Fixated Secures $50 Million Eldridge Industries Investment to Build Vertically-Integrated Creator and Content Machine | Exclusive

Fixated, the creator management and content studio, secured a $50 million investment from Eldridge Industries, TheWrap has exclusively learned. This investment comes months after Eldridge Industries led a $12.8 million funding round in March.

The company specializes in managing creator clients like Sketch (5.4 million YouTube subscribers), Zach Justice (1.4 million YouTube subscribers) and Yonna Jay (1.1 million Instagram followers). As the creator economy has become more valuable, there’s been friction between creators and traditional management companies that often plug clients into tried and true career paths rather than catering to their specific strengths and goals. Fixated aims to offer a more customized approach. In addition to providing management, Fixated also serves as a production partner. The company helps its clients with everything from ideation and filming to editing thumbnails and developing a distribution strategy.

“We have a full roster, and they’re all premium. We’re very hands on involved,” Zach Katz, co-founder and CEO of Fixated, told TheWrap.

“The creator economy has grown quickly, but the infrastructure around it has been fragmented,” Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Eldridge Industries Todd L. Boehly said in a statement to press. “Fixated is bringing talent, content, production and distribution together in a way that creates long-term value. This investment supports their continued efforts to build a more integrated and efficient ecosystem for creators.”

This new investment will partially be used to build out a full stack of creator tools within the company. The goal is to quickly create a better quality products for clients.

“In a similar way that Universal Music Group set the standard in the music industry or CAA set the standard for Hollywood when they first started out, we’re really trying to build as much infrastructure internally as possible to control all of those outcomes and give the best opportunities and deals for our clients,” Jason Wilhelm, co-founder and president, told TheWrap.

The investment will also be used to accelerate Fixated’s mergers and acquisitions initiatives as well as fund its creator-led clipping system. Fixated has identified “some pretty sizable management companies” for possible acquisitions and plans to bring them into the company as early as January.

“Our clients need more from us than they needed from us two years ago,” Katz explained. “They want more than brand deals. They want to help with content. They want to be able to build products. They want to be able to market themselves differently.”

Fixated’s amplification and clipping infrastructure will also be expanded. A huge part of Fixated’s strategy revolves around creating viral moments for its clients. To make that happen, Fixated works with a network of microinfluencers that clip videos posted by Fixated’s clients and post into their own feeds. These microinfluencers have been vetted by the company. Fixated also posts certain videos on meme pages the company owns, pages that generate 3 billion views a month across social media.

“We want to guarantee eyeballs to our creators,” Wilhelm said.

A recent success story using this strategy involved Cono (590,000 YouTube subscribers), the host of the “Craft Culture” podcast. Once Fixated spread clips of him across its microinfluencer network, those clips generated millions of views. In November, Cono generated about $5,000 in YouTube AdSense. That amount more than quadrupled by November.

The company recently started offering this viral option to brands.

“If we’re trying to get as many views as humanly possible, we will open the floodgates to as many clippers and microcreators that want to come into the ecosystem as possible,” Wilhelm explained. “If a brand, for example, comes to us and says, ‘We only want to work with the best of the best clippers,’ then we have a separate server where we have about 100 very highly selected creators. It’s a very white glove service. We multiple checks before the content gets approved but also goes live on all the platforms to make sure it’s following up the guidelines.”

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