Spotter Hires Former Google Exec Paul Bakaus as EVP, Product and Creator Tools

Spotter, a company that pays YouTube creators cash for the rights to monetize their video libraries and helps them grow their fanbases, hired Paul Bakaus as executive VP, product and creator tools.

At Spotter, Bakaus will focus on developing products and tools to serve creators and deliver on Spotter’s mission to provide value and resources to YouTubers in addition to capital. Bakaus will dual-report to Spotter CEO and founder Aaron DeBevoise and chief strategy officer Rob Gabel.

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Bakaus most recently served as head of creators at Koji, ecommerce platform designed for for social media sellers. Prior to joining Koji in April 2022, he spent more than eight years at Google, most recently as head of creator relations where he launched and led the “Google for Creators” program. Before Google, Bakaus worked at games company Zynga. He also is the creator of jQuery UI, a widget and interaction library that has been used by millions of websites to build interactive web applications.

“When I first heard about Spotter I was immediately drawn to the company’s innovative model for accelerating creator growth,” Bakaus said in a statement. “I’ve been ingrained in the creator community for years and am intimately familiar with the importance of workable tools to propel creator success. I look forward to working with the team to build solutions that will open even more doors for creators than they ever thought possible.”

Founded in 2019, Los Angeles-based Spotter has said it has a $1.7 billion valuation, with investors including Mark Bezos (brother of Jeff Bezos) and Softbank. To date, Spotter says it has paid out more than $740 million to YouTube creator partners, which include MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson), Dude Perfect, Like Nastya and Unspeakable.

Spotter says its deals with YouTube creators typically range from $50,000 to more than $30 million. The amount depends on many factors, including past performance and future estimates as calculated by its proprietary prediction engine.

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