Andrew Yaffe/Dude Perfect
- YouTube group Dude Perfect, known for viral stunts, has hired its first CEO.
- Former NBA exec Andrew Yaffe has joined the team to help grow the business beyond YouTube.
- Yaffe broke down the company's business plans and the importance of connected TV.
Dude Perfect isn't playing games. The company just hired its first CEO to help it continue to grow beyond social-media fame and into a full-fledged media empire.
That CEO is former NBA executive Andrew Yaffe, who joined the team with a vision to build Dude Perfect into the next sports-media giant.
"Our vision is to build Dude Perfect into what a 21st-century media company looks like," Yaffee told Business Insider. "We're going to build a team that'll deliver great content to our fans and great products and experiences to families in the US, and across the world."
The dudes — Garrett Hilbert, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, Coby Cotton, and Cory Cotton — are former college roommates who started the YouTube channel in 2009. Based in Frisco, Texas, Dude Perfect is now a sprawling enterprise with many ventures, including a best-selling book, merchandise sold in Walmart, a tour, and a connected-TV app. The group is known for its viral family-friendly content, from sports and trick shots to stunts and comedy skits. Its YouTube channel has more than 60 million subscribers, and its most-viewed video is a five-minute clip of flipping water bottles that has racked up 482 million views.
Earlier this year, Dude Perfect raised its first round of funding. Axios reported the group had raised over $100 million from Highmount Capital. The company said at the time that revenue this year was estimated to be over $50 million.
As viewing of creator content has surged on TV screens, Dude Perfect has made recent moves in that direction.
"We think that there's a lot of consumption happening now on the biggest screen in the house, and we want to make sure we can deliver content to our fans there," Yaffee said. "And we've seen that as a trend on YouTube as well. Even at the NBA, more than half of our content on YouTube was consumed on television. And so that's, I think, very important."
Recently, Dude Perfect launched a connected-TV app with A Parent Media Co. The app, which is ad-supported and free to use, is available on mobile and on TV through Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV, among other services. Aside from the stand-alone app, Dude Perfect also streams its content on the kid's entertainment platform Kidoodle.TV.
Going forward, Yaffe said he wants to help the group understand how connected TV can fit into the company's content strategy.
"I think it indicates longer content and more highly produced content," Yaffe said. "This is something we've done for a very long time, more episodic and franchise content. So, we're excited about that as a path forward."
Offering family-focused entertainment is something Yaffe said the team plans to continue to invest and build on.
"One of the challenges is just ensuring that we're not trying to do too much because I think there's so many opportunities in front of us," Yaffe said. "Everything from launching our tour next summer, our app, new toys, and we're opening a brand new headquarters later this fall. It's going to be a busy and exciting year for us, and I'm really excited to get into it."