How did essentially the most seen clip in YouTube historical past lead a Korean studio to the inventory market?

“Child Shark Dance” is not only a preferred youngsters’s tune obtainable in numerous languages. Moderately, it’s a basic development that shortly unfold around the globe till its video clip on the YouTube platform has acquired greater than 16 billion views, and remains to be categorized as some of the well-known youngsters’s leisure works on the Web, along with its contribution in reworking the corporate that created the tune, “Pinkfong”, from a small Korean studio to a well-known identify on this planet of kids’s media.

Its historical past

“Pinkfong” launched Pinkfong Primarily based in Seoul, it was based in 2010 by Kim Min Suk and Son Dong Woo, each veterans of the gaming and data know-how sectors in South Korea. It started as a studio for producing youngsters’s content material and was beforehand often called Good Studio. It was recognized for its quick, catchy songs and movies, which might be seen on YouTube, streaming and tv platforms, and cellular purposes.

turning level

“Child Shark Dance” or Child Shark Dance It’s a two-minute youngsters’s tune or video clip a couple of household of sharks that was uploaded to YouTube in June 2016. The tune itself just isn’t new, however reasonably impressed by an outdated chant, however Pinkfong reinvented it with enticing animation and easy phrases in English, which made it common with youngsters and adults.

Document achievement

Within the interval between 2017 and 2018, the tune unfold globally via social media platforms to the purpose that it surpassed the success of the Spanish tune “Despacito,” and “Child Shark” grew to become essentially the most seen video clip within the historical past of YouTube, because it was performed on common greater than 4.7 million occasions per day because it was uploaded, and it acquired 16.4 billion views. Not solely that, but it surely expanded to the emergence of video games impressed by the clip, tv packages, and others.

Exploit success

After the success of the tune “Child Shark Dance,” the corporate expanded its ambitions and created new characters till it grew to become an built-in studio that goals to supply easy, spreadable songs and movies on the Web to monetize them via promoting, broadcast rights revenues, licensing, and so on., and obtained early funding partnerships via “Samsung Publishing.” Samsung Publishing Which owned a 16.8% stake in Pinkfong earlier than the providing.

Her journey in direction of IPO

With the South Korean leisure sector gaining a large world fan base, Pinkfong, the corporate that created the tune, took benefit of this distinctive success to supply its shares for the primary time on the Korean Inventory Trade as we speak, November 18, as a way to show its capabilities as an built-in media firm that’s not restricted to specializing in youngsters’s screens.

Launching into the market

The providing raised solely 76 billion received ($53 million) and the inventory was priced at 38 thousand received, however on the primary day of buying and selling the inventory jumped practically 62%, rising to 61.5 thousand received earlier than closing buying and selling at 41.55 thousand received, bringing the corporate’s market worth to 596.3 billion received ($406 million).

Formidable plan

The corporate’s resolution to drift its shares will assist remodel its path from a profitable studio to a diversified model specializing in youngsters’s leisure able to constantly launching new characters, collection, and mental property rights, because it plans to make use of the proceeds from the IPO to boost its capabilities within the area of synthetic intelligence and broaden its place in key international markets.

Monetary positive aspects

However this distinctive success didn’t translate into large wealth for the corporate, because it achieved revenues of roughly $67 million in 2024, together with its income from YouTube, attributable to some restrictions imposed on youngsters’s content material on-line that restrict the flexibility to revenue from its widespread recognition.

What if?

If these restrictions, which embrace blocking personalised adverts, suspending feedback and subscriber notifications that assist drive engagement, had not been tightened, Child Shark may have generated about two to a few occasions extra direct income for the corporate, estimates Garrett Johnson of Boston College.

Conclusion

Pinkfong has benefited from the distinctive success of the “Child Shark” video and is working to broaden its footprint around the globe with extra improvements, particularly with its launch within the inventory market, particularly with expectations that the Korean leisure sector will stay the main focus of world consideration within the coming years.

Sources: YouTube – Pinkfong web site – Bloomberg – Wall Avenue Journal – Monetary Occasions