Our Investment in Mammoth Media
There are probably 1 billion phones in the world that people have looked at in the past hour. 98% of millennials in the United States have a smartphone. While some people say “mobile is dead” (for new investments / startups) or “no one is downloading new apps”, this just doesn’t match up with the rapidly increasing numbers and time spent on mobile. Consumers are always on the hunt for new, fun ways to interact with content and each other. Last year, I wrote a blog post on how the next great platform is still mobile and it rings even truer today.
For millennials and Generation Z, mobile devices are the primary screen in which they connect with their world. They communicate with their friends and families constantly over text, iMessage, Facetime, Snapchat, Houseparty, etc., and keep up with each other’s lives and more through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. People play games — lots and lots of games. The mobile gaming space is massive — over $46B was spent on mobile games last year across App Store and Google Play, and this has become the largest segment of the games industry.
Beyond just communication, social media, and games, these devices have become more and more common place for seeking out entertainment — books, video, music. One of the fastest growing areas of mobile have been subscription services accessed through your phone. People pay for Spotify or Apple Music to get their music, and Netflix, Hulu, and HBO to access their videos, or Kindle Unlimited to read books. What’s interesting about these services is, unlike mobile games, none of these started on mobile, nor are optimized for mobile.
This brings us to Mammoth Media. CEO Benoit Vatere believed there was an opportunity to create a new “studio lot” that could produce apps that provided unique mobile-first entertainment on a daily basis. They incubated this company within Science, with the idea that true mobile entertainment should be interactive, shareable, and provide a few minutes of fun, multiple times per day, instead of a 30 minute or longer show.
They first launched Wishbone, a polling app. Wishbone provided a “daily dozen” poll of 12 questions in the format “which do you prefer — A or B?” Millions of people opened their phones to vote and compare their taste to others. Over time they extended this to multiple times per day and opened the question creation to their community. Mammoth Media’s next big hit is Yarn which lets users read and watch interactive stories, with new content created daily. Yarn started with stories told through simple text message threads, and have evolved to a rich new storytelling format including video, “live streaming”, and more to tell the story. Users can subscribe on a weekly or monthly basis to access the catalog of stories within Yarn — similar to subscribing to Netflix or HBO. Yarn and Wishbone are just the beginning of Mammoth’s vision for a new mobile-first entertainment network.
In just two years, Mammoth Media has become the leading mobile-first media company to produce, distribute, and monetize original content. They deliver engaging, short-form content through their suite of mobile products and online channels, which has garnered a mass audience of users and downloads. Mammoth’s mobile apps, like Yarn and Wishbone, are consistently ranked in the Top 100 App charts. Yarn is one of the fastest growing destinations for short-form storytelling with a total of 36 million stories read, 1.6 million episodes read per week and 7.5 billion messages read. Wishbone, a community where millennials can share their opinions, has an average of 352 million votes per month and 17 billion votes created to date.
Today Mammoth is announcing its exclusive content partnership with Skype and their new series HACK’D. This is the beginning of taking more professional content and bringing it to this new mobile-native format. The Mammoth team is uniquely poised to take advantage of this opportunity with their deep experience of mobile dynamics including acquisition and monetization. For content owners, Mammoth provides direct access to millions of viewers and a platform to deliver quality content.
Along with that announcement, I am excited to share that Greylock led the $13M Series A financing in Mammoth Media, and I have joined the board. Mammoth Media is located in Santa Monica, making this my first Los Angeles-based venture investment. I’m #longLA and I believe there will be many more great companies that bridge technology and entertainment and LA will be a great place for those companies to grow and prosper. Mammoth Media is in a unique position to become one of the strongest next-gen media companies and I am excited to partner with such a special team and support them as they scale.
