/Henning - ChannelCraft Case Study

How we took a new YouTube channel from zero to 100k for funk, ARD and ZDF's digital network, and averaged 140,000 views per video

Kevin's company Apollo Studios partnered with funk, the digital youth content brand established by Germany's two national public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, to build Highperformer Henning from the ground up into one of Germany's most respected finance and business YouTube channels.

/Projects Goal/

The goal was to build a channel worth watching. Not just subscribing to.

funk was created to reach a younger, digitally-native audience that national television wasn't capturing. They needed a channel that could do what broadcast TV can't: build genuine community around finance and business content, sustain it, and reach a sophisticated audience rather than just racking up passive views.

We were brought in to own the entire operation. Ideation, scripting, direction for video editing, uploading, publishing. We also produced premium formats: a startup pitch show (think Dragon's Den, but for German audiences) and high-quality documentary content with on-location reporting and real interviews. On top of YouTube, we ran their Instagram and TikTok shorts, plus text and image posts across platforms.

/Results/

We grew Highperformer Henning from zero to 100,000 subscribers in roughly three years.

Average views per video hit 140,000. That's not a channel with a few viral outliers pulling the average up. That's consistent performance, video after video, to a genuinely engaged audience of finance enthusiasts, investors, and business professionals.

Also the short-form content across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok received hundreds of thousands of views.

The brand got noticed. Leading YouTube creators, media institutions, and major German publications referenced and linked to the channels. That kind of organic recognition from within the industry tends to happen when the content quality is actually there.

Two of the standout formats we produced:

A studio-based startup pitch show that put real founders in front of investors, filmed in a proper studio environment.