Mediakraft Networks

» see mediakraft.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mediakraft opened an office in Istanbul. That is the closest this story ever came to me, and it was not very close: the Turkish arm was one of three international branches set up in 2013, alongside the Netherlands and Poland, and by then I was twenty-nine and well outside the audience a German multi-channel network was built for. The market was teenagers. I was reading the business-press version of it.

Christoph Krachten founded the company on 1 September 2011 with the idea of turning YouTube creators into a marketing portfolio, which in 2011 was still a new idea in Germany. Within a year the former Endemol chief Ynon Kreiz had come in as a shareholder, and Shortcut Ventures had put in a seven-figure sum. By 2014 the network held exclusive contracts with Y-Titty, LeFloid, ApeCrime, Freshtorge and Die Lochis, which was most of the German-language internet that anyone under twenty was actually watching.

The money arrived on 10 July 2014: a second round of 23 million dollars led by Iris Capital, with the Cologne newspaper group M. DuMont Schauberg in through two venture funds. That year the company carried 150 full-time staff against a balance sheet of just under five million euros. In December 2015 its channels passed 600 million views in a month for the first time, with the strongest revenue growth since the company started. That is the peak, and the trouble had already started fourteen months before it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the creators ~

A multi-channel network sold creators reach plus somebody to deal with advertisers. The catch was that both got cheaper and easier to replace every year, while the contracts stayed long. At its widest the Mediakraft network ran more than 2,600 channels across five sub-networks, with ComedyNet carrying most of the views and smaller ones for beauty and for news. It made its own shows too, including Was Geht Ab!?, the first daily news magazine on German YouTube, which ran until October 2015.

Then October 2014: LeFloid announced he was leaving and founded the creators' association 301+ with others. In December, Simon Unge announced his own exit under heavy press coverage. Die Lochis went when their exclusivity expired in March 2017. Each departure was individually survivable and collectively fatal, since the roster was the product.

~ the year it broke ~

In January 2015 Krachten left the management over what the company described as differing views on strategic direction, keeping more than sixteen percent of the shares. Spartacus Olsson moved to the supervisory board in March 2016. When gamigo bought the company outright on 6 July 2017, the chief executive who had set up the sale was replaced at completion, and the business had already been rewritten as an agency selling online video and social media services to advertisers rather than a home for creators.

That version worked for a while, and the 2019 revenue was 23.1 million euros. But an agency whose value sits in manual account work is a very different asset from a network that owns an audience, and the company now holding it was a games publisher.

~ what the parent wanted ~

The decision is dated 27 August 2021 and it is in an ad-hoc release from Media and Games Invest, gamigo's parent, which never mentions Mediakraft by name. The board had resolved to run off the German influencer and performance marketing unit, about 6.5 percent of second-quarter group revenues, on the grounds that growth and margins there were "single digit to zero" and that the work was manual where the rest of the group was programmatic. Roughly ten percent of the worldwide workforce went with it.

The staff found out in the usual order. MeinMMO reported on 1 December 2021 that the business would be wound down by the turn of the year, and GamesWirtschaft quoted the homepage notice two days later. The Warsaw company is the odd survivor: Mediakraft TV sp. z o.o. was bought out by its own Polish management in October 2020, fourteen months before Germany closed, and it is still on the register in 2026 with a YouTube channel and most of a million subscribers.

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