How a guy turned 3 YouTube Channels into $3 Billion Dollars

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
I gotta tell you about a YouTube story. Okay, so this is a story of how a guy found an underrated opportunity in the YouTube market and turned it into $3 billion. So there's this guy, Renee, and Renee discovers an opportunity. Sam, do you know what the most viewed YouTube channel is? Most views on YouTube, do you know?

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
Uh, the obvious answer would be Mr. Beast, the second.

**Shaan Puri** (0:33)
Mr. Beast, number 13? Why are we talking about number 13? I'm talking about number one, Sam.

**Sam Parr** (0:37)
Okay, do I do the bro move where I underguess? So you quit? No, I'm going to say some type of Indian thing. Probably like an Indian.

**Shaan Puri** (0:46)
Number one is T-Series. It's Indian music. So it's just like all the famous Bollywood songs. But do you know what number two is?

**Sam Parr** (0:51)
I don't. No idea.

**Shaan Puri** (0:53)
CoCoMelon.

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
CoCoMelon. Yeah, God.

**Shaan Puri** (0:55)
Does your kid watch CoCoMelon or is too young, maybe?

**Sam Parr** (0:57)
I refuse to let her watch CoCoMelon because it's crack. It's baby crack.

**Shaan Puri** (1:04)
So by the way, number two, number five, number six, number seven, those are all just like CoCoMelon. They're basically kids' entertainment channels. By the way, a couple of them are like Russian and Ukrainian in the top 10 of all views. So CoCoMelon was this channel that was actually started back in 2006, 2007
This dad, who was like an animator slash filmmaker, and his wife, who I think was like a cartoonist for children's books, they noticed there's like, oh, there's like nothing good on YouTube for kids. And so they start creating very simple animations for kids on YouTube. Just like, literally, if you go to their channel and you click oldest, and the very oldest one, I think it's like 18 years ago, is a video that's like the ABC song. It's a 40 second video. Crazy, and if you go look at all the old ones, it doesn't look like CoCoMelon today. There's no character, there's no like kid, JJ. There's no like crazy cracked out animations. There's nothing, there's just like, literally they're just doing nursery rhymes. So it's like ABC, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, all the hits. And so those start getting a lot of views. And for like 10 plus years, it's just them doing animations, no sponsors, no merchandise, no gimmicks, no nothing. They're just living off of YouTube ad revenue. They got a small team. They get 20 people, 10 plus years.

**Sam Parr** (2:32)
Wow.

**Shaan Puri** (2:33)
So, they did that. There's another story, Blippi. I don't know if you're familiar with Blippi. Blippi is sort of like...

**Sam Parr** (2:41)
I mean, the guy who sings, but it's like many guys now.

**Shaan Puri** (2:45)
Yeah, they've switched out the character, but basically it's a dude who wears a blue suit with orange overalls and a bow tie. And he's like, it's me, Blippi, right? And he's like, basically, he just goes to like abandoned, like, not abandoned, I shouldn't say that, like kids, like play places when they're closed and he goes and he plays in them. And he like films himself playing in the in the play place. And he teaches you things and whatever. Slightly educational, slightly fun channel.

**Sam Parr** (3:08)
Wait, were you going to say Blippi is recording an abandoned plate, like a abandoned warehouses, like is abandoned play places like there's no one there, but they're not abandoned. I thought you'd be like today's special word is tetanus. Like if you did, like you say rabid, rabid.

**Shaan Puri** (3:28)
So Blippi, this guy basically sees that his I think his niece or nephew or something like that is watching these really low quality videos of tractors. Like, you know, like kids love trucks and tractors. He's like, Oh, man, my kid loves this. My nephew loves this tractor video. And so he goes and he makes one. If you get the same thing, go to the Blippi channel, you click all this. You'll see it's a video of a tractor going through a field. And his next one is like another tractor video. And he's on green screen with it. He's not even near a tractor. He just green screens himself on top of it. And so he starts creating this. He starts getting a lot of views. And so what happens is there's this guy, Renee. And what Renee does is he decides to create a PE roll up, but around these kids' YouTube channels. And the opportunity is that Renee worked out a company called Maker Studios. Do you remember Maker?