In 2005 YouTube sold to Google for $1.65 billion. At the time, the fledgling video sharing service was “a rickety site,” said Scott Weitz, co-founder and CEO of family entertainment company Driver Digital, but the deal was a clear indicator that major players believed there was money to be made in this new online realm.

“It was the beginning,” Weitz said, “of the value of having other modalities reach people.”

Weitz and his partner J.D. Williams spun Driver Digital off of its sister company Driver Media, a full-service agency production company whose clients have included big-name brands like LG, GM and Canon. Driver Media was doing just fine but the duo were excited about two big opportunities within YouTube’s emerging media landscape. The first was simply delivering advertising for brands on the platform, creating traditional TV-like spots that would run with already existing digital content. The second was something slightly more revolutionary: to not only create and distribute their own digital content, but to turn that content into brands in and of themselves, entities that could adapt the concept of traditional TV networks for a new era of media.

“We didn’t know how to do that or how to get that content to scale,” said Weitz, “but technically, we realized it was possible.”

Working toward that ambitious goal, Driver Digital began aggregating content for many different audiences on YouTube, though it soon realized that “to grow a network, you have to focus on a particular demographic,” said Weitz. To that end, one of the personalities on its content roster, Judy Travis, was garnering a lot of views for her down-to-earth makeup videos.

“[Her channel] began to grow and grow and grow,” said Weitz, pulling in 1 million views per month, then 2 million, then 3 million and beyond. Now a mother of three daughters, Travis’ two YouTube channels, itsjudytime and itsjudyslife, routinely draw in around 20 million views per month between them and boast more than 2 million cumulative subscribers.

Those numbers, rivaling the reach of many broadcast TV shows, helped propel Driver Digital toward realizing the first major tenet in its ambitious vision: JustHer, a female-focused lifestyle network geared toward moms that distributes digital content from the likes of popular YouTube personalities such as Travis, raw food guru Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram, thrifty advice-giving siblings The Kissters, and others.

Aggregating mom-related videos made by others was a natural starting point for Driver Digital to leverage its own original offerings, along with additional aggregated fare, toward the other side of the content coin: Kids.

“You can build brands around kids’ content,” said Weitz. “When you aggregate a personality, you’re never going to own that personality, but with kids you can come up with fun characters, own those characters, and there are really great branding opportunities. Kids and moms are really sympathetic audiences to each other… if you’re going to be working in kids content you better know about mom content and vice-versa.”

With veteran staffers from the TV industry on board, including co-founder, head of family entertainment and former Boy Meets World producer Rob Kurtz, Driver Digital’s JustKids is a multi-platform network compliment to JustHer that produces and aggregates games and videos across desktop and mobile. Thanks to popular YouTube channels like the animation, live action and puppetry outlet Cool School, which draws around 7 million views per month, JustKids surpassed both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network in reaching K6-12 online viewers in September, according to comScore.

Driver Digital’s success in holding its own against familiar content brands online when neither JustHer or JustKids is a household name is a testament to both the quality of the content the company pulls together and its ability to find innovative ways to make sure that content gets seen. For the October 2014 premiere of its original Cool School series “The Story Circle,” for instance, Driver Digital pulled in some of the most popular online personalities from the mom content realm to appear in the episode – including JustHer’s own Judy Travis. In turn, those millennial online-celebrity parents could bring their respective cadres of extremely loyal viewers to the new offering.

“Today you’re able to see content creators from a myriad of backgrounds with myriad capabilities,” said Derek Sentner, VP of sales for Driver Digital, “striking relationships with their consumers on whatever platform they might be on… Talent is everywhere and the end consumer doesn’t necessarily know what is or isn’t your brand; they’re concerned with the content itself.”

Driver Digital, he continued, has found success in this space because of its ability to “put all that talent together” with “the technology to put an ad in” coupled with its in-house content creation capabilities.

“We can give you ads across a large network and then we can give you band integration in content that we own or control, and we can even understand the platform that’s on and provide additional breadth by leveraging our know-how about how to get views,” said Sentner. “The idea of the household name comes from another era.”

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