In February, after raising a $200 million funding round, Spotter vowed to invest $1 billion in YouTube creators. Seven months later, the firm is well on its way toward that goal: It has delivered $600 million in funding to its partners thus far.
Spotter, founded in 2019, employs catalog licensing as its primary funding model. It offers direct payments to creators who let Spotter claim new ad revenue from their old videos. That model has proven valuable to creators, who are eager to reinvest Spotter’s funds in new projects.
The technology behind these deals has allowed Spotter to work across the YouTube ecosystem and around the globe. “Spotter’s proprietary prediction engine allows us to focus on the data behind the creator instead of dedicating energy to growing a specific vertical or type of video,” Spotter Founder and CEO Aaron DeBevoise (pictured above) told Tubefilter. “This means we’re doing the best deal possible for the creator and puts us in a position to work with creators across a wide range of verticals. Supporting such a broad scale of YouTubers is very important to us as it helps build a community for every creator.”
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Despite such a broad approach, there are some patterns that can be found when you break down the $600 million Spotter has paid so far. The clearest common denominator is creator success. Creators have been so pleased with the results of catalog licensing that many of them — MrBeast, Dude Perfect, Like Nastya, and Unspeakable, to name four — have gone back for multiple deals.
It’s not only repeat customers, however, who are benefitting from the financial incentives Spotter offers. In the past 12 months, the company has increased the size of its funded community one-and-a-half times over, and it has made a concerted effort to reach out to individuals from multicultural and diverse backgrounds. 30% of Spotter’s funds are going to that group of creators, with YouTube stars like Aaron ‘AB’ Brown, Deestroying, Lizzy Capri, and Kinigra Deon receiving investments.
Spotter’s partnership with Havas Media Group, announced back in June, will allow it to strengthen its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. “It’s a large focus of our work at Spotter,” DeBevoise told Tubefilter. “We want to make sure we’re supporting all creators and that the community we’re building has a wide range of perspectives so as many creators as possible can be successful.”
Through its first $600 million, Spotter has been guided by proprietary technology and open-minded ideas. Those pillars will continue to move the company forward as it deploys the remaining $400 million it has pledged to creators. DeBevoise said his team considers “all aspects of a creator’s YouTube channel” when crafting its offers, including the number of videos they’ve uploaded, the age of those videos, and “thousands of other data points.”
“This is not an easy thing to execute and it has taken us years to develop our proprietary models and prediction engine,” DeBevoise said. “We are now even able to underwrite and finance future videos a creator would upload to their channel because our models have become so advanced.”
It’s not just Spotter’s tech that’s advancing — so too are creator revenues. When Spotter hired Rob Gabel as its Chief Strategy Officer earlier this year, it said that its average deal pays out $1.5 million. Many more of those cash injections are still to come.
