Cue Nostalgia: Smosh Returns To Its Founders

Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox reunite to purchase Smosh

Good morning. Despite the threat of a TikTok ban, half of users haven’t cut back on the time they spend scrolling the app in the last six months, a new report by Modern Retail found. In fact, 32% of respondents said their app usage actually increased. Not sure if that says more about our collective disbelief in a ban actually happening…or more about the hold those GRWM videos have on us.

P.S. We’ll be at VidCon tomorrow. Hit reply and tell us what you’d like to see us cover!

Smosh Founders Buy Back Brand from Mythical Entertainment

Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, Smosh / YouTube

This week, founders Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox regained ownership of Smosh, the YouTube channel they started together in 2005.

It’s a major moment for Smosh, which has served as a blueprint for what a creator-founded brand can morph into. Here’s how they got here:

2005: Padilla and Hecox start Smosh as a sketch comedy channel, making fake commercials like “Beef ’n Go” and music videos like “Legend of Zelda Rap.” They grew in popularity to 4 million subscribers, becoming the third channel ever to do so.

2011: Padilla and Hecox sell Smosh for an undisclosed amount to digital media company Defy Media in a deal designed to help them increase production output and make movies, comic books, and magazines.

2017: Padilla leaves Smosh to start his own channel, citing creative differences (and later, a disagreement with Defy).

2018: Defy goes out of business, and Rhett and Link-founded media company Mythical Entertainment swoops in to buy Smosh for just under $10 million.

Which brings us to today: Mythical sold Smosh back to Padilla and Hecox for an undisclosed amount. According to Mythical, the company “realized a significant multiple of its original invested capital” in Smosh and it will retain a minority stake in the comedy channel.

“We realized the sketches we made weren’t just great because they were a product of the times,” Padilla said in the deal announcement video. “They were a reflection of the magic we felt when we were making something together.”

In the time since the duo was last leading Smosh, Padilla created a production agency and popular YouTube talk show, while Hecox weathered the different Smosh eras as CEO and Director of Entertainment for the brand.

How Smosh 2.0 will be different:

  • Comedy videos written/directed by and starring Padilla and Hecox start June 30.

  • Their other channels including Smosh Pit, Smosh Gaming, and El Smosh (a Spanish-dubbed channel) will stay the same.

  • Smosh will offer memberships starting at $2.99/month, which include perks like access to bloopers and live watch parties with the founders.

Ludwig’s Shorts Editor Shares Insights on Vertical Video

Stadtler "Radstads" Thompson / YouTube

“Everyone should be making Shorts right now. There’s no reason not to.”

That was the thesis Stadtler “Radstads” Thompson, the short-form content director for popular gaming streamer Ludwig Ahgren, shared during an over two-hour livestream “revealing the secrets of YouTube Shorts” last week.

The key takeaways:

  • Discoverability is difficult right now, but Shorts are driving traffic. Thompson believes that every Short has a chance of getting seen—regardless of a channel’s size.

  • The bar for good retention gets higher for shorter videos. “If your video is less than 30 seconds long, your target retention should be 90%,” Thompson said.

  • Shorts should be viewed as advertisements for your content. "Don't make Shorts for money,” Thompson said. “Make them to grow your account so you can actually eventually start to profit."

Big picture: During Google’s quarterly earnings conference call in April, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler described Shorts as the “number one” area of focus for “YouTube’s long-term growth.”

In other words: YouTube appears to be saying that if it’s prioritizing a “multi-format strategy,” then creators should, too.

Kwebbelkop Replaces Himself with AI Clone

Kwebbelkop / YouTube

Gaming creator Jordi Maxim van den Bussche—aka Kwebbelkop—announced that he’ll be retiring from YouTube after 11 years…and replacing himself with an AI clone that’ll run his 15-million-subscriber channel for the foreseeable future.

This is the farthest we’ve seen a creator go in adding AI to their tech stack. “This is a very open and public experiment and I’ll be the first creator to do this (as far as I know),” Bussche tweeted.

Zoom out: As one user noted, “If you have the attention now and you can truly clone your visual and face, why not?”

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