After growing its audience in 2021, Fox Soul has ambitious plans to expand its programming and generate revenue.
The two-year-old, ad-supported streaming service operates under the wing of the Fox Television Stations group. Fox Soul said its viewership climbed 131% to 61 million viewers and minutes viewed jumped 191% to 700 million in 2021.
“We’re still here, so we must be doing something right,” Fox Soul general manager and head of programming James DuBose said.
Fox Soul is in the process of bringing in a chief revenue officer. “My goal is to make sure we become a profitable business,” DuBose said. While not profitable yet, he said “we’re headed in the right direction.”
DuBose said Fox Soul plans to add its first music competition show in the spring. It will be looking to find a group — rather than an individual performer — and show viewers how writers, producers and artists work together to come up with hits, said DuBose, who played football at Wake Forest and once ran Sean (Diddy) Combs’s TV-production company.
DuBose also has a travel series in the works to show viewers the world that lies beyond their community, as well as an animated show for kids on Saturday morning.
It recently ordered six episodes of Turnt Out with TS Madison, featuring the first Black trans woman to star in and executive-produce her own reality series, and picked up 13 more episodes of The House, a talk show focused on the Black LGBTQIA+ experience.
Fox Soul is also relaunching its programming partnership with Black Enterprise.
Entertaining, Inspiring Shows
As the head of programming, DuBose said his goal is not just to entertain viewers, but to educate and inspire as well.
“We want to tell the stories behind the stories and really give people an opportunity to talk about things that they normally only discuss in the privacy of their own homes,” DuBose said. The formula seems to work. Fox Soul’s audience is 85% to 90% Black.
“We’re unapologetically Black, but consumable by all,” DuBose said. “We want our stories, and our voice, to be heard, but we want to be respected and well-received by everybody across the board.”
Fox Soul also aims to be interactive with its viewers. but that got sidetracked during the pandemic. “I would anticipate by summertime we will be back to having that technology and that ability. That's very important to our success,” DuBose said.
To some, Fox is an odd place for a network for Black people, given the shadow cast by Fox News Channel.
“There’s no hiding from the fact that the Black community sees it in one way,” DuBose said. “A lot of the community, friends and so forth, were a little skeptical, as was expected.” He said he didn’t want to be the Black face of a network where the people behind the scenes were not interested in the community.
“They had no interest in doing that either, and they’ve been very, very true to that word,” he said.
With cord-cutting and more viewers streaming, Fox Television Stations wanted to get into streaming, and did research to see what audiences it could attract. Stephen Brown, executive VP, programming and development for the station group, noted that a Fox First-Run show like Divorce Court already generates more revenue from streaming than it does from broadcast.
With shows like Living Single, Martin and Empire, “Fox traditionally has served the African-American population, in the network and in our daily syndicated programming, Divorce Court, Dish Nation and Wendy Williams,” Brown said.
Fox owns TV stations in eight of the top 10 Black markets. “This is the population that we should serve because we already serve them,” Brown said. “Why not hyper-serve them?”
DuBose was producing Dish Nation for Fox. “We brought James in and said, ‘We want to create a channel for the African-American audience, but we don’t want to do the traditional thing. We needed to create an authentic experience.’ And James and his team came up with Our Voice. Our Truth,” Brown said.
DuBose said he wanted to be in entertainment from childhood, shooting music videos as a teenager. He went to Wake Forest University to play football because it has a great communications department.
He now says he’s “inspired by people who have experienced great failure and come out of that.” He has his own story to tell.
DuBose started his own business in 2005 and was creating reality shows for BET and other networks. Some of his hits were Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is, Tiny and Toya and The Michael Vick Project.
“I had great success until about 2013-14,” he said. “It was like I couldn't miss. Everything I was touching was working. I was the guy who everyone was coming to. But I was miserable at my highest, financially, career-wise and everything. Inside I was dying.” He suffered a deep depression.
He said then-BET Networks president of original programming Loretha Jones called him into her office. She said, “I'm going to pay for you to get help because I'm not there for your funeral,” DuBose recalled.
“I damn near lost everything,” DuBose said. “It took me a long, long time to come back from that. I lost a lot, but by the grace of God, I was able to get myself together and continue.”
Ri-Karlo Handy, CEO of Sunwise Media and founder of the Handy Foundation, which is dedicated to providing job placement into hard-to-access Hollywood jobs, said DuBose gave him his first opportunity as an executive producer, and that many of the top Black reality show producers worked for DuBose at some point in their career.
“If Fox Soul gives James a chance to reinvent himself while giving Black folks an opportunity in this business, I hope he’s successful,” Handy said.
The community is watching to see what comes out of Fox Soul, Handy said. “I think that supporting content that employs people of color is important, so we wish him all the best,” he said.
Brown said he and Jack Abernethy, CEO of Fox Television Stations, “step way back” when it comes to Fox Soul’s programming. That’s one reason it rings true, he said. Fox Soul also manages to produce programming on a budget, or by working with partners.
“We produce the way Fox First Run produces our syndicated programs,” Brown said. “We're incredibly cost-conscious. We don't spend stupid amounts of money on on things that really ultimately don't matter. We pay good salaries for our staff and for our infrastructure. But we don't pay inordinate salaries to stars that ultimately are kind of flashes and then and then people will go away.”
Fox Soul’s lineup includes Fox First Run shows including Divorce Court and Dish Nation. It also runs shows produced by individual Fox stations, such as The Isiah Factor Uncensored from KRIV Houston and The Feed at Night from WTXF Philadelphia.
Over the Christmas break, Fox Soul aired the Fox broadcast network series Our Kind of People.
In Sync with Fox Stations
It’s a symbiotic relationship between the Fox operations. “We incubate programming on Fox Soul that can be widely distributed across our owned and operated stations,” Brown said. Fox Soul programs Business of Being Black With Tammi Mac, The Book of Seann, The Black Report and Cocktails With Queens are broadcast by Fox stations.
The arrangement provides fresh programming for the stations and promotion for Fox Soul, Brown said.
Fox Television Stations is providing additional distribution for Fox Soul. Fox’s station in Atlanta, WAGA (Fox 5), also streams Fox Soul on its website.
Fox Soul also offered an original holiday movie with Where Hearts Lie. Watch time for Fox Soul on Vizio rose 107% when it premiered on December 18.
“The next step after distribution and getting our work out there is to monetize it,” Brown said. “We’re hiring a chief revenue officer to really push that forward.” The new CRO will report to Abernethy.
Fox Soul is getting more aggressive in getting advertisers. It recently did an integration deal for Nissan that involved a series of vignettes for Black History Month.
Brown doesn’t expect Fox Soul to turn a profit this year, but he sees it breaking even next year and making money after that.
“We’re not in the business to have a hobby,” Brown said. “We’re in the business to be a business.”
That means DuBose is learning to be an executive as well as a producer. “I’m learning every day about things that I never thought I would do,” he said. “I would like to consider myself an executive/producer, but mostly a person who is still learning and enjoying what he’s doing.” ■
