Open the YouTube channel “Only Scrans”and you’ll find dozens of videos featuring host Jono Yates biting into everything from Glaswegian pies to American barbecue. While not as big a star as MrBeast, his down-to-earth foodie travelogues have earned him 170,000 subscribers and almost 16 million views.
Yet in the eyes of investment firm Nuggit, which has backed Only Scrans with outside capital and recently announced a £5 million ($6.7 million) fund for British YouTubers, Yates is more than a guy with a camera. He’s part of a rising class of up-and-coming content creators underserved by traditional finance, which has tended to perceive YouTube businesses as volatile side-gigs rather than an investable asset in a market growing at double-digit rates, and where a small but loyal audience can generate sufficient income to rival a midlevel salary.
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“This creator middle class is where a lot of growth sits,” says Nuggit founder Jonathan Freeland, a former investment banker. “But they lack effective support across their entire business model.” To help these online entrepreneurs scale while staying independent, his firm offers a mix of capital investment — cash up front in return for a time-limited slice of the 55% of ad revenues paid out by Alphabet Inc.-owned YouTube to eligible creators — and access to tools, data and analytics to boost growth.
