This California Company Is Buying New York's Best Viral Videos

Update: Mike Skogmo, head of communications for Jukin Media, called to clarify that his assistant, Jessica Garnett, quoted throughout this story, did not speak for the company in an official capacity. Small updates throughout.

What do Manhattan’s favorite rat and Brooklyn’s least favorite gentrifier have in common?

Videos of both were quickly bought up by an L.A.-based video licensing company called Jukin Media, which — now that it owns the videos — will serve as a gatekeeper between the average Joes who shot the footage and anyone who wants to air it.

Within five minutes of posting a video of a white guy in Downtown Brooklyn claiming to have “settled” the neighborhood, the videographer, who wished to remain anonymous, said he got a call from someone at Jukin.

He said he quickly agreed to sell Jukin the rights to his video for $200 up front plus a 70 percent commission on any profits the video brings in.

Jessica Garnett, an office assistant at the company, confirmed.

“We reach out to video content owners and see if they’d like to set up a contract,” Garnett said. ”We can completely buy their video for a fee.”

Individual contracts vary — often depending on what price videographers will agree to during that initial, very time-sensitive phone conversation.

Matt Little, the NYC comedian who posted the wildly popular video of a rat dragging a giant piece of pizza into the subway, will likely make thousands of dollars from his deal, Garnett said. (Little could not be reached for comment.)

Not even GIFs of pizza rat are safe anymore.

“We have a full team for rights management,” Garnett said. “There are a lot of issues with people stealing content.”

Jukin also apparently snatched up rights for the recent video of the little girl lecturing her parents on how to get along.

Jukin’s videos make money whenever any TV news stations or shows, such as Tosh.O and Ridiculousness, want to re-air them. The company also re-posts raw user videos on its YouYube account, or one of its partner YouTube accounts, with an ad up front — at which point “the monetization money starts flowing,” Garnett told Patch.

She insisted the company has no special technology nor algorithm to detect new, potentially viral videos as they’re uploaded to the net. (Update: Jukin Media spokesman Mike Skogmo said that in fact, Jukin’s development team is building new technologies to serve this exact purpose.)

“We have a team of 15 researchers here that are just pretty much, like, every second of the day taking the internet and ripping it apart and finding these videos that we think have a potential of getting big,” Garnett said. (Update: Skogmo said Garnett’s count of 15 researchers was incorrect. However, he declined to name the correct number, ”for competitive purposes.”)

For example, Garnett said, “We have the researchers going on people’s Facebooks. We have kind of like a deal with Facebook where we pay a fee to be able to message these individuals.”

The company’s video miners also troll YouTube, Instagram and Vine for potential hits.

Jukin and its competitors in the viral-video licensing industry often have to duke it out for rights.

“It’s kind of just first come, first serve,” Garnett said.

Video Ink has more today about Jukin’s exploding portfolio of partnerships. And here’s an extensive profile on the company that Wired reporter Davey Alba wrote in August.