Jellysmack is laying off staff as it scales back its creator program

• Creator-economy startup Jellysmack is reorganizing and cutting some staff, Business Insider is exclusively reporting.
• The startup, backed by SoftBank, has faced business challenges after raising significant funding.
• Earlier this year, Jellysmack insiders said they were uncertain about the startup’s path forward.

Jellysmack, a prominent creator-economy startup backed by SoftBank, is undergoing a reorganization and cutting staff.

The company confirmed to Business Insider that the latest cuts will impact 22 staffers in the US, and in the coming months, employees in France will also be affected.

Going forward, Jellysmack said it would prioritize content businesses where it owns the intellectual property, including YouTube channels like Gamology, House of Bounce, Beauty Studio, and Oh My Goal. The company said it’s scaling back on a program where it helped creators make money by posting their content on Meta-owned apps like Facebook.

“Jellysmack is making organizational adjustments to better align resources with key areas of growth,” a representative told BI in an email. “Jellysmack’s goal is to prioritize and invest in our business units that hold IP, given their continued success on YouTube. While we are scaling back certain operations in our Creator Program on Meta due to the opacity of their new monetization model, we remain dedicated to supporting our key creator partners and ensuring they continue to benefit from our platform.”

During a December round of layoffs, Jellysmack’s CEO said the company had experienced “a contraction of monetization across platforms.”

Jellysmack, which launched in 2016, transitioned from making its own YouTube content to working with other creators — such as superstars like MrBeast and PewDiePie — to edit and recirculate their content across platforms like Facebook and Snapchat in order to capture additional ad revenue.

“We realized that creators were not really leveraging their library of content and their brand, outside of YouTube, for monetization,” Jellysmack cofounder Michael Philippe told BI in 2020.

But Jellysmack expanded well beyond that in the past several years, launching arms ranging from a production play (JellySmash Productions) to an AI assistant (Jelly X). The company said in early 2022 that it would set aside $500 million for a program called JellyFi to license creator catalogs. This division was sold to Copyright Capital at the beginning of 2024.

“They’ve almost shifted to being this holding company,” a former staffer told BI earlier this year. The ex-staffer requested anonymity as they were not permitted to speak about their experiences working with the company.

Despite Jellysmack’s expansion into new areas of the creator economy, its business had been increasingly troubled, insiders told BI earlier this year. A BI investigation in May detailed the challenges the tech unicorn had faced — and its uncertain path forward — after it raised a nine-figure war chest and became one of the creator economy’s most high-profile companies.

Jellysmack’s move to prioritize and invest in business units that focus on intellectual property suggests a narrowing of its focus moving forward.

Other creator-economy startups that built businesses via influencer content, such as video-shout out app Cameo, have struggled to meet growth expectations set by VCs.