• by Wayne Friedman , April 11, 2018

Young-skewing cable music and entertainment company Fuse Media is debuting a branded content studio, called Fuse Collab.

The company includes Fuse, a 65-million-subscriber cable network, and its FM (Fuse Music), a 40-million-subscriber network. The studio will be an in-house creative, talent and event-marketing division.

For the upcoming upfront ad market, Jason Miller, executive vice president of advertising sales and integrated marketing of Fuse Media, expects the company to sell around 65% of Fuse’s national ad inventory.

From April 2017 to April 2018, Fuse pulled in $23 million in national TV ad revenues, according to iSpot.tv. Biggest advertisers over the period include: Wendys, Dominos, Taco Bell, Doritos, Hershey’s, Pop-Tarts, GEICO, Olive Garden, Booking.com, and Arby’s.

For all of 2017, average prime-time Fuse viewers dropped 17% to a Nielsen 49,000 from 59,000 in 2016. In 2017, Fuse says its core, adults 18-34 viewers, grew by 33%.

The company says next season it will have seven new and 10 returning original series. Fuse, which positions itself as a multicultural young-skewing network, focuses much of its original content on music and storytelling around music creators.

It also runs a number of off-network TV shows and movies.