Little Baby Bum is sold

Terms of the sale of one of YouTube’s most popular channels aren’t disclosed.

One of YouTube’s most popular brands has been bought by a trio of entertainment-industry veterans with ties to Disney and the Teletubbies, as independent creators discover that the way to expand is finding deep-pocketed backers or combining with other video producers.

Little Baby Bum — YouTube’s ninth-mostwatched channel and a savior of time-poor parents worldwide — has been bought by an agency called Moonbug, which may use the channel to pursue other YouTube-based companies in hopes of building scale and pooling resources, Little Baby Bum co-founder Derek Holder said.

Little Baby Bum’s 54minute compilation of nursery rhymes is the 20th-mostpopular video in YouTube history, with 2.1 billion views. Its 3-D animations set to saccharine electronic music gave busy parents a free, safe space to distract toddlers, at a time when critics found increasingly disturbing children’s content elsewhere on the site.

Moonbug was started by investor and former Walt Disney Co. employee Rene Rechtman, and by Alfred Chubb and John Robson of WildBrain, a division of Canada’s DHX Media that controls famous brands for kids including Ben 10, Popeye and the Teletubbies. Moonbug beat out four other bids for the company, Holder said.

Rechtman already had taken part in one of the biggest YouTube deals: the sale of Maker Studios to Disney, which paid more than $650 million for the network of tens of thousands of YouTube channels.

Companies like Maker were once popular targets for traditional media companies looking to better understand YouTube, seen as an avenue to vast online audiences that potentially could be enticed back to traditional TV or continue to be served on the internet. DreamWorks Animation SKG acquired AwesomenessTV, Disney bought Maker and RTL Group took on StyleHaul.

Yet while YouTube’s revenue has climbed past $10 billion, video creators and companies on the site have struggled to find similar success. Most of these networks have had to lay off staff and look to new areas, such as merchandise and proper TV shows, for added income. AwesomenessTV, valued at $650 million just a few years ago, sold for a fraction of that this year.

Moonbug’s trio became directors of Little Baby Bum on July 10, public records show, with husband and wife Derek and Cannis Holder of London stepping aside from the company they founded in 2011.

Terms of the sale were confidential.