a digital strategy. Who should we partner with?’” he says. “And we’re one of the names that come up.”

What ‘The Disney of Empathy’ Actually Means

Three to five years from now, Jason describes Jubilee as becoming “the new town square for the next generation,” a brand that people associate with human connection across content, live events, and technology. The “Disney of Empathy” phrase he has used publicly is not about theme parks; it is about becoming the defining brand for a specific human need.

“When people think about people coming together, having a conversation, connecting in an interesting way, they will think about Jubilee,” he says. “Not just our content, but our events, our experiences, and our technology. It’s all part of this ecosystem that you are living in.”

On AI-generated content, Jason draws a clear line. He believes AI will play a meaningful role in content production and will command audience attention across some categories. But in the space Jubilee occupies, built around unscripted human dialogue, he sees no plausible displacement. “I don’t think there’s a world where AI will out Jubilee Jubilee,” he says.

His advice for brands wanting to participate in that ecosystem is practical. “Fish where the fish are,” he says. “Go and spend in the places where your audience naturally is. That’s one of the reasons so many people come to Jubilee. They know people are already watching here.”

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