Who Owns CoComelon?

Jay Jeon and his wife launched what became CoComelon in September 2006, uploading simple animated alphabet videos to YouTube under the account name "checkgate." Jeon, a Korean-American commercial director, initially made the videos to teach his own children, appending links to a family educational website called ThatsMEonTV. The channel predates Google's purchase of YouTube by a month, making it one of the oldest major properties still operating on the platform.

The channel rebranded to ABC Kid TV in 2013 and shifted to 3D animation in 2016, a change that transformed its growth. In 2018 it took the name CoComelon and introduced the recurring cast that anchors the brand today: JJ, his siblings YoYo and TomTom, his parents, and classmates including Cody and Nina. For years the operation ran anonymously out of Orange County with a staff of about twenty. Jeon did not publicly reveal himself until a February 2020 interview, by which point the channel was generating more than 3.5 billion views per month.

Moonbug acquired Treasure Studio in July 2020 and applied its playbook of platform expansion, localization, and licensing. Netflix began carrying compiled CoComelon episodes in 2020, and the show became one of the service's most-watched children's programs, logging more than 45 billion minutes of viewing on Netflix in 2024 alone. Moonbug extended the franchise with spin-offs including JJ's Animal Time in late 2021 and the scripted series CoComelon Lane on Netflix.

Under Candle Media ownership, the brand has continued to scale. The flagship channel passed 200 million subscribers in 2026 with more than 220 billion lifetime views, and Moonbug's combined channels exceed 400 million subscribers and roughly 4 billion views per month across 100 platforms in dozens of languages. In 2025 Disney secured exclusive streaming rights to the flagship series from 2027, a deal reported to be worth tens of millions of dollars annually, and Moonbug has a CoComelon feature film in development.