Yiğit Doğan Çelik, chairman and CEO of Merzigo, joins ScreenMDM Talks’ The SwitchScreen strand ahead of StreamTV Show to share the company’s journey from YouTube Turkish drama specialist to a multi-genre and global social media optimizer.
The company, founded in 2018, manages more than 6,000 channels on behalf of some of the world’s leading broadcasters, studios, and content owners, delivering more than 17 billion monthly views. The company has also gotten into the sports game, recently aligning with Inter Milan.
The lightbulb moment for Çelik—who was recently ranked as one of the 50 most influential people working in the U.K.’s OTT industry—came when he was in the gaming business. “Turkish drama was rising a lot,” he says. “Turkey is a free-to-air country. People are used to watching things on free TV. YouTube is an open platform. It’s a free platform. I said, ‘Why don’t we shift that business to YouTube scale?’ I started straight away taking YouTube rights of the Turkish dramas, and then I started to upload the international versions, and it just became a huge business. Now, YouTube is one of the dominant revenue sources for the industry in Turkey. It’s nearly similar to international sales revenue.”
Watch the conversation with Yiğit on YouTube or Spotify, or keep reading about the Merzigo journey below.
Of course, convincing broadcasters at the time was a bit of an uphill battle amid their concerns about cannibalization. As such, Merzigo began initially by bringing Turkish dramas to YouTube in markets like LatAm and the Middle East. “Those two markets were an important case study for us because they were not cannibalizing their own OTT services. And then they saw the figures.”
YouTube is essentially a catch-up on-demand service for local dramas in Turkey today, reaching “almost 20 million unique people every day,” he says.
“YouTube is TV,” Celik says about the ongoing debate, noting that the platform is used by more than 55 million people every day in Turkey. “The population of Turkey is almost 90 million. More than half are watching YouTube.”
And by reaching all target demos, “YouTube is a total TV group. There are a lot of people in the basket.”
Like the big free-to-air broadcasters that used to hold that all-demo appeal, Merzigo is tracking performance daily. “This is not different from the traditional TV business. You have to follow the reactions of viewership every second. I have hundreds of developers [working on] entertainment technology features every day. We are collaborating with the VOD services. We have collaborations with multiple platforms. We want them to be ready for this demand as well, because now everyone speaks about the huge business happening on social VOD platforms.”
Merzigo was founded to help players across the ecosystem on that journey, with a particular emphasis on “premium IP” across TV, movies, and sports. “This business is now more than a creative agency business; this company is now a core entertainment solution partner for studios, producers, and broadcasters.”
