While touring Smosh’s 17,000 square foot studio, co-founder Anthony Padilla points out an old article framed on the wall that feels both poetic and ironic to read today.
It’s from Time Magazine’s “2006 Person of the Year” which celebrated YouTube creators like Padilla and co-founder Ian Hecox as the platform’s first generation of stars.
“So far Padilla and Hecox haven’t been able to monetize their viral notoriety on any significant scale,” Padilla reads from the TIME article, cracking a smile.
17 years later, with over 35 full time employees and 75 million followers, it’s safe to say Padilla and Hecox along with Smosh CEO Alessandra Catanese and EVP of Production Zoe Moacanin have more than answered those questions of monetization and scale.
In fact, Catanese was instrumental in negotiating the deal with Mythical to buy back Smosh along with their legal team at Nixon Peabody and business advisor David Seivers. After working with Padilla for over six years and founding Pressalike together to produce popular shows such as “I Spent A Day With,” Catanese took on the role of Smosh’s CEO. It’s a similar story with Moacanin who quickly rose the ranks at Smosh after Hecox realized how pivotal she was in bringing the team together following the exit of former CEO Daniel Tibbets and SVP of Content Joel Rubin back in June.
But long before the massive studio and impressive team, Smosh’s story starts with a webcam and two friends from Sacramento. Back in 2005, years before today’s robust creator economy, a full-time career on YouTube was far from the norm. YouTube’s monetization program was in its infancy and there was no guarantee that the views would keep coming.
I spoke with Padilla and Hecox along with Catanese and Moacanin about Smosh’s journey, the duo’s 2017 split, solo journeys as creators, and the ultimate reunion to buy back the content production powerhouse that Smosh has now become since their first upload.
PIONEERS ON THE PLATFORM
“I started to have this fear that maybe this thing was gonna just suddenly collapse,” Padilla said. “There’s a chance that this might all fail if we don’t start…bringing in money from someone else.”
Even as one of the most popular YouTube channels at the time, Padilla and Hecox weren’t sure about what their careers might hold. They were pioneering new ground and that eventually led the duo to sell Smosh to Alloy Digital (which later became Defy Media) in 2011. For Padilla and Hecox’s share of the sale, they received stock options in Alloy and a guaranteed four-year salary.
“I couldn’t foresee any future where that company didn’t end up going public,” Padilla said. “I foresaw this imaginary number that…the stock would be worth exploding to like 10, 20 million times higher than what they offered.”
But when Defy Media (formerly Alloy) shut down in 2018, those stock options were suddenly worthless. Smosh became just one of dozens of media assets to be sold to the highest bidder.
“There was just no understanding of how digital media worked,” Hecox said of Defy. “We [didn’t] have the resources of Disney.”
“YouTube was always our priority,” Padilla added. But he recalled how Defy stretched them too thin, pushing them to make Smosh The Movie, mobile games, cartoons, comic books, a magazine and live stream shows.
“It always felt like we were juggling 10 projects at one time,” Padilla said. “I couldn’t remain at Defy, I felt like my brain was gonna explode at any moment.”
When Padilla’s contract expired in 2017, he left Smosh, citing a need to create independently before Defy Media ultimately shut down altogether in 2018.
“There wasn’t much of a friendship left at that point. We had gone from being childhood friends [to] business partners,” Hecox said.
“I put Smosh before our friendship. And Ian did as well. So at that point it was kinda like, if I’m leaving Smosh, where’s our friendship?” Padilla said. “We didn’t really have one anymore.”
Padilla’s departure sent both creators down a different path. Hecox suddenly became the leader of a company struggling with its identity.
“So much of the Smosh brand was about me and Anthony being best friends, so without Anthony in the picture, what is Smosh?” Hecox said.
“People started referring to me as like the dad of Smosh, like I was the dad who got all the kids in the divorce.”
By this point, Smosh had outgrown its sketch comedy origins. A new cast of characters was emerging on Smosh Pit and Smosh Games. With Padilla gone, Hecox was tasked with redefining what the channel would become.
“My job was to shine the spotlight on everybody and say like, ‘Hey, it’s not just me here,’” Hecox said. “It’s more than just the friendship that Anthony and I had.”
FINDING A NEW IDENTITY
On the other side, Padilla ventured on his own as a solo creator and wondered the inverse: who was Padilla without Smosh?
“I didn’t know who I was as an individual. I knew who I was as part of a duo. I knew that I made comedy videos,” Padilla said. “I thought that was the only thing that I could be.”
“It was a really public display of me finding myself,” Padilla said, “You’re figuring it out on the spot, your numbers are going to drop and the numbers are the most public thing.” Padilla said. “You get these comments too that make you feel like you need to prove yourself: you’re nothing without Smosh, you’re irrelevant and washed up.”
Padilla’s earliest solo content were half-improvised, half-sketch. Six months in, Padilla’s views were a fraction of what Smosh’s uploads got and he was far from turning a profit. But it was at this point that Padilla found the creative freedom he’d been chasing since going on his own.
“Once I stopped thinking about myself from the third person, I stopped thinking about how others perceived me.” Padilla said. “That’s when I started to get experimental in a way where it didn’t feel like I was just trying to give people what they wanted.”
Eventually, Padilla found a format that was both personally rewarding and grew his channel: “I Spent A Day With,” which was an interview show where Padilla speaks with an eclectic set of guests. From furries to flat earthers, content creators to celebrities, Padilla’s genuine curiosity and empathetic approach resonated with viewers and guests alike.
“As I continued to do more and more interviews, I started realizing that I was learning more about myself by learning more about others,” Padilla said. “It forced me to learn how to communicate with people. To listen more. To be more observant.”
Today, Padilla’s channel has 7.52 million subscribers, 990 million total views, and twelve full time employees working as part of his Pressalike Production company.
“All those skills that I learned, oddly enough, culminated in Ian and I reconnecting. I was able to sit down with him and ask questions and just be genuinely curious,” Padilla said. “Before I wasn’t able to see myself as anything except for the guy from Smosh.”
NEW BEGINNINGS
The year after Padilla left, Defy closed its doors permanently. The team at Smosh found out through an email, with no company leadership present to deliver the message in person.
“We all got an email that said effective immediately, Defy is no more,” Hecox said, recalling his team’s disbelief. “That to me was really scary because this is all of our IP and it could just wind up in the hands of somebody that really doesn’t care,” Hecox said. “If that was going to happen, I wasn’t going to stay at Smosh.”
Luckily for Smosh, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, the duo behind Good Mythical Morning, swooped in with a lifeline buy-out offer. Four months later, Smosh announced Rhett & Link had purchased the channel from Defy.
Under the ownership of fellow creators, Smosh flourished over the next four years. Simultaneously, Padilla began to hit new levels of success with “I Spent A Day With,” as interviews started to top 10 million views.
With both Padilla and Hecox seemingly hitting their stride, I asked them: why buy the channel back?
For Padilla, it started with nostalgia. Clips from Smosh’s heyday in the early 2010s were going viral on TikTok and Twitter.
“For a while I’d resigned myself to the idea that all of our old content was only really good in the past. It’s just nostalgia that makes me imagine it fondly,” Padilla said.
“But watching the clips I was like wait, our writing at times was really solid. And the chemistry that we had together off camera and on camera was really strong. And we fit together in this way where we kind of balanced each other …That I hadn’t found in anyone else,” Padilla said.
As Padilla and Hecox began reconnecting as friends, an idea started to grow.
“What if we owned this again? What if we had another chance at doing this exactly the way that we want?” Padilla said. “What would our jokes look like? Could we do even better than we did in the past? Is our writing even stronger?”
Eventually, the two got together and Padilla gave his pitch to buy back Smosh. Hecox described the 30 minute rant as a “diatribe” but he was in as well.
On June 20, 2023, Padilla and Hecox uploaded a video to announce that they had bought the company back from Rhett & Link and classic Smosh-style sketches would soon return.
BEYOND THE BUY BACK
Walking through Smosh’s 17,000 square foot studio, it’s clear that TIME Magazine’s line about lacking monetization was premature. Two soundstages are set for filming. Towering shelves line the walls with props and costumes carefully categorized. There’s an equipment room, a workshop for building props, a stocked kitchen, makeup table, editing bays, offices, and a conference room big enough for basketball.
“We’re in the same position now that we were when we first started — us being two really close friends who love making each other laugh, love spending time with each other, love creating stuff together, love capturing the magic that we feel,” Padilla said.
That magic is evident with their latest uploads averaging over 2.4 million views each on the Smosh main channel. Padilla describes the tone of the channel as “joyful absurdity.” But the main channel sketches are just one facet of the Smosh umbrella. Smosh Pit hosts the group’s unscripted content, from “Try Not To Laugh” to “Eat It Or Yeet It.” On Smosh Games the crew plays everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Mario Party and Cards Against Humanity. And then there’s Smoshcast, where Smosh hosts their podcast, recently rebranded Smosh Mouth.
With the re-acquisition, Smosh is also turning to a membership model to help drive revenue. Three dollars a month gets you exclusive access to the Smosh Discord, as well as loyalty badges and custom emojis for comments and live chat. Five dollars a month adds bonus behind the scenes content. And Smosh Royalty, for $10 each month, grants access to a members only watch party after every main channel sketch upload.
Both Padilla and Hecox expressed that this new formation of Smosh would not be possible without Catanese stepping into the position of CEO and Moacanin taking on the role of Executive Vice President of Production.
“They were instrumental in this new formation of Smosh. They were the ones that knew the secret before everyone else and helped us build this thing.” Ian said
Six years and six days before the buy back, Padilla announced he was leaving Smosh. Six years before that, in 2011, Smosh was sold to Alloy Digital. And six years before that, in 2005, Smosh uploaded their first video ever; “Power Rangers Theme.”Closing out our conversation, I asked Padilla and Hecox what Smosh will look like six years from today.
“I hope to turn this into a business — a company that is continuing to thrive with all the success that we’ve seen, but keeping the element of Smosh that was there since the beginning,” Padilla said.
“I think it’s just providing a place for the funniest people to come together,” Hecox added. “I think that was one of our missions and I think it will continue to be our mission. It’s so great to read the comments of people saying that they look forward to these videos and they love the dynamics that we’ve created with other cast members.”
With the team around them and history behind them, it looks like Padilla and Hecox will only continue making that mission come true for many years to come.
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