We take a bet on ad views to channel cash to the stars of YouTube

If you have teenage or pre-teen children in your house, you may have wondered how the YouTubers they watch have become so rich — just from posting videos of themselves playing computer games or daring their friends to eat the world’s spiciest crisp.
David Page knows the answer, and kindly opened the black box.
On YouTube, he explained, while Google owns the video-sharing site, the creators own the content they post. YouTube places ads in the videos and shares the advertising revenue they generate with the creator, in a 45:55 split in favour of the latter. Money is paid based on views of all the ads contained within the video, rather than the video itself, so keeping people glued to the content from beginning to end is the goal, Page explained: “Having an engaged audience at the start of the video is one thing, but having an engaged audience at the end is also really important.”
Page makes a good living knowing such things. His company, Viewture, works with social media stars to help them raise money against the value of their content. Viewture buys the rights to future ad revenue from their back catalogues of videos, in the same way that musicians including Justin Bieber and Pink Floyd have done with the future royalties from their old songs.
The firm, founded in 2021, works with YouTubers including the Sidemen, a band of online celebrities who take on challenges such as road trips, stage football matches and provide commentaries on video games. The Sidemen have 21.7 million subscribers and millions of views for every video. KSI, the rapper, boxer and YouTuber, is its most famous member, with 16.4 million subscribers on the site.
“We’ve done a funding deal for them because they wanted to put some cash into a new venture,” said Page. “We bought some income rights on their back catalogue and the deal has performed very well.
“Their watch time and their ad impressions are just off the charts,” he added. “They do an hour and 20 minutes as their average duration, and they have more than a 95 per cent engagement rate all the way through the video.”
Page, 48, admitted that until 2020, the world of YouTube stars and influencers was a mystery to him. He is a serial entrepreneur but started his career in accountancy, and his previous companies were in financial services and data analytics. So how did he come to find himself hanging out with YouTube megastars such as MrBeast (328 million subscribers)?
His career as an entrepreneur started in 2003. He was working for Credit Acceptance, the UK arm of an American-based car finance company, when it stopped making new loans here. Page was offered a job in Detroit by the US company, but after visiting the city with his fiancée, he decided to stay where he was, in West Sussex.
He was managing the closed book of UK loans when Marlin Financial, a US debt specialist, approached him to ask if it could buy a portion of Credit Acceptance’s outstanding loans — and take on the company’s remaining staff and systems — as the basis for building up a business in the UK.
Page agreed, and over the next decade, Marlin went from strength to strength in the UK. It bought portfolios of underperforming loans — ones at risk of being repaid late, or not at all — from banks and arranged new repayment plans with borrowers, which generated a big enough margin to cover the amount that Marlin had paid the bank for the loan and to turn a profit. Banks were keen to get the doubtful loans off their books because they weakened profitability and tied up liquidity.
Page and his colleagues bought Marlin’s UK business in 2006, and in 2014 the company was sold to Cabot Credit Management, partly owned by the US private equity firm JC Flowers, for a reported £300 million. By then, Marlin was also owned by a private equity firm, Duke Street, but Page was the chief investment officer and still an equity holder.
He puts the success of Marlin down to superior data — a lesson he has taken with him throughout his career. “We had 80 people working in our data team at Marlin, in a company of 250,” he said. “Every week, we’d have a data-science innovation meeting on a Friday afternoon for three hours, always tweaking how we looked at things, how we could improve our modelling techniques, how we could test and learn different strategies.”
After Marlin was sold, Page carried on working for new owner Cabot until the end of 2017, when it dawned on him that running a large company was not where his heart lay. He left and spent some time at home — “getting a work-life balance again and reacquainting myself with my wife and children, having been on the road so much” — but soon realised “I had another turn left”.
He invested in financial services and fintech companies, and also set up a company called Quantum Data Analytics, which worked with companies doing acquisitions to assess how their target could be made more profitable through better use of data.
“Then, in the middle of 2020, we had a new client — a very young entrepreneur of 23 who had done unbelievably well growing his business,” said Page. The client was a YouTuber called Slogo, real name Josh Temple, who was getting 250 million views a month during lockdown for his gaming content and earning enormous sums from the ad revenue.
“He’d had an offer from a US company to acquire the future rights to those videos. They would give him a lump sum and the ad revenue would flow to them for a period of five years. He got referred to me because he didn’t know how to assess whether it was a good offer or not, and wanted some advice.”
The deal went ahead, but Temple told Page that he disliked the process of raising the money — “and that was when the ‘we can do this better’ moment happened in my head.”
Instead of just consulting with the YouTubers on such deals, why not buy the rights himself, but in a less painful way for the celebrity?
Page spent 18 months setting up Viewture, hiring former data-science and risk-management colleagues and taking on board members, including Temple, to gather the data needed to back content creators by buying the rights to their future ad revenues. Page and his team put their own money in to pay for the data scientists’ work, until Viewture did its first deal in late 2021.
The model is fairly simple; using their analytics, they calculate the likely ad revenue that the star should make over the next, say, five years. Viewture pays them the money upfront and gets the ad revenues as they come in. It pays slightly less than the expected revenues so it can make a profit, and also to account for the risk of the revenues not coming in as high as hoped.
After the term, the rights revert to the client.
Private equity firm Permira supplies Viewture with a credit line to fund the acquisitions, while Page has also raised equity from high-net-worth individuals including the investor group Wealth Club.
While he may now be dealing with celebrities rather than car finance loans, Page said there are similarities: “When we were at Marlin, we were working out how much to pay a bank for a customer’s debt based on how much we thought they would be able to repay us in future. Now, we’re working out how much we think a video is going to make in the next few years and how much we are prepared to pay for it.”
Why do content creators bringing in thousands in ad revenue want to raise money in this way?
“Josh [Temple] was my case study,” said Page. “He started out making content in his bedroom on his laptop and he wanted to move into a studio space. He also quickly realised that he needed to be producing twice a day every day. He couldn’t do that on his own, so he had to hire editors and production assistants.
“He was earning monthly revenue — but like any business, to grow quicker, you take on capital. But he couldn’t do that through traditional sources of funding, which is common in the [influencer] economy. If you go to a high street bank and ask for £200,000 to grow your YouTube channel, they ask, ‘How much do you get a month?’ And you have to say, ‘Well, it depends on how many views I get.’ Then they ask, ‘What assets do you have?’ and you say, ‘I have some videos.’ Then they just go, ‘Whoa, I can’t cope with this.’ ”
Viewture had revenues of £6 million and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) of £3.7 million in 2023, and is now expanding fast: it aims to make Ebitda of £15 million in 2025.
“I’m a great believer that these guys are the brands of the future,” said Page. “The MrBeasts, the Sidemen — kids are more engaged with that than with any other brands.”
My hero … my wife. I’ve been with her for almost 30 years. She knew me when I was broke and sacrificed her own career. In business, I love Richard Branson’s approach.
My best decision … not going to Detroit when I was offered the job there, and realising the opportunity with Marlin instead.
My worst decision … financially, it was leaving Cabot when I did, because I could have stayed on and made more money. But I wasn’t motivated by that; I was ready to do other things.
Funniest moment … my guilty pleasure is that I own a few racehorses, and the Cheltenham Festival is the pinnacle. Last year, I had a horse running in the Champion Bumper, a race for young horses. We were winning and we were all going absolutely crazy — all the cameras were on us — but then we got beaten on the line. It trended that night on Instagram: 11 million views of us going crazy and then in total despair.
Best business tip … always back yourself. If you believe in something, no one else is going to make it happen; you’ve got to do it yourself.