Mashable continues its push into video with the acquisition of movie-centric YouTube channel CineFix.
The digital publisher purchased the channel, which has 1.6 million subscribers, from Lloyd Braun’s Whalerock Industries, the media company behind the Kardashian sisters’ apps and web brands like Wonderwall. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“They’ve built up a great following on YouTube over the last few years,” Mashable chief strategy officer Adam Ostrow said Monday in a statement. “The voice really aligns with what we’re looking to do in terms of entertainment and culture.”
Launched three years ago, CineFix has focused on serving up web videos for film lovers, including movie reviews and series like 8-Bit Cinema, which retells movies in the classic animation format. Its more than 1,200 videos have been viewed a total of 351 million times.
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For Mashable, which has placed an emphasis on developing video franchises since a $15 million strategic investment from Turner, CineFix offers a new home for existing and forthcoming projects. Among the franchises that will now live on CineFix are Trailer Mix, TL;DW and Scene Stealers. It will provide production resources for the channel while also building the brand’s presence across multiple platforms, including Facebook and Twitter.
Ostrow says that Mashable plans to continue its relationships with the freelancers who were making videos for CineFix. Mashable hired two former CineFix staffers last year, a move that Ostrow says should help the entity keep the brand intact under new ownership. “The tone and voice of CineFix isn’t going to change,” he adds. “It’s still going to operate as its own entity with the addition of production resources and social pollination that we’re going to bring to it.”
Like many of its peers, the Pete Cashmore-led media company has made video a priority since founding Mashable Studios last summer. It currently operates a small network of YouTube channels, its largest being the Mashable channel with 260,000 subscribers. In the midst of its push into video, Mashable earlier this year conducted a round of layoffs that Cashmore described as part of a “strategic shift.”
As Mashable has decreased its emphasis on news and politics coverage, it continues to see entertainment-related content as a key part of its content plan. Ostrow calls entertainment a “key pillar” of Mashable’s coverage, noting that “our audience is rabid consumers of entertainment content, so we think the channel does a great job of fulfilling that need.”
