This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. It's powered by digital media here with Keith Richmond, who is, I always call it the CEO of Defy Media, but you're president of Defy Media.

That's correct. I think Defy Media is a little bit in the Rodney Dangerfield zone. You're a big video producer. You know how to do something. A lot of people don't. And I think a lot of folks outside a pretty small circle of media people don't know what

defy media is.

Am I summing that up correctly?

I think that is unfortunately a fair characterization.

So I always introduce you as these are the guys who produce Smosh.

And most people who read Recode probably don't watch Smosh, but they may have heard of Smosh's two dudes primarily who are a giant YouTube brand. And they've now expanded, this is why you're shaking your head, into a bigger YouTube brand. But started off with two dudes from California. Yeah, I mean, I think the 50,000-foot view of Defi is because we own a bunch of other brands and channels is we're a big creator of digital programming for 13 to

34 year olds video primarily right or with focus on video that's primary focus on video yeah and we

you know we're the largest owner of YouTube channels we have about 70 million subscribers to our

various channels and this is more of an owned and operated model. It's not a network model where

we're renting the channels in deals like that. We are the owners of the channels and we are the

producers of programming for those channels. You make lots of content that you own. Yes.

Distributed on the internet on places like YouTube. I think Facebook will talk about all of that. In an earlier

era, you were called break. Yes, so Defy is actually the result of a merger between two

companies, one break media and the other Alloy Digital. And we came together in 2000, at the end of

2013, to create Defy. And we did it because we were both getting to a scale. And it was a scale at which, no matter how successful we were, we always felt that we couldn't invest enough in programming. And by coming together, we were able to do that. So talk about scale. So again, assume that the listeners of this podcast have never heard of Defy. How big is the company? How many folks are you reaching? Can we put it as a contact of a TV network?

Yeah. So like I said, we have 70 million YouTube subscribers. We do about 800 million views a month to our content.

Majority of that's actually on YouTube, which is a rarity nowadays when people talk about views. We get about 50 million people a month to our various

websites, you know, breaks, smosh. We have a website called girl.com that's really popular.

The company's got about 375 people in it spread between Los Angeles, New York, and then some

sales offices around the country. And like you said, you started off as a primarily YouTube company.

Right now, all the excitement around video has shifted to Facebook and Snapchat.

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