Mad Artist Publishing — YouTube

Mad Artist Publishing CGI & Films launched on YouTube July 27, 2011 with one goal: turn the channel from a side asset into a real growth engine for the publishing brand. Fifteen years later it sits at 501K subscribers with 204,868,699 lifetime views across 787 videos — one of the most-watched independent animation channels on the platform.

I led Partnerships personally — driving outreach across animation schools, editorial publications, and licensing partners. The roster grew to include Der Spiegel, The New York Observer, and Rolling Stone Magazine for editorial coverage, alongside distribution and feature relationships with Disney Plus, The Huffington Post, and the Vaughan Film Festival. Mainstream editorial reach is hard to earn for an independent animation channel — we earned it through deliberate outreach, not luck.

Beyond partnerships, I sought out new talent and oversaw the creation of Mad Artist Publishing’s Interactive Hardcopy art books — premium printed titles with embedded interactive e-learning elements that drove commerce sales through the publishing storefront and fed fresh creative content back into the YouTube channel. The same content engine also licensed kids’ television shows for the platform, widening the audience without diluting the brand.

Underneath all of it sits content aggregation done right: partnered with international animation schools to license and showcase student short films, VFX breakdowns, and 2D/3D animation reels — giving emerging artists a global platform while filling the channel with a steady stream of premium creative content the algorithm rewards.

The system runs on an editorial calendar, keyword research, SEO-driven titles & descriptions, a tight thumbnail framework, and the cross-channel loops back into the storefront, email list, and social. YouTube search is its own engine — we treated it that way.