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Pictured above: YouTube star Rosanna Pansino
KIN, the parent company of YouTube MCN KIN Community, has just raised a $12 million Series C round of funding, led by Corus Entertainment with investments from Emil Capital, Mayfield Fund, General Catalyst Partners and Rustic Canyon Partners.
KIN Community content is primarily made by women for women and focuses on lifestyle topics. At the top of its channels is The Ellen Show, which shows clips of its broadcast television show. It has been able to use YouTube well as a viral marketing engine to drive audiences to its daytime talk show broadcasts. KIN’s network of stars also includes Rosanna Pansino, a YouTube creator whose quirky cooking lessons have built a huge audience of nearly 2.7 million subscribers and 442 million lifetime views. And KIN was involved in the innovative and Emmy-award winning series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The show was a remake of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but formatted around a series of video blogs. Characters in the video blogs interacted with fans in real-time via social media, creating an intense fan base and deep engagement.
The new funding will be used “first and foremost to build out our sales team. There’s a great opportunity to provide real value to brands,” said co-founder and CEO of KIN Community, Michael Wayne. “We want to work with the best brands out there. We want to do that directly with brands and we want to do that with YouTube.”
KIN and Corus, will also partner to launch KIN Canada, a Canadian version of KIN’s offerings. KIN Canada content will be uniquely tailored to the Canadian market to optimize opportunities for branding. Beyond North America, “I think you’ll see us looking at other international markets too,” said Wayne.
Corus is a publicly traded Canadian media company that creates content for numerous Canadian television channels and owns 39 radio stations. Corus has a number of entertainment and lifestyle focused television channels including OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network (Canada), W Network, ABC Spark, and CosmoTV. The company also has a focus on kids programming including the Canadian version of Nickelodeon.
Wayne said the company’s approach to finding Canadian YouTube stars will parallel much of what KIN is already doing in the United States.
“We work with around 100 creators. It’s really important for us to find creators who are dedicated to their brand. People who want to do this as a full-time job, preferably for the rest of their lives,” said Wayne. “They tend to share the same values with other creators that are part of KIN.”
KIN has over 25 million unique viewers each month and has over four billion lifetime video views.
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