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What’s a meme worth? Likely more than you’d think.
Doing Things Media was founded in Atlanta and is the owner of many Instagram-popular accounts, including hitShitHeadSteve. OurFourTwenty, @DoggosDoingThingss and hitShitHeadSteve. Volition Capital led the round. Volition Capital is a Boston VC company that previously backed Chewy.com (an e-tailer for pet supplies).
Doing Things Media is profitable and brought in more than $ 10 million in revenue last year from a mix of sponsored ads and e-commerce, mostly apparel and other items bearing the meme accounts’ brands. The five-year-old company hadn’t intended to take any outside capital but thought Volition’s experience backing Chewy.com would benefit a determination to grow its own e-commerce operation. “When they hit us up, we were like, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s hear them out,'” Hailey says. “Our goal is to keep growth that’s sustainable.”
There are many memes online. These funny and viral comments about pop culture often use only recycled joke images. But it’s been hard to gauge how well a company might monetize them — or how valuable such a company would be. Warner Music reportedly spent $ 85million on IMGN Media in 2020. This media company also owns the @Daquan Instagram account. Given what Warner paid for IMGN and the new influx of Series A cash, it’s reasonable to assume Doing Things received a valuation that neared 100 million in this latest funding round.
Doing Things survived the downturn in advertising dollars and pitched advertisers such as T-Mobile, Bud Light and Netflix to their loyal, young audience. The company has 20 Instagram accounts that are memes, and there are more than 40 million Instagram users.
“Companies like Doing Things have already done the hardest part: they’ve created unique content, they’ve amassed massive audiences, and their audiences are very engaged,” says Larry Cheng, a founding partner at Volition. “We think there’s plenty of room to create new brands and expand to new categories and also to extend to different distribution channels.”
That’s complicated language to mean Doing Things will do things like increase its Web series, TV-show-type videos uploaded mostly to YouTube. YouTube is a great place to share ad revenue. A clip that has 20 million views could earn you $ 100,000. Although the economics may not be as appealing, Snap also hosts such series. It’s also possible to place a series’ bonus content behind a subscription paywall like the one Patreon offers.
It is harder than creating funny dog videos to create these series. The web-show by Doing Things was a big hit. Gas, All Gas. but the comedically breakneck examination of America’s stranger corners — Proud Boys, Burning Man, porn stars — ended last spring amid a contract dispute with its host, 23-year-old Andrew Callaghan.
The new series will be called Businesses are in trouble In it, host Graeme Barrett will try to delineate how a company operates, examaning “peculiar businesses being, like,‘ How do you make money? ’” Hailey says. “Maybe a waste disposal plant, where he’ll see if there’s any money in poop.” For an extraspecial episode, Barrett might try some self-examination and review the meme business.
