Now I realize that at this point, the first question my regular readers (thanks, all five of you) will be asking is “Who is Defy Media, and why should we care?” Well, to the first, they were a large YouTube multichannel network who were partnered with a bunch of fairly big channels. Kind of like Voltron, the sum is supposed to be greater than the parts forming it. To the second, it turns out that a bunch of fairly big YouTube channels got screwed over pretty badly. I’ll let MatPat of Game Theorists take it from here:
Reading the first article I linked, it’s pretty clear that Defy was trying to plump themselves for a big acquisition, but ran out of time and other people’s money to make it happen. It sounds a lot like some of the sketchy things that were going on during the dot.com bubble, only now the games are being played with other people’s revenue money.
I’m just a teeny, tiny fish in the YouTube ecosystem, not even big enough to attract the attention of any multichannel networks. Maybe that’s a good thing. I hope MatPat and the other folks who got taken for a ride by Defy get their money though, and that’s why I’m boosting the signal in whatever little way that I can.