THREE-YEAR-OLD Blue Ant Media now has over 200 employees and when you tour around its Merton Street headquarters in Toronto, many of those are your “millennials” or “digital natives” madly creating content for the myriad customers its various media outlets now serve.
In just three years, the Michael MacMillan and Seaton McLean-backed venture (TorStar also owns 25%) has grown from purchasing a piece of what was Glassbox Television (with comedy channel Bite and music brand Aux) to a now 11-brand, multiplatform powerhouse with global aspirations. “Our internal motto is ‘connecting people to their passions’,” said Raja Khanna, the company’s TV and digital head in a recent interview with Cartt.ca. “We do that through great content. Frankly, the mandate of the business was always to be content-focused and fan-focused, rather than technology or distribution method focused.”
Blue Ant owns or controls TV channels (and their digital efforts and apps) Aux, Bite, Hi Fi, Oasis, Radx, Smithsonian Channel and Travel+Escape, as well as Cottage Life magazine, its branded TV channel and consumer shows, Outdoor Canada magazine, and as of today Omnia Media, an extremely popular YouTube multichannel network which has more than 40 million subscribers and half a billion page views per month. That was one long sentence to list what the company has compiled in a very short time frame.
The company is nowhere near done, added Khanna, who sees Omnia Media helping lead the company to growth found beyond the Canadian border.
“It’s hard to be a YouTube broadcaster just in Canada… the digital video business has to be global,” he explained. “The other thing you quickly realize is that the dollars are much smaller, so not only do you have to be global because of the technology and the platform, you also have to be global to get the scale one needs to make it a viable business. So, we switched our thinking… if we’re going to be a content company for this generation of folks, we need to engage them where they are, which is on YouTube… Our first foray was Style Collective.
"If we’re going to be a content company for this generation of folks, we need to engage them where they are, which is on YouTube." – Raja Khanna, Blue Ant Media
“The next major move was when we realized it would take us a long time to try to build the type of scale we need. So we looked out there saying could we buy it? So Blue Ant has done a deal with a company called Omnia Media that will take us into a controlling position in a short period of time… What they are is a YouTube multi-channel network. They’re in the same category as Machinima, Maker Studios, or Fullscreen,” Khanna added.
Omnia’s focus on music dovetails nicely with Blue Ant’s burgeoning Aux, whose interactive magazine is one of the most popular sources of music news on the web, according to Khanna. “Last time I checked, Aux was either No. 1 or 2 music magazine in Canada, U.S., China – a whole bunch of places – on iOS and Android tablets.”
The majority of Omnia’s page views are thanks to the more than 650 artists the company offers on its various YouTube channels. “They’re the third-largest network of music content on YouTube. Number one is Vevo, number two is Warner,” explains Khanna. “It’s analogous to being a broadcaster in that they sign licensed content from 
content creators and then they represent all the ad inventory associated with that content.”
What Blue Ant brings to the table is the ability to fund even more content – and to do direct sales itself and even offer Omnia’s content creators the opportunity to do custom branded content. Until now, Omnia has relied on Google for all of its ads, had no sales force of its own and no way to pitch custom content.
In support of all this growth, Blue Ant is opening an office in New York to go with Omnia’s in Los Angeles – and is also in the middle of building a studio in its Merton St. base in order to create more YouTube videos.
“What Omnia needed was to partner with a media company to bring all this other value to the creators… and say to the best ones: ‘we’re going to fund the creation of more content. We’re going to make use of it not just on YouTube, but in our magazines – digital magazines and on our TV channels. We’re going to bring you branded content opportunities through our brand partners.’ If we can go to a major brand and say ‘hey, we’re going to bring you the top ten music YouTubers to do some custom content for your brand, that’s a powerful story’,” said Khanna.
Since Blue Ant offers social media branding to its major clients such as Samsung and Toyota, too, with “an API connection into Facebook and an exclusive relationship with a software vendor in the U.K. that gives us access to Facebook that others don’t have to allow us to run Facebook campaigns for our clients, we are actually social advertisers,” he continued.
“Our dream sale is one where we get to produce some video for them, but also create a live event for them in conjunction with one of our consumer shows, or one of our other live events, broadcast that on television, run a social media campaign around that through Facebook and launch a custom YouTube channel for it at the same time and run a 12-month campaign… We can do that now with all these different pieces. I think we’re betting on brands more and more wanting that level of integration, cross-platform seamlessness. Hopefully, that’s how it plays out.”
So if Blue Ant believes this is the future and is acting quickly to capitalize on trends, we asked Khanna what’s holding back the big Canadian media companies, who can call on far larger resources than his upstart?
“We don’t have a giant business that we are working to protect, so we have a bit more freedom and… a broader field of vision. We are able to more freely spend management time and resources looking at other parts of the world… We have, frankly, not just the ability, but the need to go beyond Canada to find ways to grow.”
“(Competition) forces us to be more competitive and entrepreneurial, which is good. It keeps our skills strong, keeps us fresh, forces us to be more international-focused and to compete." – Khanna
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate the Canadian system, though. After all, the regulated system here let Blue Ant create and build a base from which to explore the world. “Regulation has been our friend,” he said. “It protects and encourages independent broadcasters and creates opportunities for us where otherwise, in a freer market – free of regulation and free of Cancon restrictions and all that – we would be very vulnerable… So I’m the first to applaud what the Commission has done and continues to do for maintaining a diversity of voices in Canada.
“I would love to have done the Omnia deal with a veil of regulatory protection over it. It’s the nice thing about living in Canada,” Khanna continued. However, that unfettered international competition, “forces us to be more competitive and entrepreneurial, which is good. It keeps our skills strong, keeps us fresh, forces us to be more international-focused and to compete which, ultimately, is good for Canada. We should have companies that have that type of global, entrepreneurial attitude and who don’t rely completely on the regulated system, which can tend to create a little bit of complacency in the market – and less innovation.”
