When Linguana launched in 2023, its plan was to help YouTubers establish relationships with international audiences by fully localizing their content.
Now, three years later, it’s still doing just that–but it’s also doing a lot more for thousands of creator partners.
“The biggest asset we have is our relationships with creators,” Jonny Steel, Linguana’s Chief Marketing Officer, says. “With more than 1,200 creators working with us, we have a front-row seat to the challenges they face every day. Those conversations help us identify pain points, uncover new opportunities, and build solutions that help creators expand their global distribution and monetization, while they stay focused on what they do best: creating great content.”
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We’ve written about the process of content localization before, but the key thing to know is that Linguana’s business model has always been hands-off for creators. Co-founders Yuval Tal and Oded Shafran knew going in that Linguana would handle the entire localization, distribution, and monetization process for its partners.
So, for example, an American creator with English-language content might see strong potential viewership in countries like Brazil or the Philippines. Linguana will take that knowledge, launch individual channels in each of those languages, and then completely re-dub all of the creator’s original videos using an AI clone of their voice. There’s no upfront cost for creators; Linguana posts the videos and maintains the channel(s), and when AdSense rolls in, it takes a cut for its services.
Because of this business model–which was intended to expand creators’ reach without adding to their workload–Linguana ended up functioning as a distributor, bringing their content to entirely new audiences across markets they could otherwise struggle to reach.
And as our industry has continued to grow, more and more creators have embraced cross-platform distribution and off-platform monetization to help diversify their revenue streams. Linguana’s partner creators asked if it could help distribute their content outside of YouTube.
“In the early days, Linguana was all about YouTube,” Steel says. “But once you’ve localized content into 40 languages, you’re no longer managing just one channel—you’re sitting on 40. Between us and the creator, that creates an enormous asset: a vast library of proven content in multiple languages that can be distributed, discovered, and monetized across countless audiences and platforms.”
One of the top platforms Linguana has tapped is MSN, which Steel describes as “an extremely popular way for creators to reach new audiences around the world.”
Microsoft-owned MSN has a Partner Hub that disseminates video content to millions of daily active users on Microsoft products like Windows, Bing, Edge, and the MSN news site. Securing distribution through the hub means a creator’s videos could appear when someone is browsing news headlines, searching on Bing, or looking through the Discover panel on their PC.
It’s particularly valuable for creators because “payouts are made from the very first view,” Steel says. “As soon as your channel is live, it’s generating revenue.”
Linguana has been testing a variety of content on MSN, figuring out what languages and what niches generate the most viewer attention. Steel says there has been impressive variety, with channels in Czech and Japanese being big drivers, and that Linguana has seen “promising” traction in France and other parts of Europe.
The company has also expanded distribution of creators’ multilingual content to Spotify, tracking with that platform’s push into video podcasts, and video site Dailymotion. It’s in the process of securing deals with TikTok and Meta, as well as major players in the FAST ecosystem, it says.
Another component Linguana has introduced over the last six months is generative AI ads.
Linguana already worked with creators to insert ads in their localized content. Much like with its foundational localization services, its ad process is hands-off for creators; Linguana finds and brokers deals with companies and makes the ads in-house in the voice and style of the creator across dozens of languages and geographies.
To give an example again, say an American, English-language cooking channel has a partnership with a U.S.-based restaurant chain. If Linguana localizes that video for a Filipino audience, it could help the creator partner with a Filipino chain for a similar ad read that’s customized to the local audience. The end result? More brand deal income for creators.
“When we insert a localized ad, we effectively represent the creator,” Steel explains. “We source those brands and create for them a fully produced ad insert, which is yet another source of monetization.”
Bringing AI into its ad-making pipeline has meant doing some trialing, Tal explains. “You can do a lot with AI ads,” he says. “There’s an art to what converts. The holy grail in this is how do you both entertain the viewer, while ensuring the ad is effective in convincing the right people to buy it?”
Steel notes that AI ads also keep with Linguana’s core principle: taking as much work off creators’ plates as it can.
“Let’s say we manage to source for a creator an amazing deal with a brand to feature on their channels,” he says. “If we go back to them with a script and say, ‘Okay, record this, do this,’ that’s more effort for them. Instead we can say, ‘Here’s the deal we’ve sourced for you,’ and as soon as they give the nod, we will go and create that AI ad for them.”
He says Linguana has “honed our expertise” in both the storytelling and operational sides of AI ads, “getting it to look like the rest of the video so it fits in seamlessly.”
“It’s almost impossible to distinguish between the AI segment and the rest of the video,” he says. “It just feels completely smooth.”
All of these elements–handling localization and brand deals for creators, growing off-YouTube distribution, and ad creation–have come together into a “network effect” that’s resulted in more business for Linguana, Steel says.
“More brands are seeing the ad segments, and they start to see we’re open for business and this is where they can advertise,” he says. “Now when we meet a brand, we can say, who are you trying to reach? What countries? What age demographics? Then we can tell them, these are the 10, 20, 30 channels where you can reach that audience, and we can integrate brand segments in all those videos. It’s a very clear way for us to increase reach at scale.”
Linguana has begun working with a larger number of global brands, he adds, and can now localize content in 41 languages.
“These are companies as interested in acquiring new customers in the U.K. and U.S. as they are in Brazil and Germany,” Steel says. “We offer something that’s hard to find elsewhere. Most creators are only one language and one demographic. Our network can offer a lot more.”
Linguana is a Tubefilter partner.
