Creators Are the New Media Moguls. But Scaling a Face Is Harder Than It Looks

Creator Economy

Creators Are the New Media Moguls. But Scaling a Face Is Harder Than It Looks

On a Friday morning in June, Jimmy Donaldson—better known as MrBeast—notched a digital media milestone, becoming the first person to surpass 500 million subscribers on YouTube, making his viewership larger than the combined populations of the U.S. and Canada.

But inside his North Carolina studio hangs a plaque that has little to do with subscriber counts. It reads “YouTube first,” a motto that still governs the Beast Industries operation, according to its chief executive Jeff Housenbold, even if the company it anchors no longer looks much like a YouTube channel.

Instead, the business now more closely resembles a diversified conglomerate, encompassing a chocolate brand, a toy manufacturer, a brand studio, a competition show on Prime Video, a financial services app, and, coming later this year, a mobile telecommunications platform.

Donaldson, who uploaded his first video to YouTube 14 years ago, is the most visible example of a shift that has been building for years: Creators, expanding beyond their native platforms, are maturing into media companies.

The same personalities who once measured success in views and subscribers are now guided by balance sheets and equity value. They are restructuring into parent companies, hiring chief executives, launching products, and, in some cases, courting the same institutional capital that funds traditional media.

In 2026, U.S. brands will spend at least $21 billion on creators, nearly double the 2022 figure, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more telling, the revenue gap between web publishers’ programmatic display businesses and creator earnings, which publishers led by 44% in 2022, has collapsed to roughly 26% today.

“Creators are not becoming the new media companies,” Housenbold told ADWEEK. “They are media companies.”

Becoming a media mogul follows a consistent set of mechanics. A creator builds an audience on a platform they do not own, then starts businesses on top of it that they do.

This model is not new. Hank Green and Mythical Entertainment were among the first YouTube creators to parlay their online followings into broader media companies, noted Andrew Graham, head of business development at CAA Creators.

Still, the space needed time to mature. Audience attention had begun to shift toward creators, but the commercial infrastructure, personnel, and advertising budgets still lagged years behind.

In recent months, however, a series of events has pushed the market past an inflection point.

The transformation of podcasting into a visual medium collapsed two distinct ecosystems into one, enabling top creators in both spaces to dramatically expand their influence. In December, Netflix penned a deal that brought a wave of podcast creator content to its platform, spurring a flurry of similar efforts by Disney-owned Hulu and Fox’s Tubi.

This spring, a batch of breakout theatrical hits from a cadre of YouTube directors—Iron Lung from Mark Fischbach, Backrooms from Kane Parsons, and Obsession from Curry Barker—grossed hundreds of millions of dollars on shoestring budgets, attracting the attention of Hollywood.

And in June, CAA and Integrated Media Company, which is funded by the private equity firm TPG, announced a $250 million investment fund intended solely to bring institutional capital into the creator economy.

As is so often the case, a transformation more than a decade in the making appeared to materialize nearly overnight. And now, everyone wants in.

“Basically every major media company has a foot in this,” Graham said.

The shoulder business boom

The businesses creators are building on top of their original foundations cluster into a few categories, starting with consumer goods and services.

Beast Industries sells chocolate through Feastables, toys through MrBeast Labs, and snacks through Lunchly. It has moved into services by acquiring the financial platform Step and the planned launch of a mobile carrier later this year.

A cookware collaboration with culinary creator Andrew Rea, who operates under the moniker Binging with Babish, does roughly $7 million a year through Walmart and Amazon, according to Babish Media CEO Sawyer Jacobs. In July, Rea also unveiled a partnership with CookUnity, enabling him to sell premade versions of his recipes directly to consumers.

Even a Bluetooth landline phone can become a business. Cat Goetze, an Instagram and TikTok creator famous for her approachable explanations of the artificial intelligence industry, posted about a prototype on a whim and made $118,000 in sales within 72 hours on organic traffic alone. Goetze, who operates under the handle CatGPT, is now bringing in more than $1 million in annual revenue from that single product.

Other times, as they expand, creators prefer to do more of what they know: launch media offerings.

Beast Industries’ Watch Time Studios, which Housenbold announced at Cannes Lions in June, is building out new channels across genres like gaming, finance, and fitness that intentionally do not feature Donaldson. Rea launched a podcast with Vox Media in May, and Goetze is building Cat Labs, a 2,200-square-foot studio where she plans to film founders building businesses in real time. The concept is part hacker house, part reality show, part incubator.

Likewise, creators have increasingly parlayed their knack for creating compelling narratives into lucrative branded content businesses. Dhar Mann Studios created a brand campaign for Microsoft Surface, called The Digital Scrapbook, that delivered a two-week goal of 16 million impressions in a single day, while Donaldson directed a Super Bowl commercial for Salesforce with less than six weeks’ notice.

With lower overheads and larger built-in audiences, creators can make for an attractive partner in brands’ marketing efforts.

While a number of forces are pushing creators toward this holding conglomerate structure, the most apparent motivation is the strategic logic of diversification. Launching multiple businesses mitigates the downside of any one of them failing, while simultaneously giving the company more opportunities to produce a hit.

No single business line at Dhar Mann Studios, the production house started by the inspirational YouTuber, accounts for more than 40% of revenue, according to CEO Sean Atkins. The Beast Industries portfolio works the same way, according to Housenbold, who describes it as a hedge modeled on the vertical integration of old Hollywood studios.

This tactic also reduces the key-man risk of these ventures, a notable concern given how integral individual creators are to the success of their brands. These vulnerabilities fall along a spectrum, of course: Mann, who is often behind the camera nowadays, has less to worry about on this front than Rea, whose face is synonymous with the Binging with Babish empire. The Babish brand would likely not survive if Rea stepped away tomorrow, according to Jacobs.

Eliminating these single points of failure is also vital for securing investment or attracting a buyout, according to Tyler Chou, a longtime entertainment attorney who now works with creators.

Unlike Silicon Valley startups, creator businesses often arrive with existing revenue and customers already attached, making them appealing targets for private equity firms—at least in theory. But in nearly every instance, a functioning team is the single biggest factor in whether a creator business can be sold.

“A buyer will not buy you if you don’t have a team that can run without you,” Chou said.

Challenges at scale

Despite the flurry of activity, the professionalization of the creator space has not come easily.

Beast Industries is fighting a federal lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, and wrongful termination. The company has denied the claims and called the suit an attempt to “manufacture a payday.”

Unwell, the podcast network built by Call Her Daddy creator Alex Cooper and her husband and co-CEO, Matt Kaplan, saw more than 30 current and former employees tell Vanity Fair this year that the company fostered a hostile workplace, allegations Cooper has disputed.

And Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat, once valued near $650 million, has cut roughly a quarter of its staff, churned through two CEOs in about a year, and is fighting lawsuits from former podcast executives.

This turbulence is a direct illustration of what Chou coaches her creator clients to guard against: building a business quickly, with a lack of structural governance, around the judgement of a newly famous person. Creators, after all, rarely bring a wealth of commercial acumen to their enterprise, at least not at the outset.

As a result, the most difficult part of scaling a creator business is often not the strategy, according to Josh Kaplan, co-founder of the creator collective Smooth Media.

Instead, it is the unglamorous work of operationalizing a business that often began as a hobby: formalizing employment agreements, establishing clean chains of title, cleaning up their books.

This professionalization shows up most concretely in who creators are hiring. Housenbold came from Shutterfly, Dhar Mann Studios’ Atkins from broadcast television, Babish Media’s Jacobs from trademark law, and former NBCUniversal executive Zach Miller stepped into the role of president at Jesse “Jesser” Riedel’s sports media empire JesserCo in April.

In fact, the influx of executive talent is perhaps the clearest indication that the space is poised for growth.

“We have built infrastructure, and we have hired people with different kinds of expertise,” said Miller, who’s been working within Jesser’s brand empire since 2023 and plans to launch branded outdoor goods and consumables companies within the next year. “We are not slowing down, but we now have people in place who have seen a lot more than young people who are figuring it out as they go.”

The next phase of maturation, though, will be when the creator economy no longer needs to import such outside leadership, according to Kaplan.

As creators have grown their followings over the years, a service economy of editors, thumbnail strategists, and IP lawyers has similarly scaled to support them.

The early career media buyers who years ago advocated for increasing creator budgets have now aged into decision-making roles at agencies and brands. And businesses like Beast Industries, which employs around 750 staff, have served as a kind of coaching tree for the creator space, turning out the next generation of operators who will go on to build ventures of their own.

What comes next

Most of the people building these businesses expect the structure to formalize further from here.

An unusual wave of M&A is coming, according to Graham, which could see creators acquiring pieces of IP outright rather than being acquired by a studio, and creator-to-creator deals as portfolios consolidate. The growth of podcast networks built around a flagship creator, similar to what Cooper is doing with Unwell, previews a version of this trend, but the concept could extend naturally to YouTube creators, where they could expand their empire by acquiring other channels.

Chou is already brokering some creator deals—she is currently orchestrating a sale in the $30 million range—and expects additional activity in the related agency space, citing Accenture Song’s acquisition of Whalar in June, a deal reportedly worth more than $500 million.

Creators looking to finance their professionalization efforts have, until recently, had limited access to institutional capital. Traditional funds have been reluctant to wade into the creator economy, wary of its fragmentation and complexity, according to Chou.

That changed in June, when CAA and IMC launched their $250 million fund, called Compound. The venture will favor creator businesses, specifically those built on YouTube, that have already amassed a sizable audience. The approach aims to differentiate it from other early investments in the space, including a series of deals from Fox Creator Studios, which has invested in individual pieces of creator IP throughout the year.

“You don’t need as much money to be successful as in traditional forms of entertainment,” Miller said. “If something didn’t work, you can change it the next day and keep going.”

Still, despite the institutional enthusiasm, even the people writing checks are wary of overselling the moment. Compound is not underwriting billion-dollar outcomes, according to Miller. Its working assumption is that a nine-figure business is the realistic ceiling, at least for now.

But the investment of money and media expertise alone are proof that the calculus has changed in a meaningful way. This financial and executive scaffolding going up around creators shows faith in their relevance beyond third-party platforms—and their ability to build something new.

This story appeared in the Aug. 4, 2026, issue of ADWEEK magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Mark Stenberg

Mark Stenberg is ADWEEK's senior media reporter.