Discovery Is Broken. This Startup Says Its Tech Can Help Creators Fix That
SCOOP: Two new Hollywood execs join Chronicle Studios as it pushes to help talent cut through YouTube chaos
This is a preview of Like & Subscribe, my standalone Ankler Media newsletter on the creator economy. I wrote about Apple’s move into the increasingly competitive video podcast space and the debate among creators over whether to form a union, and I talked to Mark Fischbach (aka Markiplier) about his film, Iron Lung. I’m natalie@theankler.com
When I sit down with sources who work with digital-first talent, they regularly grouse that it can be hard for emerging voices to break through the noise on social media. For all the opportunity that exists in the creator economy — and I’ve written about a lot of those opportunities over the last 13 months — it’s also never been more difficult to find an audience.
Edison’s quarterly list of the top 50 podcasts is full of shows that have been pumping out new episodes for years (with the notable exception of one-year-old Good Hang with Amy Poehler). And most of the top channels on YouTube, where there are an estimated 115 million channels and an average of 20 million videos uploaded every day, have been posting on the streamer for over a decade. That makes the rise of Vlad and Niki, an eight-year-old kids channel with 149 million subscribers, or Alan’s Universe, Alan Chikin Chow’s six-year-old channel for scripted videos with nearly 100 million subscribers, all the more impressive. Even on TikTok — where, thanks to a powerful recommendation algorithm, any old video can turn into a viral sensation — the top 20 most-followed accounts belong to people who’ve been posting since at least 2020.
The saturation of these platforms means that people who would have thrived in digital video a decade ago now struggle to find a foothold. Last year, I wrote about Carla Lalli Music, a cookbook author and Substacker who shut down her YouTube channel because, in spite of her popularity, she couldn’t attract an audience big enough to cover the cost of her highly produced cooking videos.
Discovery is a big problem without an easy solution, but today I’ve got a story for you about a San Francisco startup that believes it’s solved part of the puzzle — and scored $11.6 million in seed funding (in a round led by Steven A. Cohen’s Point72 Ventures and Patron) to prove it. Chronicle Studios has spent the better part of the past year developing AI technology to help YouTube channels of any size meaningfully grow their audience.
“We’ve talked to hundreds of indie creators, studios, brands, and they all have the exact same problem,” says Chronicle co-founder and CEO Aaron Sisto. “YouTube is top of the funnel and none of them have really cracked the code on how to be successful there.”
Chronicle works with the creators and companies behind about 50 YouTube channels, including an Israeli animation studio and an animator who worked on How To Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. And I can exclusively report that the company has tapped Hollywood veterans Scott Greenberg and Brett Coker — who co-founded Bob’s Burgers animation studio Bento Box Entertainment and later sold it to Fox Entertainment in 2019 — for leadership roles as it looks to open up its platform to more than 10,000 channels by the end of the year.
“If we can really help make social video accessible, I believe there’s a world where you can be an independent production company, and creators can own their content and really have a shot to make money,” says Greenberg in his first interview since joining Chronicle as a co-founder (having exited Bento Box in 2023, he’s also executive chairman at Othelia, a startup developing AI storytelling tools). Coker, meanwhile, left Bento Box in August and is now head of franchise strategy for Chronicle, which employs about 15 people in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and London.
Over at Like & Subscribe, my full interview with Sisto and Greenberg on how Chronicle plans to attack YouTube’s discovery bottleneck. Plus:
Where Chronicle thinks the real “bottleneck” in digital distribution lives
What its “secret sauce” AI actually does beyond basic thumbnail testing
How it segments YouTube’s 2.5 billion users to find new audiences
Chronicle’s micro-targeting strategy behind its growth engine
How Greenberg is translating Silicon Valley tech for Hollywood buyers
Chronicle’s revenue model — and where the real money could come from
Why some creators see this as protection against a looming AI “slop society”
The rest of this column is for paid subscribers to Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter dedicated to the creator economy from Ankler Media.
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