In this article, we're discussing how a social media meme page operator, Doing Things Media, raised $21 500 000 in venture capital to grow their media brand operations. We talk about how they did it, and exactly what they have done to get to this level.
We also go ahead to look at what signals this sends towards the future of online businesses and entrepreneurship.
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If you are interested to learn how meme pages make money on instagram, let's dive into this article...
Doing Things Media
Doing Things Media is the media company behind some of the biggest pages on social networks. It has 25 social media meme accounts and a collection of brands with over 65 000 000 followers across Instagram and other platforms. Some popular pages owned by Doing Things Media include:
- Shit Head Steve — 6 900 000 followers on Instagram
- Doggos Doing Things — 2 900 000 followers on Instagram
- FourTwenty — 4 200 000 followers on Instagram
These are all classic meme pages and they get a pretty decent amount of engagement from their audiences due to the infotainment nature of the content.
Apparently, this media company (Doing Things Media) which was founded in Atlanta — USA, took a $21 500 000 Series A funding round led by Volition Capital. Volition Capital is a venture capital firm based in Boston, the USA that has backed several companies like Chewy.com, which is one of the biggest e-commerce companies in the pet category.
After the financial backing of Volition Capital, Chewie.com currently receives approximately 52 000 000 monthly visitors consistently, which is about 624 000 000 visitors per year. This is a massive number because the site now gets more visitors in a year than the whole entire United States population.
Now that Volition has invested in Doing Things Media, we expect so pretty incredible growth due to the previous track record set by Chewy.com.
Larry Cheng, a founding partner at Volition Capital says,
"Companies like Doing Things have already done the hardest part: They’ve created unique content, they’ve amassed massive audiences, and their audiences are very engaged.
We think there’s plenty of room to create new brands and expand to new categories and also to extend to different distribution channels."
Sources of Content
Doing Things Media is a company that actually doesn't make its own videos. They instead get videos sent to them by their audiences. On their main website, they have a portal whereby people can submit content to them.
Also, some of their meme pages have a link on the bio where you can literally just send them videos you want to be published on the page.
So basically they have an evergreen influx of content that's not really theirs but they can still call it original content because it's sent to them by their audience. They post the received content on their page with a few extra quotes in a meme format like this.
Valuation
According to Forbes, memes are everywhere online but it’s been hard to gauge how well a company might monetize them or how valuable such a company would be. In 2020, Warner Music reportedly spent $85 000 000 to acquire IMGN Media, which owns things like the Instagram account, Daquan. Given what Warner paid for IMGN and the new influx of Series A cash, it’s reasonable to assume Doing Things received a valuation that neared $100 million in this latest funding round.
Daquan meme page. Recently acquired by Warner Music.
Doing Things Media owns multiple big pages all over social media which makes its worth presumably bigger than that of IMGN media.
The company has been around for only 5 years and it has become a success for the founders. The reason why they have been able to raise this amount of money is not just because of their audience size but the fact that they have generated millions of dollars in revenue.
In 2021, the company generated over $10 000 000 in revenue from advertising and selling merchandise on their e-commerce stores to their fans.
What Does This Mean for the Future?
One thing that this investment means for sure is that a lot more online media companies with access to huge audiences are going to start getting valuations like this. There are so many big corporations that have so much money to blow and they’ll definitely blow it by investing in brands that can get them access to millions of views on social media.
Owning the access points to such huge audiences would be extremely valuable for any big venture capital firm or any other corporation, especially in terms of marketing. So why wouldn't they start investing in more brands like this!
What this also means is that media and e-commerce are always going to continue being extremely aligned. Owning a media channel is really valuable as it can save you millions of ad spend while generating millions of revenue from free traffic. When it comes to owning a media company you can create content however and whenever you want and you can funnel all the viewers to your e-commerce pages for free.
This is great as it sorts out the marketing part and all that is left to handle is the supply chain and logistics. When you mix the two, then you’ll have a steady combination because one can supplement the other whenever they're struggling. For example, if you have supply chain issues, you can still continue to build up hype with the eyes and attention that your pages are getting until when the stock is ready.
Conclusion
This information comes as a positive signal for online entrepreneurs as it reveals how owning online channels can be so valuable and will continue being so valuable in the foreseeable future. We can see this from how Doing Things Media was able to get a valuation of approximately $100 000 000, yet it has been running for only 5 years.
In this current world of evergrowing social media, the kind of success achieved by Doing Things Media can be replicated and even taken further as there are platforms like Tiktok that offer much more growth opportunities.
If you want to start your own meme page this is also a sign to go ahead. The most important thing is to have a growth plan to reinvest some of the money that you make back into turning it into an actual business by building a team and acquiring more brands to widen your portfolio.
