Digital content company Little Dot Studios is acquiring History Hit, the platform co-founded by broadcaster and historian Dan Snow.
The acquisition will create an integrated History network, linking Little Dot Studios’ existing factual AVOD channels with History Hit’s market leading SVOD channel, podcasts and online communities as well as licensed activities including events and book publishing. As part of the deal, Snow will exclusively work with History Hit and All3Media’s Little Dot Studios to create new online and broadcast content.
Little Dot Studios’ existing digital brands Timeline and Absolute History already generate more than 650,000 unique views a day with Timeline amassing 1.9m subscribers on YouTube alone. Acquiring History Hit will allow Little Dot Studios to expand its history audience by adding globally recognised talent and a fast-growing SVOD subscriber base.
History Hit is the UK’s biggest digital history brand across Video on Demand, podcasts, social media and the web, with more than 100,000 subscribers to its TV and audio networks. The company’s SVoD service, HistoryHit.TV hosts a curated collection of history films licensed from the world’s top documentary makers. Its podcasts, including Dan Snow’s History Hit, average around three million listens a month. As well as hosting an online community of history fans, History Hit also runs live events with partners including The British Museum, The Tower of London and English Heritage, and has licensed its first book – On This Day in History – which was a Christmas best seller.
Andy Taylor, co-Founder and CEO of Little Dot Studios, said: “As factual history programming has fallen out of favour with some traditional broadcasters, it has boomed on digital platforms across all age groups. History content is an important part of our business – average watch time on YouTube is over 30 minutes per video with the majority of viewing taking place in the living room – and we see potential for further substantial growth in this area.”
“Together with History Hit, we will have the largest history audience on digital platforms globally and acquiring this brilliant platform will give us not only one of the world’s most recognised historians in Dan Snow, but also the team who are delivering high quality, prestige content which is attracting a fast-growing subscriber base. The integrated network will allow us to serve our audience with choice across multiple platforms and in different media forms. We are very excited by the potential to super serve this highly engaged and discerning audience that the combination allows.”
Dan Snow, who co-founded History Hit with CEO Justin Gayner, added: “I started History Hit TV because I believed that there was an audience for high quality history, told by the world’s best historians, which was not being served by the traditional media. We have made longform history programmes unlike anything else available, broadcasting new voices and new stories to subscribers from Alaska to Zambia. Our size and agility has meant that we have been able to respond to the onset of Covid and the global movement against racial injustice by commissioning audio and video with a range of new voices, virologists, medical historians, activists and historians of colour to help provide audiences with context for the upheavals they see around them.
“Today is the start of the next phase. Little Dot is the perfect home for us. They are best in the business at attracting gigantic audiences online through their world beating YouTube channels. It is a killer combination. Together we are going to transform the way people watch and listen; always innovating, but never forgetting that the key is giving our hugely sophisticated, highly engaged audience what they struggle to find elsewhere: high quality history.”
Jon Creamer
Share this story
