800 Pound Gorilla
“I love to laugh. I love the feeling of it,” says Ryan Bitzer — and since 2016, he and Damion Greiman, have turned their mutual fondness for funny into a multi-format comedy powerhouse that works with the top names in stand-up. The co-founders, who started the company in 2016, estimate it currently generates just under $10 million in gross profits annually, and serves 2.3 million followers and 20 milion comedy fans monthly across its five YouTube channels and social media platforms.
The Nashville-based company, which also operates an international division in London, initially worked with stand-up comedians to produce, distribute and market their audio recordings and specials to larger audiences, including such hit YouTube projects as Mark Normand’s Out to Lunch and Matt Rife’s Only Fans, as well as specials for major streamers. They include Leanne Morgan’s I’m Every Woman on Netflix and Sean Patton’s Number One on Peacock.
Distribution partners include Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud Network, Bill Burr & Al Madrigal’s All Things Comedy, and its own legacy label, Clown Jewels, which has released works from legends like Lucille Ball, Robin Williams, Gilbert Gottfried, The Smothers Brothers and Bob Newhart.
The company is now venturing into producing scripted and unscripted movies, TV shows and documentaries. It announces new content weekly for such comics as Iliza Shlesinger, Fortune Feimster, David Spade, John Crist and Russell Peters; works with Nate Bargatze’s multimedia platform Nateland, and is a producer on the Marc Maron documentary Are We Good?
800 Pound Gorilla has also built a profitable pipeline to spotlight international comedians via its Comedy Exports YouTube channel, and earlier this month, announced that it will begin dubbing content by Rife, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes and Michael Yo in Spanish and French and releasing it on that channel as well.
Early in their careers, Bitzer, who mainly handles 800 Pound Gorilla’s business affairs, and Greiman, who focuses on creative development, worked in country music — both in artist management, and Greiman, at Outback Presents, a leading promoter of country music and comedy tours.
They, along with director of marketing Amanda Zuckerman, who runs point on 800 Pound Gorilla’s marketing, publicity, YouTube engagement and digital strategy, sat for a conversation with Billboard about the company’s growth, the burgeoning popularity of international comics and their methods for building comics’ fan bases.
Damion and Ryan, you both come out of country music. Do you think there’s a connection between that genre and comedy?
Damion Greiman: It’s a little bit different for Ryan than it is for myself. I came from Outback Presents. We did country music concerts, but we also did a lot of comedy. We started the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, and my boss at the time, Mike Smardak, started Outback Concerts, and that company became known as the go-to company for comedy. We had other guys focused on rock shows, country shows, different types of concerts, but I gravitated to the comedy side which then led to management, which led to us starting this.
Ryan Bitzer: I was working in music artist management for, I think, 15 years. It was a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. But one of the things about managing at that time was you weren’t as in control of your artist’s career as you can be now. There were gatekeepers along the way, and if someone wasn’t feeling it, it was, “Sorry,” and two or three years of work that you had put into something shut down overnight. Over here in comedy, it’s such a blue ocean for us because if we get behind our artists, we can elevate their careers. The work you put in, you get out.
When you say gatekeepers, can you be more specific?
Bitzer: In country music, for example, radio drives that business. You could have everything lined up — the right artist, a hit songwriter, someone who’s been on Broadway for eight years and well-polished —doing the rounds, and if the program director says, “We’re not feeling this today,” it’s like, “What do you mean? It’s working.” You do that enough times, and you just lose your zest. It’s been so much fun over here because we can put that same amount of energy into these artists and have a real impact.
I’m guessing that a lot to do with Amanda and your digital strategy?
Bitzer: You got it.
Post-pandemic we saw a lot of comedians blow up from their socials — like Matt Rife. Amanda, how did that strategy evolve?
Amanda Zuckerman: That’s a great example to start with. I’ve been at the company for a little over eight years now. Our pivot to video and how we handle clips on socials and position these specials in front of the audience online happened around that time.
There’s a debate about what’s more important for breaking and maintaining a stand-up career: touring vs. social media. What’s your take?
Zuckerman: I would say touring is really important. Where we come in is helping to position their special online and drive that discoverability across all platforms to feed the touring and funnel back to ticket sales.
Bitzer: You can work things backwards so if someone blows up socially, depending on their art and their work ethic, they can make it work in the club. But [success as a live performer] takes a while. Whereas, if you take a Chad Daniels — someone who’s been touring for close to two decades —by the time he gets to us he’s built up this quiet fanbase.
So, when you finally put something out online properly it’s like lighting gasoline. You’ve just got to get in front of them. Matt Rife really blew up on the internet first. so that worked backwards. But he has the chops. He’s so good at crowd work and what he does online, he can do it live so well.
Greiman: When we’re talking with comics, they typically say, “I want more eyeballs on my videos, and the reason for that is I want more people coming to my shows” It’s usually not about how much money I can make. Of course, they want to make more money on their project, but more importantly, it’s about how is this going to impact my tour numbers? That is what led us to start this company. We were using it as a marketing tool for their tours.
When we were thinking about comedy audio, we didn’t even know that there was a real business there. We just thought this is another way to get an artist out into the world, so that more people go to their shows.
What are the milestones that distinguish 800 Pound Gorilla’s past year?
Greiman: Throughout the life of this company, we’ve progressed organically. We started as an audio company and became the record label for Netflix, for Kevin Hart’s company, for Bill Burr and All Things Comedy. That led to us doing video projects. Comics came to us saying they needed help on video projects. We started by spending a lot of money to produce these projects and trying to sell them to major streamers. A lot of times those projects would get passed on, and that forced us to think about building an audience here.
So, that’s what we’ve been doing the last several years because we needed a home for our own projects. The benefit of that is now other comics see us as a home for these projects because we have built this audience of stand-up comedy fans. So, it’s not just about a comedian’s audio project or video project. It’s about the fans that we have that are used to watching long-form stand-up comedy. Our channels are built for that.
We were one of the producers on a Marc Maron documentary, Are We Good? We’re now working on feature films with some of the comics that we work with, so that feels like the next phase.
You have five YouTube channels. How would a comedy fan navigate those?
Zuckerman: One thing that we’ve learned is that comedy fans exist online in many different places consuming comedy in different formats. We’ve built channels around those different formats to super serve each of those audiences.
Our main channel, The Whole Banana, is built for our long form stand-up specials. Then there are audiences that like to watch short-format comedy — clips and shorter chapters from the specials. So, we have the Shorts channel that’s built for that. There’s a clean comedy audience out there as well so we have a channel that we call Safe for Work, as well as an international channel, Comedy Exports, that speaks directly to U.K. and Australian audiences. And there’s still an audience for people that want to listen to audio only. So, we have a channel that’s built for that: full specials in audio-only form.
Bitzer: We also have a legacy channel called Clown Jewels and that’s playing Robin Williams, George Carlin, all the legacy acts. The thing that gets me excited now is, four years ago, we didn’t really have an audience, and today, we’re almost up to a million people a day watching something either on the website, YouTube, Facebook — wherever this content lives. Now we can put someone we love in front of a real audience and it moves them faster. We can grow them.
What are some of the comedians you’ve done that with?
Zuckerman: Matt Rife is a good example. He definitely already had momentum on his own before he partnered with us. When he partnered with us, his special had about 2 million views on his channel. When he brought it over, and we put it up in front of our audience, our channel had 18 million views, and it revived the special on his own channel, where it shot up to 15 million views. We’ve seen that across the board. We call it the “same movie, different movie theater” approach. It’s the idea that comedy fans are online at different places, and our approach is meeting them where they’re at to expand the discoverability of the content.
Ryan Bitzer: Greg Warren is a great example of someone who was the club level, and we did one project with him. We figured out who his audience is, then did a second project that went really well, Where the Field Corn Grows. That got us a conversation with Nate Bargatze.
When we approached Nate, he was trying to build Nateland, and we said, “Hey, let us be your backbone. We know what you want to do. We know how to do this. And you remember Greg, don’t you?” They did comedy together in New York, so it was an easy intro. We partnered up and we did The Salesman, [Warren’s special, which Bargatze directed]. Between us and Nate and Greg’s talent, that blew up. Then Nateland just did The Champion which we all worked on together again. Now when Greg goes back to cities where he might have had trouble moving 50 tickets, he sells out. And to hear that in his voice when he calls is the coolest thing in the world for me.
How does 800 Pound Gorilla differentiate itself from Punchup Live and Comedy Dynamics?
Bitzer: Punchup Live is sort of a ticketing play. We work with them — we’ll license a piece of content over there, but they’re really interested in working on the live and ticketing side so it’s a totally different company. We’re more of a media company. I think Dynamics maybe is a little closer to how we do business, but this is almost 40 people, and we’re solely focused on stand-up comedy and comedy related film or TV, where Comedy Dynamics is doing shows about toys and decade [retrospectives].
We’re comedy all the time here. We’re here on this earth to make people laugh. We’re also very focused on international. We think that’s been an underserved market. Whenever we hear, “Don’t waste your time on that, there’s no money,” that perks up my ears. It means someone went fishing in this spot with the wrong lure. Sometimes we lose, but when we started the company, we heard, “You don’t market recorded comedy audio because there’s no money in it.” Well, like I said, this is almost 40 people now.
We heard this about international five years ago. If you go over to The Festival Fringe in Edinburgh [Scotland], they’re moving more than 2 million tickets a year. There’s 100,000 people there and they’re all watching comedy shows. You just look around and you’re like, “There’s got to be a business here.” You just have to dig in, and you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. And that’s where we’re at. It took us probably three years to get profitable working in the United Kingdom — signing U.K. acts, putting them on Comedy Exports and building that audience through email. It takes time. Now it’s at a place where it’s a business, there’s an audience, and hey, they may like Kyle Kinane or David Cross, so let’s see if that works. And then vice versa. Could we take Jimmy Carr and Sarah Millican and bring them over here?Those things are working.
Damion Greiman: When we first started, our competition was some of those companies that you pointed out. Now, it feels like we’re competing with Netflix — we’re the Netflix of comedy. It used to be that we when we had conversations with comics, they weren’t going to Netflix [with a special] and wanted to put it out on their own YouTube page. Now we’re working alongside the comics. We can do things like the collab feature with YouTube or we can upload something on one of our channels at the same time, so it’s our team, plus the comic’s team. If you’re releasing on your own, you want to talk to us.
Have you done investor rounds?
Bitzer: It’s 100% organic here. We haven’t taken any external money. It’s just been taking the profits and pouring them back into the company every year.
Are those profits from YouTube traffic, and production fees?
Bitzer: Yeah, the royalties that come off comedy audio, YouTube, Meta, a little bit from TikTok. We sell direct to the consumer as well and generate a fee for service.
I find it interesting that you’re in Nashville. Clearly there’s a comedy scene there, but New York and Los Angeles are considered the de facto capitals.
Greiman: When we first started the company, it was as simple as, we lived in Nashville. Some people in the industry were asking us, “When are you going to move to L.A.? When are you going to move to New York?” And we just said, “What do you mean?” We don’t have any intention of moving. It felt like, right around the pandemic, people really started to realize, yeah, you don’t have to be in one of those places. You can do this from anywhere.
Also, Nashville as a whole and the community here has grown for comedy. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, comic in the world, Nate Bargatze, lives here. There’s a lot of comics that either live here now or are moving here. One of the best comedy clubs in the country, Zanies, is here. So, there is this comedy community now.
Bitzer: I was just going to add the staffing talent here is amazing because you have all the kids at Belmont and MTSU [Middle Tennessee State University] being trained in the entertainment industry, and there’s only 10 jobs that open up in country music a year. So, you get these really talented young adults coming out of school looking for work. You find the one that loves whatever, Theo Von’s podcast or whoever they’re into, and they go, “Oh, I didn’t even know you guys were here.” All of a sudden, you have this amazing young staff. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s probably our greatest achievement as a company.
