Viacom has made it official.
The Redstone family-controlled New York media giant acquired AwesomenessTV, the youth-centric media company, from co-owners Comcast/NBCUniversal, Hearst and Verizon, it said Friday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but reports put the sale price at around $25 million — a steep discount from the $650 million valuation the Los Angeles company had two years ago.
There’s been a “general decline of digital native” companies that “isn’t limited to AwesomenessTV,” a media industry source told The Post.
Translation: Expect more digital media companies to sell for far less than their valuations.
Bought by DreamWorks Animation in 2013, a year after it was formed, AwesomenessTV has a distribution footprint that includes social and subscription video-on-demand platforms, as well as a creative agency, a YouTube creator network and brand partnerships division. More recently, the company has experienced disruption in its leadership ranks, thanks in part to Viacom.
Brian Robbins, who co-founded the company in 2012, stepped down as chief executive last year. He is now president of Viacom’s youth-centric entertainment production division, Paramount Players.
At the same time, Viacom last fall hired Kelly Day, the chief business officer of AwesomenessTV, as president of Viacom Digital Studios.
“Awesomeness has done an incredible job building their brand into a digital media powerhouse for today’s most sought-after and hard-to-reach youth audiences,” Day said on Friday.
According to Viacom, Awesomeness will help accelerate its digital transformation, bolstering the efforts of its recently launched Viacom Digital Studios. AwesomenessTV’s current CEO, Jordan Levin, is expected to leave the company once the transition of the sale is complete.


