StyleHaul

» see stylehaul.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The haul video was a genre before it was a business. A teenage girl empties a shopping bag onto a bed and talks through every item for twenty minutes, and by 2011 enough people were watching that somebody built a company on top of it. I was twenty-seven that year, working in engineering, and the entire economy described below ran for eight years without touching me once. It is a corner of YouTube I only know from the outside, which is worth saying before the numbers start.

Stephanie Horbaczewski founded StyleHaul in 2011. It was an advertising company in the end, one of the earliest to make branded content and native advertising work at scale on somebody else's platform, and what it sold to Sephora or Maybelline was access to an audience that did not watch television. On the other side it signed creators. Zoella was on the roster. So were Ashley Tisdale and Cameron Dallas.

RTL Group, the European broadcaster, took a majority stake in 2014 for a price reported at the time as $107 million, though Wikipedia's figure is $127 million, and bought the rest in June 2017. Horbaczewski left in June 2018 to start an AI company. Sean Atkins came in that September, running both StyleHaul and the new global digital video group RTL had assembled around it.

In March 2019 employees were told that most of the US staff would be cut to a skeleton crew on 1 April and that the American operation would close completely in July. What the company said publicly was that operations were moving to Europe. "The StyleHaul management team and board of directors have made the decision to close StyleHaul's U.S. offices and manage all global operations from Europe," a spokesperson said. Ten weeks later that plan was dropped too. Atkins confirmed the company would "fully exit the StyleHaul business," and every creator was unhooked from the network on 31 July 2019.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the haul economy ~

The multi-channel network was a specific answer to a specific problem. YouTube paid creators, but it would not sell them to advertisers and would not put a human on the phone. An MCN sat in that gap: it took a cut of the money, and in exchange it brought brand deals and somebody whose job was to argue with the platform on your behalf. StyleHaul's version of this was narrower than most. It went after beauty and lifestyle, which is where the advertising money for young women already was, and it got large on that focus.

How large is hard to say, which is itself a fact about the industry. The best number anyone has is 5,000 creators, and the source for it is StyleHaul's own job posting, undated. Nobody published a verified subscriber total. Reach was the product being sold and the seller was also the only one counting.

~ the money ~

RTL's 2018 annual report carried a goodwill impairment against StyleHaul of roughly $119 million, which is more than the company had paid for its majority stake four years earlier. The networks had been bought during a period when everyone assumed audience attention would consolidate the way television audiences once did. What happened instead was that creators with real followings worked out they could negotiate for themselves, and the platforms built ad products that did not need a middleman either. The middle got thin from both sides.

Then there was the other thing. Dennis Blieden, a StyleHaul executive and a professional poker player, was arrested and pleaded guilty to embezzling $22 million from the company, money that went to poker debts and to cryptocurrency bets that did not work out. The arrest landed in the same stretch as the shutdown, though the writedown had been taken the year before and the decision to leave did not wait on a court. What stays with me is the size of the hole: $22 million left through one person on the inside, and nobody caught it while it was happening.

~ 31 july ~

Nothing about that day was visible from outside. Channels were detached from the network in a batch and the contractual relationship simply ended. StyleHaul mentioned in the same breath that creators might want to talk to Divimove, RTL's Berlin network, which at the time said it handled 900 influencers with 130 staff.

Atkins put the reasoning on the record without much decoration: "Our growing European assets, which include Divimove and United Screens, must be our priority going forward." RTL had bought its way into the American creator economy in 2014 and was out of it by the summer of 2019, with Divimove and United Screens kept on.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »