(Bloomberg) -- Andrew Yaffe has spent the last decade expanding the audience for the National Basketball Association across digital and social platforms. Now he’s tackling a company with an even larger online fan base on YouTube: Dude Perfect.
Yaffe will serve as the chief executive officer for the sports and comedy channel, which has amassed more than 60 million followers on YouTube thanks to its videos of trick shots and interactions with athletes. Yaffe’s job is to turn its large audience into the basis for a family-friendly media company that spans TV, video games and live entertainment.
Popular YouTube channels make tens of millions of dollars from advertising on the site, as well as related sponsorship deals. The most ambitious of those channels have tried to leverage their followings into businesses including publishing, TV and commerce. MrBeast has started a snack business and a TV series for Amazon.com Inc. while former NASA scientist Mark Rober sells engineering tools and lessons for kids.
“Fundamentally what Dude Perfect wants to build is a world class content company,” Yaffe said in an interview. “Fifteen years of growth and staying power on YouTube don’t happen by accident.”
Dude Perfect started when five former college roommates at Texas A&M University uploaded video of their basketball trick shots to YouTube in 2009. The video went viral and was featured on Good Morning America. The popularity of their videos has already led to several related business ventures. They created a couple of mobile games, produced a TV show for the cable network CMT and collaborated on a book.
But the dudes, as the co-founders are known, eventually realized there was only so much they could do on their own.
“The five of us have had a lot of fun, but were bottle necked in terms of what we can do to grow the business,” said Coby Cotton, one of the five dudes.
The dudes raised more than $100 million earlier this year from Highmount Capital, an investment firm lead by Jason Illian, who used to lead an investment arm of Koch Industries.
They plan to use that money to increase their output from a new video every couple of weeks to new ones every couple of days. Most of those videos will feature talent that isn’t one of the dudes. They are also building a family-friendly entertainment complex, have conceived a new idea for a live tour and are planning some new video games.
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