Over the last few months, Veritasium viewers have noticed a trend: Derek Muller, who launched the channel in 2011 after earning his Ph.D. in physics and working as a science teacher, has been appearing less frequently in videos.
That, of course, made them nervous. Had something changed behind the scenes? Was there a new cost-cutting corporate owner in the mix, tugging Veritasium’s strings? Would Veritasium follow in other channels’ footsteps and start using generative AI, or stop producing long-form videos in favor of chasing views on Shorts? Was Muller preparing for a Tom Scott-style retirement?
The answers to all these questions are a little bit complicated. (Well, except the AI/Shorts question; that’s an unequivocal “no.”) So, Muller made an entire video addressing them.
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Turns out, yes, something has changed behind the scenes. And yes, there is a new (part) owner in the mix.
But these changes didn’t start a few months ago. They started way back in 2023.
In his Dec. 24 upload, Muller says that for much of Veritasium’s lifetime, it was a one-man passion project. He got into it expecting to make no money, and when his channel did start bringing in thousands of dollars per year in AdSense, he was still very aware that revenue can be fickle. So, in order to protect himself and his channel financially, he limited expenses to the extreme. That meant doing everything–researching, writing, filming, editing, and even the “crappy animations” (his words, not ours)–himself.
That both limited his output, and put him in a difficult position with work/life balance. Eventually, he explains, Veritasium “grew to a size where it was ridiculous that I was still doing everything myself.”
He ended up hiring a few key people, but the workload was still extreme.
“There were many nights where, instead of tucking my kids into bed, I was downstairs in the office making videos for this channel,” he says. “That’s when my fiancee told me something I already knew, which was that his was not sustainabale. And yes, she was still my fiancee, because even though we got engaged seven years previous and had three kids together, we hadn’t found the time to have a wedding.”
Not long after he and his fiancee had that talk, Muller was approached by “these two guys” who wanted to invest in Veritasium, he says.
Those “two guys” were Ian Shepherd, a Turner Broadcasting, Universal Music Group, and Walt Disney alum who co-founded creator/consumer brand licensing company The Social Store, and Owen Maher, a longtime finance exec who was executive managing partner of strategy for Findex and a principal at investment company KKR.
They had co-founded a new venture, Electrify Video Partners, that would invest in edutainment channels like Muller’s with the goal of building them into sustainable businesses.
“The deal they offered was this: Electrify would buy some of the business, but I would remain an owner. They would take care of things like hiring, production, logistics, corporate compliance, taxes, all that sort of stuff, and they would reduce my working hours,” Muller explains. “It was kind of the perfect offer at the perfect time.”
Plus, he says, the cash Electrify planned to invest “would reduce the precariousness of being a creator, especially at a time where AI was coming on the scene and Shorts was just starting.”
So, in April 2023, Muller signed the deal. We actually wrote about it later that year, in a piece about Electrify’s $85 million funding round. But since Electrify’s work happens behind the scenes of a channel, viewers who don’t follow industry news wouldn’t have known about it, and thus were surprised when, over the last few months, the changes at Veritasium became more public.
Muller is careful to say that anyone who’s worried about Electrify making alterations that negatively affect Veritasium can put those concerns to bed. “You don’t have to wonder what Electrify will do, because we’ve already been working together for nearly three years,” he says. “I can show you what we have done.”
Since Electrify’s investment, Veritasium has produced its three most-watched videos of all time (about forever chemicals, blue LEDs, and black/white/wormholes) and has grown its subscriber count by 50%.
“In fact, the last four months have seen a record amount of time that people are spending watching the channel,” Muller says.
Shepherd also tells Tubefilter that Veritasium’s most recent video, The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World’s Most Important Machine, is the channel’s top-performing video of all time, having brought in 11.3 million views within seven days of upload. The channel currently brings in around ~75 million views per month. (We’ve also noticed Veritasium appearing frequently in our Gospel Stats Weekly Brand Reports, where we track the top 5 most-viewed sponsored videos across all of YouTube.)
To make all this happen, Veritasium’s production costs have quadrupled, with most of that money going to the team.
“The real way we’ve been able to grow is by adding more people,” Muller says. “There are now more than 30 people working on Veritasium–writer/directors, researchers, illustrators, animators, editors, and production staff. These are the people responsible for some of your favorite videos.”
And they’ll continue to produce those videos–while Muller takes a bit of a step back.
He’s definitely not following the Tom Scott retirement path; instead, his time reduction is closer to MatPat‘s. He too built a dependable, growing YouTube media business, got an investment and business development support, and now has a team who can continue the work while he transitions to working more off camera.
“I have been able to reduce my workload and spend more time with my now four kids,” he says. (He and his partner also finally got married.) “[A]t some point I will [retire], but it’s not exactly clear when that will be. What I can tell you is that I won’t be around as much, which you’ve probably already gathered over the last year or two. In some upcoming videos, I will not appear at all, even if I’m guiding things in the background. This is to give me more time to spend with my family, and to read books and exercise and contemplate other projects. I am proud that what started as my passion project now employs dozens of people.”
In a company blog post, Maher added that Electrify believes Veritasium “is just getting started in terms of what it can become.”
“There is so much passion and talent within our team,” he wrote. “Millions of people grew up watching Veritasium and personally we know the impact we can have on people’s lives. We want to keep the fun, curiosity, and learning alive for generations to come, both on YouTube and beyond, continuing Derek’s mission to increase the level of critical thinking in the world.”
YouTube is now two decades old, and we’re expecting to see more creators take the same trek as MatPat and Muller. We already knew YouTube was an incubator for new media studios, but in this ripe old year of 2026, our industry has reached a maturity level where investors understand (1) how important those studios are, and (2) how to invest in them without changing what got them an audience in the first place.
