Santa Monica-based media company Culture Genesis has entered into a $25 million partnership with Jellysmack that aims to boost underrepresented content creators. The process is strikingly simple: with money from Jellysmack, Culture Genesis’ roster of more than 120 creators will receive funding to invest in their content while having access to Jellysmack’s catalog licensing.
Culture Genesis was founded in 2018 by Cedric J. Rogers, a former Apple executive, and Shaun Newsum, a VEVO and MLB Advanced Media alum. Newsum said partnering with a company like Jellysmack to expand felt natural.
“I’ve known Adam (Goldstein, a vice president at Jellysmack) as a friend for many years,” said Newsum. “I reconnected with Adam mid-to-late last year and that’s how the conversation got started. It was a really organic conversation … we (both) saw an opportunity for growth.”
A key aspect of this initiative is Jellysmack’s catalog licensing. In short, Culture Genesis creators who want to participate will be able to sell the licensing rights to their content to Jellysmack. Portions of the $25 million fund will also go toward directly financing creators, which, as Newsum noted, helps to clear a frequent hurdle for up-and-coming underrepresented creators. Although the partnership was built for channels already in the Culture Genesis network, Newsum stressed that the initiative isn’t exclusive to their preexisting partners.
Black creators’ monetization rates lag behind their non-Black peers by as much as 35%, despite having larger followings, according to a study by Group Black and Nielsen. Newsum sees initiatives such as the Culture Genesis and Jellysmack one as necessary and important for the ever-growing creator economy.
“For Culture Genesis, we want to be the largest underrepresented digital video network and monetization platform, so for us we’re looking to work with any and everybody that wants to help bridge the gap for underrepresented creators,” Newsum said.
The company has paid out roughly $10 million to content creators to date and has worked to grow their creators’ audiences by a combined 100 million viewers.
Since 2021, the company, which claims to be the “largest Black-owned digital video network,” has tripled what its creators would have otherwise made through YouTube’s standard monetization systems.
In recent years, the company has also partnered with entertainment heavyweights including comedian Steve Harvey, rapper Patrick Cloud, and YouTube channel All Def, which the company purchased in 2019.
