–SELLER: Dr. Insanity–

Overview

• Faceless true-crime YouTube channel: no on-camera host, narration over real case footage
• Now a multi-platform franchise: a main channel, a 24/7 livestream, a podcast, and a FAST presence
• Acquired July 2026 by Content Partners via Wonderloom Media
• 3 anonymous cofounders

Company Highlights

• 5M+ subscribers
• 1.3B+ lifetime views
• 3 seasons streaming on Tubi since 2023
• 80M views a month; new videos do 10–15M in their first week
• 50–70% of revenue comes from the deep evergreen library
• Among the largest true-crime channels on YouTube

Content Overview

• Format… documentary-style true crime built on real police and bodycam footage, covering poisonings, murders, shootings, and missing persons
• Main channel… long-form case documentaries, the core library and audience
• Dr. Insanity TV… a 24/7 true-crime livestream with live chat, a linear-style feed on top of the catalog
• Podcast… distributed on Apple Podcasts and YouTube Music
• FAST / streaming… three seasons on Tubi, free ad-supported, roughly 40 to 60 minute cuts, since 2023
• Owned audience… a website (drinsanity.com) with case tips and corrections; a true-crime niche that skews English-language and high-RPM

Founding Story

• Emerged as a faceless channel where the brand and the case library, not a personality, are the asset
• Grew on evergreen, re-watchable documentaries assembled from real case and police footage
• Kept the operator anonymous, which is a brand choice and, for a buyer, a reason it reads as IP rather than talent
• Expanded off YouTube on its own, into livestream, podcast, and FAST, before any institutional owner arrived

Business Model & Services

• YouTube ad revenue… the core line; the channel keeps 55% of ad revenue (YouTube takes 45%), earned across the evergreen library
• FAST and licensing… ad-supported streaming on Tubi plus content licensing
• Podcast and livestream… added ad and host-read inventory on the 24/7 channel and the podcast
• Memberships and brand deals… channel memberships and sponsor integrations; pricing not disclosed

Owners & Selling Shareholders

• Held by a small, private founding group of three partners in their 20s; of the three, one remained an active operator
• The active operator had taken the channel as far as he could, and sought to move on to new opportunities — a clean, increasingly common seller profile as this market matures

Financials

• Not disclosed

Select Capital Markets History

• Bootstrapped, no disclosed outside capital
• July 15 2026: acquired by Content Partners via Wonderloom Media

–BUYER: Content Partners (via Wonderloom Media)–

Overview

• Los Angeles media-IP firm, founded in 2006 by Steve Kram and Steven Blume
• Early backing from Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner
• Buys film and TV participations and libraries, then works the cash flows
• Runs lean: about 14 people, deals topping $1B over two decades
• Wonderloom Media is a new partnership between Content Partners and Ed Simpson, built to buy and scale YouTube channels and studios with professional operations and cross-platform distribution

Company Highlights

• 800+ films and ~3,000 hours of TV
• Added 300+ titles in recent years
• Owns the Revolution Studios library and half of the CSI franchise
• Launched Content Partners Capital, a credit arm, in 2024
• Backed by a Carlyle continuation vehicle for new deals
• Adapting Forensic Files into microdramas via GammaTime

Founding Story

• Started in 2006 buying backend participations from talent and studios after a title’s first run
• Moved into whole libraries as independents needed capital
• Added credit in 2024, then growth capital from Carlyle
• Now extends the same discipline to YouTube through Wonderloom, a new partnership with Ed Simpson

Business Model & Services

• Library ownership… buys durable content rights; earns the long-tail cash flows
• Content credit… lends to IP-heavy businesses; earns interest and structured returns
• Format adaptation… reworks owned IP into new formats; earns production and licensing fees
• Channel operation (new, via Wonderloom)… owns and grows channels; earns their ad, FAST, and licensing revenue

Acquiring Vehicle (Wonderloom)

• What it is… a partnership between Content Partners and Ed Simpson, built to buy and scale top-tier, YouTube-native creator studios
• Who runs it… Ed Simpson, a longtime entertainment exec who was chief strategy officer at Wheelhouse and earlier helped build Brent Montgomery’s Leftfield before its ITV sale 
• The pairing… Content Partners brings the capital and the long-tail content expertise; Simpson brings the operating muscle to actively scale the assets, not passively hold them
• Structure and funding… a partnership between Ed Simpson and Content Partners, not a subsidiary or a branded arm. Favors outright acquisition and will take 100% when owners are walking away, but will also structure earnouts if owners want to stay with the business; adapts based on seller’s goals

–DEAL DETAILS–

Overview

• Announced July 15, 2026
• Terms undisclosed: price, structure, and any earnout are private
• Sale was part of an auction process

Valuation

• Not disclosed. 
• Per Simpson, Wonderloom anchors its acquisition pricing to unscripted-TV production market multiples.

Strategic Rationale

Buyer (Content Partners / Wonderloom):

• An entry into a new asset class while catalog capital hunts for yield beyond music and film.
• Ed Simpson brings the operating muscle to grow channels and rework the library into new formats.
• “YouTube is no longer the disruptor. It has become the incumbent.” — Ed Simpson
• The bigger play is a roll-up: bring top-tier creator studios together into the next Discovery or A&E, one built natively on YouTube, at the scale advertisers want
• Viewing has moved to YouTube on the living-room TV, creator content has premiumized, and the scaled studios still lack a bridge to Hollywood and deep operating executives. Wonderloom is built to be that bridge.
• Active, not passive. Content Partners’ long-tail expertise underwrites the buy; Simpson’s playbook scales it. This is not annuity-clipping.
• From my chat with Simpson: a faceless, IP-driven channel is more ownable than a creator-fronted one. No on-camera personality means less key-man risk, and about 50-70% of revenue already sits in the back catalog, which is exactly the library profile Content Partners knows how to underwrite.

Seller (Dr. Insanity operator):

• Liquidity for a bootstrapped asset with heavy single-platform exposure
• A chance to de-risk and take chips off the table while handing scale to an owner who can push it further with professional operations

Post-Deal Operations

• Runs under Wonderloom Media, led by Ed Simpson
• Expect more production, more cross-platform distribution, format extensions, and catalog licensing
• More acquisitions to come

–WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING–

1) The key takeaway isn’t that a faceless channel sold. It’s that a 20-year film and TV catalog buyer is the one who bought it.

Faceless YouTube channels have changed hands for years. There’s already a roster of buyers and roll-ups doing exactly this, so a channel selling is not, by itself, news. 

What’s new is the pedigree of the capital. 

Content Partners has spent two decades buying film and TV libraries: backend participations, long-tail cash flows, the unglamorous annuity end of Hollywood. When that kind of institution crosses into YouTube, it functions as a validation event. It says a faceless channel is now legible to catalog investors as an ownable, financeable asset rather than a personality bet or a growth flyer. 

The buyer, more than the target, is the data point. 

The takeaway for operators and investors: watch who is buying, not just what is selling. The arrival of catalog-grade capital re-rates the whole category.

2) Music showed catalog buyers that the annuity survives a distribution shift. That’s why they pay up.

Music rights are close to a century-old asset class, and capital has always flowed toward them. Then Napster arrived in 1999, the same year US recorded-music revenue peaked near $14.6B, and the fear was that free digital copies would end the business. For about 15 years they nearly did, as revenue fell to roughly $7B by 2014 while CDs and downloads collapsed. 

Then streaming crossed half of US revenue around 2016 and more than replaced what physical lost. The industry climbed back to about $11.5B, streaming now near 84% of the total (RIAA, 2025), and music rights returned to real growth.

Overall, investors watched a content annuity survive a wholesale change in how people consume, and come out the other side growing. 

That is why, from 2020 to 2024, institutional money paid up for catalogs: Blackstone took Hipgnosis at about $1.6B in equity, roughly $2.2B including debt; Shamrock bought Taylor Swift’s masters; Sony paid a reported ~$500M for Bruce Springsteen; Universal took Bob Dylan. 

They weren’t betting on a format. They were buying a proven annuity. It held so well the cash flow became debt: Blackstone backed a ~$1.5B securitization against the Hipgnosis catalog. Once a stream is a predictable annuity, you can finance it like infrastructure.

Now move one platform over. 

Music catalog, then film and TV library (Content Partners’ native turf), and now social IP, underwritten by the same kind of investor asking the same question every time: how durable is the back-catalog through the next distribution shift? They answered it for streaming. They’re answering it now for YouTube. 

For the deal math on what a buyer of YouTube IP actually pays for, see our analysis of The Overlap’s 7-figure acquisition of United Stand (our analysis).

3) A rights-holder doesn’t just hold the annuity. It grows and diversifies it, and Content Partners’ history tells you how.

The music comparison only works if you remember what those buyers do after they buy. They don’t sit on a catalog; they work it: sync licensing, re-recordings, playlist and social placement. The value creation, not the coupon alone, is the return. 

So the question for Dr. Insanity is what Content Partners does with owned IP, and its record answers it. 

Over 20 years it has bought participations and whole libraries, including Revolution Studios and half of CSI, and managed what Carlyle’s credit arm called “long-duration, largely uncorrelated cash flows.” In 2024 it built a credit arm to finance other IP businesses. And, tellingly for a true-crime channel, it is turning Forensic Files into microdramas through a venture called GammaTime.

Dr. Insanity fits that playbook, and it has already started running it: three seasons on Tubi, a podcast, a 24/7 livestream. Expect Content Partners to push further in the same direction, more formats, more FAST and connected-TV, international versions, and licensing of the case library, plus the balance sheet to roll up more channels under Wonderloom. 

Simpson ranks the growth from easiest to hardest. 

First is off-platform distribution: linear and FAST platforms are already inbound for the library, and early Tubi placement is performing. Second is upload volume, currently about 32 episodes a year, with room to raise it steadily. Third is the owned-audience layer of podcast plus YouTube and Patreon memberships; he also notes that the podcast has a lot of room to grow and improve, but still it already out-rates Joe Rogan on some days, which tells you the headroom. And he frames all of it as active scaling toward a bigger prize: rolling these channels up into a YouTube-native studio group, not clipping a coupon on AdSense.

Contrast the operator version of the thesis. 

When The Overlap, Gary Neville’s Global-backed brand, bought Mark Goldbridge’s United Stand and That’s Football (our analysis), the plan was audience and format: cross-promotion, live events, sponsorship scale. A publisher grows the audience; a rights-holder grows and diversifies the monetization of the IP. 

Both now buy YouTube channels, and the playbooks are converging. The buyer you get sets the value-creation plan you get, and a catalog owner with a credit arm and a format-adaptation habit is treating Dr. Insanity as IP to be worked.

One lesson from these types of YouTube Studio deals, and from many other seller convos we’re actively having with social publishers: preparation for a sales process is critical. As creator studios professionalize, the businesses that show up with clean IP assignment, employees properly signed on, trademarks actually owned, and accounting that ties out are the ones that close fast and for full value. The ones that don’t can double a timeline. Getting a creator business ready before the process starts is exactly the work we do at RockWater; reply to this email if that’s you.

4) How you’d underwrite it: the KPIs, and the math.

Here’s how we’d size up a channel like this. 

The subscriber count is the number everyone points to, but it’s not what a buyer is actually paying for. What matters is how steady the revenue is, and how much of it keeps coming in without new uploads.

• Catalog vs. new-upload split: what share of views and revenue comes from videos more than 12 months old. High is an annuity; low is a treadmill.
• Evergreen vs. topical decay: does a video earn for years, like a cold-case documentary, or spike and die.
• Effective RPM and its durability: what the channel keeps per 1,000 views, and its exposure to demonetization on graphic content.
• Discovery independence: how much traffic comes from search and suggested video, not the subscriber feed.
• Footage and format rights: for true crime built on police and bodycam footage, who owns or licenses the underlying material, and can it travel across platforms.

Here’s the math:

YouTube pays creators 55% of ad revenue and keeps 45%, so the RPM a channel reports is already net of that cut. Public RPM-by-niche estimates put true crime in the high single digits, around $8 net. 

On this specific channel, Simpson estimates that 50–70% of revenue comes from the back catalog, a textbook annuity, and the single clearest reason a catalog buyer gets comfortable here.

To show the mechanics (these are not Dr. Insanity’s actual figures): 

At an $8 net RPM (already net of YouTube’s 45% cut), every 100M monetized annual views is worth about $800,000 a year to the channel from ads, or roughly $1.5M in gross billings before YouTube’s share. Scale that across a deep evergreen library, then add Tubi, the podcast, memberships, and licensing, and you can see why a catalog buyer treats the ad line as a floor, not a ceiling.

5) Owning the channel is a different bet than funding it, and there’s now a whole map of models.

The first money into “YouTube as an asset” was financing, not ownership, and it has fanned out into a spectrum. 

At the lending end, Spotter advances cash against back catalogs, Copyright Capital buys YouTube content outright for cash on a rights basis, and revenue-based financiers like Creative Juice and Fundmates advance against future AdSense. 

Newer retail platforms, Everbloom and GigaStar among them, let outside investors buy a slice of a channel’s future revenue. 

In the middle, Jellysmack licenses and optimizes catalogs, and bought Law&Crime (our deal analysis) on their recent acquisition of Court TV). 

At the ownership end sit operator roll-ups like The Overlap and Electrify, and now catalog owners like Content Partners. 

Read left to right, it is a walk from lending against the annuity, to licensing it, to owning it. 

What stands out is that Content Partners sits at the ownership end while running a credit arm at the lending end, so it is fluent across the whole map. Financing was the market testing the water; outright institutional ownership is the market deciding the water is fine. 

This is the exact profile of businesses we’re increasingly advising on; faceless, library-heavy YouTube channels with a deep evergreen back-catalog. Reply to this email if you’re a qualified buyer.

6) Every one of these annuities has had a landlord. The questions just changed.

Each version of the media annuity carried a distribution risk buyers had to price. 

Broadcast had shelf space and radio. Streaming had platform payout rates and playlists. A YouTube library has the recommendation algorithm. That is not a reason to pass, since buyers priced broadcast risk and then streaming risk and still made money. It is the diligence list:

• Platform concentration: how much revenue and traffic is YouTube-only, and what is the multi-platform path. Dr. Insanity’s Tubi and podcast presence already help here.
• Demonetization: how much of the catalog risks age-gating or ad limits given graphic content.
• Algorithm dependence: how much of the library’s earnings rely on suggested and search placement.
• Production dependency: faceless removes the on-camera key-man, but who writes and edits, and do they stay.
• Rights durability: is the underlying police and case footage owned or licensed, and for how long.

Social IP still trades cheaper than film and music libraries, and this is why. The buyers who get comfortable with algorithm risk the way they once got comfortable with streaming are the ones who will own the category.