VC Firms Are Buying Equity Directly in Influencers, YouTube Creators
- YouTube creator Marina Mogilko recently received $1.7 million in funding from Slow Ventures.
- In exchange, the VC firm will receive 5% of all her future earnings.
- The money will allow her to focus on content creation instead of sponsored content, she said.
As the creator economy continues to boom, some venture capitalists are looking to profit off the trend by buying equity in influencers.
In one of the latest deals, Marina Mogilko, a YouTube creator with four channels, received $1.7 million in funding from venture firm Slow Ventures, as well as investors Sriram Krishnan and Daniil and David Liberman. In exchange, she gave up a 5% cut of her future earnings.
Mogilko, 31, told Insider that this funding gives her the freedom to focus on content creation instead of relying on income generated from sponsored content.
“Google AdSense is a good stream of revenue, but I also have to take a lot of partnership deals in order to sustain a stable revenue stream,” Mogilko said. “That takes a lot of creativity away.”
Mogilko runs a diversified YouTube business. She is behind the 505,000-subscriber lifestyle channel, “Silicon Valley Girl”; the 1.3 million subscriber vlog channel under her name; a language-learning channel with 4.5 million subscribers, “linguamarina”; and an English language-learning channel with 50,000 subscribers called “English with LinguaTrip!”
Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin told Insider that the firm will act more like “passive partners” in Mogilko’s creator business, taking a 5% stake in everything she does as a creator over the next 30 years.
Earlier this year, the VC firm carved out $20 million from its latest fund to back creators, and its investment in Mogilko is only the start. This money is meant to help the creator “grow and professionalize” their business, Lessin said.
“With creators, the reality is you’re seeing a class of people like Marina who all of a sudden are building around themselves personal brands and huge followings, ahead of actually building product,” Lessin said.
“It’s an opportunity for me to scale down on the number of partnerships I do and focus on creating instead – and thinking about ideas and different companies I can build for other creators,” Mogilko said. She added that she doesn’t have a specific plan for the money quite yet.
Aside from brand partnerships and ad revenue earned from her videos, Mogilko also earns money by selling a course on how to start a YouTube channel. Her course, which costs $475, has over 5,000 sign-ups, she said. She is also the cofounder of two language-learning companies, LinguaTrip and Fluent.express.
Slow Ventures isn’t the only firm starting to invest in creators. One the firm’s portfolio companies, Creative Juice, has set aside $2 million of its recent $5 million seed round to invest in influencers, cofounder Sima Gandhi told Insider in May. The startup, which is developing a tool for creators to see their projected revenue and value of their business, has paired with the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, to work with the selected creators.
Similary, creator economy startup Spotter is paying YouTubers to acquire the rights to their back catalog of videos for a limited time. Creators are taking advantage of the money in similar ways. The capital MrBeast earned in his deal with Spotter, for example, is going toward producing higher-budget videos and expanding his team.
“For creators specifically, the reality is, it’s kind of a weird position where these very serious businesses are being built, and they are operating off of cash flow,” Lessin said. “I think that puts creators at a really disadvantaged place. … If someone had a lot of these creators’ numbers but instead of being a person they were a company, they would have great venture capital.”
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