How a YouTuber built an educational media company with 35 animated channels — and how much money the business makes

Oliver Gilpin proudly says he’s built a YouTube media company without ever filming a single video himself.

Unlike the majority of YouTubers, who build media companies based on their likeness, Gilpin is creating an educational media brand, Telos, with animated content.

“I saw the model that Richard Branson used,” Gilpin told Insider. “He starts the company not running it himself. He already has a chief executive to run the company for him, or a managing director. And that’s what I’m doing with the channels.”

The company counts four content brands covering a variety of topics. The short, conversational videos explain complex themes with cartoon characters:

Each channel has different iterations in up to 12 languages, including Spanish, Hindi, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian, and Japanese, for a total of 35, with over 8 million combined subscribers.

How Gilpin’s company works

Gilpin first began incubating channels in 2021, and he’s been able to scale quickly by hiring local channel directors, who oversee channels in foreign languages independently.

Gilpin runs operations for the English channels, and works with production teams to create videos in English. He then hires people to run international channels, usually one person per language, who are in charge of translating and voicing the videos, subtitling them, and overseeing the channel in their own language day to day.

Gilpin’s goal is to scale to 30 different media brands teaching about as many topics, each with its iteration in a number of languages — eventually launching a different one each month.

The company’s name, Telos, comes from an Ancient Greek term meaning “end, fulfillment, or goal.” Gilpin chose this name based on his mission of educating the audience.

“The goal is to start building people’s care for a new topic, for people to come away from the video more empowered with their critical thinking, their understanding of power dynamics, space, geopolitics,” Gilpin said. “Animation is a good format because you can explain things metaphorically.”

Gilpin said he tries to approach each topic without a political agenda in mind, with the idea of covering general-interest topics in its most distilled form. He calls these “highlighters,” a “simple, effective point articulated concisely (or visually represented quickly) in consideration of the pacing we require for our videos,” as explained on the Telos website.

Before shifting his focus solely to his own YouTube channels, Gilpin was running a production agency, NowCreatives. This summer, he decided to step away from NowCreatives to focus on Telos. He still owns the production company, but he’s left it in the hands of a managing director.

Breakdown of income and expenses

Gilpin shared with Insider how much the total of his 35 channels had made historically, from MrSpherical, which was created in August 2021, to the most recent channel, HumanBuddy, created in March 2023.

MrSpherical and SolarBalls are profitable, making approximately $171,500 and $261,000 each. But the two newer ones are in the negatives, having lost about $27,000 and $16,000 each. Gilpin aims to get each channel to make $20,000 a month in profit.

Gilpin said he’s confident that the two newer channels will soon start turning a profit, but he added that for every successful channel, there’s at least one other that has failed.

The income for all channels comes almost equally from AdSense — YouTube’s ad-revenue-share program — and from brand partnerships. Choosing potential sponsors requires balance, and Gilpin is always looking for brands that fit the educational content his company creates.

“I do want to be thoughtful about what sponsors we take on,” he said. “We could have promoted an organization where you invest digital art, NFTs, and that kind of thing. And I don’t want to do that. However, because the channels are very expensive, I am definitely not as selective as I’d like to be.”

The expenses cover primarily personnel costs, like voiceover artists, animators, content strategists, and video editors.

Gilpin has made a point of re-investing the majority of the company’s revenue in new channels.

Animation requires investing time and money. But Gilpin has embraced a remote-work-friendly approach, hiring talent in areas of the world where wages and cost of living are cheaper, to mitigate costs and still turn a profit.

“We selectively hire people who are naturally motivated to do the work, they’re passionate about the work, and they’re independent generally when it comes to work,” he said.

He also hires all talent as contractors, and provides bonuses like a profit share on AdSense and brand partnerships, to incentivize them to work toward the success of the channels.

“If the channel makes money, they make money,” he said. “If it doesn’t make money, they lose money. The key is to always have a revenue split, meaning that they care.”