MrBeast built a media empire in order to sell chocolate bars.

Dave Portnoy built a platform to launch Alex Cooper, just to watch her leave and build her own platform to launch Alix Earle, just to watch her leave to . . . 

Travis and Jason Kelce get the inside scoop on Taylor's The Life of a Showgirl, and Theo Von throws up the peace sign as This Past Weekend climbs to Top 3 on Spotify's podcast charts.

Jordi Hays and John Coogan just interviewed another AI founder and wrote an angel check into their company, and Joe Rogan is pounding the table, reminding everyone that he was doing this long before it was cool.

"It" is the Creator Economy, and "it" is booming.

The cost of production and distribution has fallen to near zero.

All you need is an iPhone (which you already have) and YouTube (literally just download it), and you too can be a ✨content creator✨.

I myself am a specific type of one of said ✨content creators✨, and Skybox is a media platform for the decision makers in sports and entertainment.

But content creation is not my full-time job. 

Every week at CNC Partners, I sit across the table from founders and CEOs of companies building in the creator economy, as well as the bankers, lenders and PE funds infusing it with capital, all of whom are trying to solve the same puzzle from a different seat.

And it has become abundantly clear to me that the creator economy is turning into an institutional asset class in real time.

The audiences and the ad dollars are growing at a pace most industries would kill for, but like any maturing asset class, there are still some dislocations.

The banks, funds, data and deal structures that support a mature market are still catching up.

That is why we are confused when we read a headline like Live Nation Backs Creator Nation To Build The Next Generation of Creator-Led Business.

An IRL company backing “a new company designed to help digitally-native creators turn audience attention into lasting fan relationships and enduring businesses.”

How did we get here? 

To answer that question, I started drawing a map.

And as I mapped the landscape of the creator economy, I began to realize how big it truly was, and I simply could not stop at what I had planned.

So this is a three-parter:

By the end of these three Fridays, you should be able to read any creator-economy headline and understand its significance in real time.

Class is in session, let's begin. 📝📝📝

🎙️ Each week, Brent Peus Jr., Dominyck Bullard, and I connect the dots across the deals, trends, and players shaping sports, media & entertainment.

Let’s start with what it costs to get in front of an audience today: nothing.

An iPhone and a YouTube channel will put anyone in front of the whole world for less than an LA utility bill, and you were going to own that phone anyway.

And yes, YouTube is winning the streaming wars.

YouTube is now taking about 14% of all U.S. TV viewing, more than any other media company, including the new Skydance behemoth (Paramount and WBD).

Worldwide, it surpassed Netflix in 2025: 99 minutes of daily watch time vs. 93.

Do you see how I said “TV viewing” there?

A platform built for amateur UGC is now taking the largest share of time on our phones AND on the biggest screen in our house.

When distribution is that cheap and that accessible, it is talent that becomes the scarce input.

But talent follows a power law, and the top 3% of creator channels capture roughly 90% of all viewership. MrBeast alone pulled 26.6B YouTube views in the first half of this year.

And “Success isn’t owned. It’s leased, and rent is due every day.” - JJ Watt

So even MrBeast is renting your attention, one upload at a time. He, and everyone else, is on the content creation hamster wheel with no exit in sight.

The horizon is ever-receding, and from now until retirement, creators have to get you to watch, and then they have to get you to trust them with your time on a go-forward basis.

So why do creators grind day and night to earn it? Because the money chasing this market is not small:

And these podcasts, by the way, have quietly become the new talk show.

Hollywood has certainly noticed (see: Disney x Dude Perfect, Beast Games x Amazon Prime), and the industry deal flow is following.

There were 70 creator economy acquisitions in the first half of 2026 (a record), and for the first time media overtook software as the top target.

Before I go any further here, let me put you on game.

Chris Erwin and the team at RockWater.

A boutique investment bank focused on the creator economy, they publish the best dataset in the market: a quarterly transaction comparables report covering every notable deal and public comp.

They also built the cleanest categorization of the creator economy I have seen. 

A helpful framework as we begin to construct our map of the industry.

Now I want to strip a few things out.

Put the talent managers and agencies to the side. Do the same with the platforms themselves (YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, IG), the commerce businesses, and the ad tech too.

All of that matters, and we’ll come back to it in Part II.

But for Part I we focus on the creator economy at its very core, and I mean at its very core, because everything in this market sits downstream of one thing: somebody making a digital asset. 

Today I want to show you how the sausage gets made, and then what the deals behind that sausage look like.

So, let's get practical. Pretend you are about to launch a show on YouTube. How do you do it?

You have to actually make the thing.

Lights, camera, action. That can mean a phone in your hand, or it can mean millions of dollars of production equipment and a full Ultradome like the one TBPN built.

You have to make sure the thing is good and that it makes money.

Titles, thumbnails, SEO, chapters, and the rest of the "algorithmic stuff" turn a video into a channel that grows, instead of a creator that shouts into the abyss.

Then you need to be able to sell brands on your thing, which means a media sales team so that the good channel is not gated at monetization.

You have to get the good thing that makes money in front of as many people as possible.

That means putting a megaphone to your good thing that makes money across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, every social platform, plus FAST, AVOD and SVOD, and the redistribution rights that let one episode live in five places.

And of course, someone has to pay for the good thing that makes money and is in front of as many people as possible.

That is Part III.

So here is the first thing I’ll note: should we outsource this stack or should it live in-house?

Well, that depends on who you are and how big you are. Dude Perfect and MrBeast have teams of 100+ supporting their operations, including full commercial partnership teams.

But if you are on a smaller scale, or if you’re launching your channel, getting scrappy and partnering with the right groups are key to jumpstarting your growth.

Step 1 in this looks like getting repped by an agent or manager from the likes of CAA, WME, UTA, or other

But the models at those companies are evolving themselves.

For years, these agencies and management companies stuck to just representing talent and decided to outsource everything else. They repped a creator and found that creator a brand deal (taking their commission) while letting the show be produced by someone else.

That “someone else” was a digital production company, and there are hundreds of them.

But that dynamic is pivoting hard and fast because the agencies want to own IP alongside their talent.

Quick history lesson:

Agents are licensed and regulated, with capped commissions and union/guild laws that limit what they can own alongside their talent.

An agent negotiates an NFL player’s on-field contract and is capped by the NFLPA at 3% of it.

But a manager can help that same athlete land off-field endorsements (taking 10-20%) or launch a business on the side and own a piece of it.

The creator economy doesn’t have an NFLPA or Writers Guild of America, so the management model prevails.

And now that talent wants their business to be predicated on digital media, that looks like helping talent launch a show.

This translates to management companies now wanting their own production, optimization, and distribution capabilities all in-house so that they can do this themselves rather than watching another firm do it for them.

But even then, the bottleneck every one of them is experiencing is the same:

Media sales.

You can produce a great show and grow the channel and still get choked at monetization, because nobody on your team is in the flow of how brands buy digital right now. 

A property sales division might know how to sell naming rights, but you need to be in the digital cultural zeitgeist in order to best sell a YouTube slate to brands for integrations.

Which brings me to production, which is not one singular thing, because there are many different types of shows.

Every creator business sits somewhere along this production ladder. Each rung up costs more money, and each one opens up a different kind of deal.

A single creator, or a group of creators, posting from a phone. This is where almost everyone starts.

Remember the Hype House? The TikTok collective moved into an LA mansion in late 2019 and was signed by WME within weeks.

A podcast, often paired with a newsletter run through Beehiiv or Substack.

This is more sophisticated than it looks. The newsletter owns the coveted email list, and the podcast owns an hour of attention each week. Both mediums are playing different long-term monetization games simultaneously.

As these tools have scaled, they have enabled solopreneurs to run real, cash-flowing digital media businesses with a fraction of the effort. This is why so many writers are leaving their newsrooms to go solo and why 9-to-5ers are launching this as a side hustle.

A set, a crew, a guest list, and a format people come back to every week.

Joe Rogan. Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO. Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom. Matt Fradd’s Pints with Aquinas.

TBPN is the purest example of what money does at this rung. It runs a live daily show out of a dedicated studio. Molly O’Shea’s Sourcery covers similar ground at a very high level, built largely on remote interviews and HQ tours.

The difference between them and the solo show is mostly the production budget and popularity.

Long-form storytelling, where the channel is built around series and seasons instead of a host behind a microphone.

Viewers come back for the next chapter as much as for the personality. This is the rung where YouTube starts to look like TV, and where most premium creator production money gets spent.

This is the Sidemen’s Inside and Bryson DeChambeau’s Breaking 50.

Multiple shows, a roster of talent, a sales team, and a brand bigger than any one personality.

Barstool Sports, Unwell, The Daily Wire, MeatEater, Almost Friday, Dude Perfect and Good Good Golf live here, and nearly all of them are pushing hard into the next rung above.

The media company that sells something else.

Beast Industries is the case study everyone is chasing. The content builds the audience, and Feastables monetizes it. The media becomes the marketing budget for a consumer products company.

But the ladder runs both ways.

Some of the best content-to-commerce businesses started with the product and then built the media after.

Gymshark was pioneering “influencer marketing” years before anyone else was on game. Then, Nick Bare at Bare Performance Nutrition ran the same playbook: find a stable of athlete creators to incubate and put in front of your customers. 

Here is why this ladder matters in the first place: the deal structure changes on every rung.

A creator on Rung 1 can sign a brand deal, but a show on Rung 3 can sign a platform deal. A show on Rung 4 can license its series, but a company on Rung 5 can raise institutional capital.

And a company on Rung 6 . . . well, they can IPO.

So when you read a headline, the first question is simple: what rung are we on?

Now for the deals.

Before a creator signs anything with anyone, they already have a deal with YouTube.

It is called the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), and a channel qualifies for it once it has 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 watch hours over the last 12 months or 10 million Shorts views over the last 90 days. 

From there, creators and YouTube split ad revenue 55/45 on long-form videos and 45/55 on Shorts. YouTube has paid out more than $100B from 2021 to 2025.

Every other deal in this section is layered on top of that split.

In the early 2010s, a new kind of company stepped in between the creator and YouTube: the multi-channel network, or MCN.

An MCN signs dozens, then thousands, of channels and takes a cut of their YouTube revenue. In exchange, it provides what a solo creator cannot: rights management, channel optimization, brand deals, and a sales team that can sell many channels at once.

I will tell the MCN story in Part II, because the market is rerunning that playbook right now. For today, what matters is the structure:

The MCN collected a commission on channels it did not own.

So for every deal beyond the YPP, ask two questions:

The talent owns the show, and a network (MCN) sells ads against it under license.

Splits typically run 70/30 – 80/20 in the talent’s favor. The network earns a commission but owns nothing, and when the talent leaves, the show leaves with them.

A digital production company fronts the cost to launch a talent’s show. Once it recoups that cost, the producer and the talent split the profits 50/50.

Producers protect themselves with a long-tail agreement: typically 5% to 10% of the talent’s receipts for a period of time should the talent depart.

The talent and the financier launch the show together and own the IP together.

The same mechanics apply, but now both sides hold equity. The financier often gets paid separately for each risk it takes along the way: a sales commission, a financing premium, a producing fee and a backend share.

If the show is ever sold, both parties get paid out on their equity. Big payday.

A platform pays for the right to distribute a show.

At the small end, picture a legacy publisher like the WSJ or Yahoo that wants digital-native shows on its site. The offer to the creator is distribution, with a revenue share on the back end. No IP changes hands, just a simple quid pro quo.

At the big end, the platform writes a real check. In 2024, Amazon’s Wondery signed New Heights to a three-year deal of $100M for the rights to distribute it. 

Wave, the production company behind the show, kept producing it for a fee, and the nine figures went to the rights holders.

A brand covers production in exchange for being the presenting partner, plus integrations throughout the show.

This is [your favorite show], presented by [the brand that fits it].

Landing brand financing is incredibly difficult. But brands have recently started pushing to launch and co-own new shows alongside creators who need a partner to get started.

The brand is putting up the money anyway, right? So why not act like a proper financier and own a piece of the IP?

If a channel already earns (AdSense, brand integrations), a lender can advance cash against that future revenue, and the creator can use it to launch a new show.

More on this, and its nuances, in Part III.

While we common folk have to scrap, athletes and celebrities usually get a different menu.

Cost-plus. A studio or streamer pays the production budget plus a fee, typically to a production company the athlete owns, and the buyer owns the show. Most premium sports documentaries and unscripted series are made this way.

First-look. A studio pays for the first right to pick up whatever the talent’s company develops. Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media signed one with NBCUniversal in 2021. The studio gets first dibs, and if they pay for a project they own it.

Overall deal. The richer cousin of the first look. The studio pays an annual fee for exclusivity on everything the talent’s company makes.

The talent fee. A platform or producer guarantees the talent a fee to make a show, and after it recoups production, it splits the profit with the talent 50/50.

The agency that put the deal together earns its 10% on the talent’s side, and it is happy to, because it put up zero risk.

It is not until you own a piece of the underlying IP that the market pays double-digit EBITDA multiples, and high ones (15-20x) at that.

One last thing, because it explains where all of this is headed: media is fracturing into ever-nichier niches, and those niches are where the value is.

The algorithms are getting hyper-specific.

TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn no longer show you what is popular. They serve you exactly what you like, on a silver platter, down to the subculture.

Hyrox vs. CrossFit beef. Endurance racing. Catholic vs. Protestant theology. Acquired Style’s wedding dress drama and phe phe’s NYC pop-up event (I know that one from my wife).

And trust has moved with it.

Twenty years ago, you trusted the institution: the network or the newspaper. Today, trust sits with the individual.

In Enduring Assets, I split new media into two models.

Content-to-audience builds the largest following possible and sells directly into it through apparel, CPG, live events and more.

Content-to-access is a different kind of commerce:

Both can run a sponsorship playbook, but the CPM logic is not the same.

Dude Perfect sells reach and gets priced accordingly. TBPN sells access to the people who run the technology industry and gets priced by the buyer who most wants a seat inside that room.

AKA, sports business is becoming its own highly valuable new media niche.

Enter Skybox: on Rung 2, and climbing.

Next Friday, Part II: the players.

Stay tuned and share this with someone who should be paying attention to where the Sports Economy is headed.

See you next Friday!

Email: [email protected]

– Matthew