Jukin Media

After graduating from Columbia College Chicago’s film program in 2005, founder Jonathan Skogmo went to work in Hollywood as a researcher on CMT’s home video clip show Country Fried Home Videos, where he began contacting video owners directly through YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry to obtain footage; he later worked as a freelance producer making shows for networks such as MTV, truTV, and Discovery Channel. Because a freelance producer had no ownership of the shows, he quit his job, bought videos from his apartment, and sold the clips to television shows.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Jukin Media was founded by Skogmo in 2009. In its early days the company worked from folding tables in his living room, and it later established its headquarters in the Los Angeles area.⁠[2][3][1]

In April 2014, Los Angeles-based Maker Studios partnered with Jukin Media; the two planned to launch a standalone website for Jukin’s viral video channel FailArmy and to pursue other efforts to monetize Jukin’s various channels. FailArmy’s YouTube channel compiles internet “fails” of all kinds into weekly compilations.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In May 2014, Jukin Media closed its first funding round, raising $1 million from Maker Studios, Launchpad LA, Bertelsmann Digital Media, and several Los Angeles angel investors. At the time, FailArmy’s YouTube channel generated around 450 million views a month, and Jukin regularly distributed viral videos to networks such as Comedy Central, NBC, and CNN; the company was headquartered in Culver City with about 40 employees. Skogmo said the company had been profitable for a while and did not need the funding.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

In 2015, FailArmy bought the rights to the 15-second “Pizza Rat” video (a rat dragging an entire slice of pizza down the stairs in the New York City subway), which had only about 2,600 views at the time; the original video has since amassed more than 11 million views, and iterations of the meme spread rapidly on other platforms with the brand’s watermark in the corner of the frame.⁠[5][5][1]

When Reuters launched the content platform Reuters ConnectReuters ConnectReuters Connect is Reuters’ digital content platform and licensing marketplace for clients such as news organizations. Launched in May 2017, it brings Reuters’ text, pictures, video, graphics, and other multimedia content together with content from third-party media organizations on a single platform, where clients can search, subscribe to, and license it.Open the full entry on May 18, 2017, Jukin Media was listed among the first publicly named third-party content providers. As of November 2019, Jukin was still among the platform’s more than 50 content providers.⁠[6][7]

On August 12, 2021, Trusted Media Brands, the parent company of publications including Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home, and Family Handyman, announced its acquisition of Jukin Media. Skogmo said it was an all-cash, 100% acquisition; the terms of the deal were not disclosed. At the time, Jukin’s brands included FailArmy, People Are Awesome, The Pet Collective, and WeatherSpy; co-CEO Lee Essner said the company had been consistently profitable and had raised only $6 million from investors.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][8][8]

At the time of the acquisition, Jukin owned the rights to more than 70,000 videos, with about half its revenue coming from licensing and half from advertising; in 2020 it licensed more than 2,000 video clips for use in advertising campaigns and on TV and digital platforms in nearly 100 countries. Its brands together received about 2 billion views a month on social platforms. Trusted Media Brands CEO Bonnie Kintzer said the acquisition was a step in the company’s pivot toward OTT streaming video; Skogmo stayed on after the deal closed to continue leading Jukin’s growth strategy.⁠[5][5][2][5][9][9][5]

Jukin’s core business is finding online videos likely to go viral, working with the videos’ creators, and licensing the clips on their behalf to media companies, advertising agencies, news organizations, websites, and TV shows, while protecting video rights and dealing with unauthorized copies. After creator Candace Payne’s May 2016 video of herself laughing in a Chewbacca mask received more than 140 million views on Facebook, she also began working with Jukin. Skogmo said the company had paid video creators more than $10 million in royalties.⁠[8][1][1][1][1]

As a user-generated video provider on Reuters Connect, Jukin offers solutions that allow brands, publishers, and media networks to commercially use user-generated video, and produces original content for TV, the web, and other platforms; its social video brands, including FailArmy, People Are Awesome, The Pet Collective, and JukinVideo, have a combined total of more than 190 million fans online and 3.2 billion monthly video views.⁠[10][10][10]

As of October 2026, Trusted Media Brands operates the video licensing business under the name Jukin Licensing, whose website offers entry points for submitting and licensing videos; FailArmy, The Pet Collective, and People Are Awesome, as brands of the company, operate free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels.⁠[11][12][13][13]

Jukin Licensing: Official website: https://www.jukinmedia.com/licensing (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Trusted Media Brands: Post-acquisition parent company official website: https://www.trustedmediabrands.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]