Skyship keeps it Super Simple
Morghan Fortier reveals how Skyship Entertainment has built a robust business through its Super Simple Songs YouTube channel for preschoolers, entirely bypassing the broadcaster system and retaining all of its IP.
Morghan Fortier
Skyship Entertainment is that rare production company; one that has built a robust business by entirely bypassing the traditional broadcaster system.
The Toronto-based outfit, which is behind the juggernaut YouTube channel Super Simple Songs, has racked up more than 71 billion views on the Google-owned video platform across its various brands, with 42.6 million subscribers to Super Simple Songs alone.
Dedicated to animated videos, nursery rhymes and original songs aimed mainly at preschoolers, the channel features videos that help kids aged from one to eight learn to count, recognise colours and identify different animals.
The channel has become a hit with youngsters, their teachers and parents. In particular, teachers use it as an educational resource and as a curriculum supplement. New videos commonly rack up more than five million views, and some post significantly higher numbers than that. Three videos on the channel have cleared two billion views, including This Is How We Get Dressed, while more than 30 attracted 250 million views, including My Happy Song.
Co-owner and CEO Morghan Fortier told C21’s Content Canada in September how Skyship has built its business in such a way that it never has to rely on other companies to cobble together the financing to greenlight a show.
“Because it’s animation first and foremost, the plan has always been about iterating and innovating pipelines that were going to be sustainable for self-investment,” she said during an interview with Andrew Peterson, head of YouTube Canada.
“We’re self-financed, don’t have any outside loans, don’t have any external parties financing us, and we don’t pitch to broadcasters. We certainly could but we currently don’t – it’s not in our model. So it is 100% risk for 100% of the reward.”
As is the case when building a production company with a more traditional model, Skyship’s journey has been long, winding and not without its challenges.
The company was in at the ground floor of what today is referred to as the ‘creator economy.’ Co-founded by Devon Thagard and Troy McDonald, the Super Simple Songs brand began posting YouTube videos in 2006 and four years later began monetising that content. In late 2015, Thagard and McDonald teamed up with Fortier to launch Skyship.
This Is How We Get Dressed has cleared two billion views on YouTube
Attempting to build a self-sustaining business without going to traditional content commissioners for development and production financing is a risky proposition, but with determination, skill and a bit of luck along the way, Fortier says the rewards can be significant.
“It certainly requires long-term investment, but today that’s allowed us to retain 100% ownership of our IP. It is unburdened by any distribution requirements or restrictions and, with that, we’re really able to build out the model we have today,” she explained, adding that Skyship doesn’t need to adhere to strict release dates for its content. “We can make them up,” she said.
Skyship’s strategy has evolved over the past eight years. In 2016, it was focused solely on producing, releasing and monetising its YouTube videos. Today, it has built new revenue streams on top of the YouTube business, including its Super Simple Songs app and books.
Given that music is the foundation of everything it does, it is also investing in live touring and consumer products. However, Fortier concedes that Skyship has struggled to make significant headway with consumer products so far. “I don’t know how you make money on consumer products, and we’ve been doing this for three years,” she said.
For Skyship, Super Simple Songs is the flagship brand around which everything revolves. That means profits from the YouTube channel and its ancillary business lines are funneled back into other projects.
“Whenever we produce, we do it with cash in hand and that’s the slate for production for the year. So we don’t over-extend; we save up for a rainy day these days. But the day job paying for the production still applies – the day job now just happens to be the Super Simple Songs channel and it feeds everything else we do.”
Other brands created and produced by Skyship include Finny the Shark and Mr Monkey, Monkey Mechanic.
My Happy Song
Driven by revenue generated from YouTube, Fortier said Skyship is “more of an entertainment company today than we were in 2016,” but the foundations of the company remain very similar to eight years ago. Today, however, it has been able to scale up using the global success of Super Simple Songs as the bedrock of its business activities.
“We are, at our heart, a production company. If you walk through the doors of our offices, there’s animators, designers, board artists. We have two sound booths so we can do our voice recording for songs and series, we have live-action talent, we have a shooting stage that we’ve built in that facility,” she said.
“Being a production entity in the digital landscape can be one person, or it can be us today, where we have between 40 and 50 people who work with us, not including the freelancers and additional companies.”
Opting to avoid the traditional broadcaster commissioning model, as well as not taking on any service work, has also forced Skyship to grow its storytelling and songwriting capabilities internally, said Fortier.
“If we were to work with a broadcaster, the pipeline we’ve created and the strength we’ve built in our storytelling would probably never have happened,” she said.
How to use and interpret data gleaned from YouTube is, for many companies, a complex undertaking that dictates future business moves and strategic decisions. That is not the case at Skyship, where Fortier said the data is interpreted and applied in its most basic sense.
“Yes, we can look at the data from the backend analytics, you can get really into the weeds with it, but what it comes down to is a show either does well or it doesn’t. A brand is either doing well or it isn’t,” she said. “The way we use [YouTube viewership] analytics is no different to ratings for a television broadcast.”
Particularly coming out of a near-decade-long spell when producers, in many cases, have been forced to give up their IP in order to get shows made, Fortier said going direct to the audience on YouTube and bypassing the more traditional gatekeepers has, in the long run, made a significant difference for Skyship.
“The fact we have been able to stay so independent and retain full ownership of our IP has allowed us to expand in a lot of areas we might not have been able to otherwise,” she explained.
The model the company has built also doesn’t preclude it from pursuing traditional network or streamer commissions, she noted. “It’s not an either/or model,” Fortier claimed. “We just happen to not do a lot with broadcasters, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t go to a broadcaster and pitch a show we’ve produced.”
In its current phase, however, the model of using the Super Simple Songs brand as its profit engine and building outwards from there continues to be Skyship’s core strategy – which, in turn, gives it far greater control of its own destiny.
Fortier said: “We’ve found the independence in the ownership of our IP has been far more fruitful now we’re at this stage of our company’s growth.”