Every top creator seems to think they can be the next Disney.
Big names from MrBeast to Steven Bartlett and Dude Perfect have cited the media and entertainment empire as their north star.
In a Wall Street Journal profile last week, top creator talent agent Ali Berman described creator businesses like this: “Think of it as Disney, but Mickey Mouse is the director, producer and distributor, in addition to being the star.”
Name-dropping Disney makes for a good headline. It’s also an easy, familiar way for creators to describe their ambitions to investors and reporters.
But creator businesses are inherently different from Disney’s and the comparison could have consequences when their efforts fall short.
Many top creators have already adopted a Disney-like flywheel, building out experiences and infrastructure on top of their content. For context, Disney now makes most of its money from its “Experiences” division, which includes theme parks, cruise ships and products, rather than its movies or TV shows. In the first quarter this year, “Experiences” accounted for a whopping 71% of the company’s operating income.
Case in point: MrBeast has opened a theme park, Dude Perfect is in the process of building one and Bartlett has expanded his business to investments, podcast hosting services and more.
One key difference is that creator businesses generally center around a real person in the real world, while Disney’s business is built on original characters and universes from Star Wars to Frozen. There’s only so far you can scale an individual.
Creator content is also less Magic Kingdom and more reality TV or talk show, making it less suited for immersive experiences. There’s a reason why there’s no Martha Stewart or Kardashian-themed theme park—and why MrBeast’s was only temporary.
But the real reason why the comparison is flawed: the media landscape has radically transformed. On the one hand, creators are commanding more of our attention and redirecting ad dollars that were once reserved for TV. In 2026, creator ad spending is expected to rise by 26% to roughly $37 billion in the US, per the IAB. The traditional TV ad market, will continue to decline.
But our media behaviors are splintered across platforms, devices and brands. There is no dominant medium like TV once was anymore.
Plus, as the industry has become more crowded and our feeds have become more algorithmically-driven, it’s harder for creators to break through to the mainstream. That means there likely won't be another dominant media brand, but rather many creator-led media businesses with smaller, but still sizable, audiences.
And as creators are trying to force a traditional business structure onto a new industry, the incumbents are getting smarter and ultimately stronger. We’ve seen this before: Outdated frameworks for influencer marketing measurement, for example, are pumping more money to social platforms, sometimes at the expense of creators.
Similar dynamics are already playing out in the media world. Even Disney is starting to adapt, entering a landmark deal with OpenAI to license its characters and launching a short-form video feed on its streaming platform Disney+ later this year. It also published an entire movie “High School Musical” on TikTok in 52 videos.
Creators who win will be the ones who position their companies for this new reality. That’s what Disney’s now doing, too.
We go deeper on this in our latest podcast, embedded below. You can also watch or listen on Spotify—or wherever else you get your podcasts.
👀 A New Type of Creator Exec Emerges
Dude Perfect announced that it hired its first-ever chief content officer last week. In this new role, Kevin Sabbe is responsible for developing new shows, formats and talent as the YouTube channel seeks to expand beyond trick shots and stunt videos.
As you can see from the timeline below, there was a flurry of executive hires by creator companies in 2023 and 2024. Most of these were for primarily business-facing roles like CEO, COO and president. With these positions now filled, the number of new executive hires has since slowed.
But Sabbe’s hiring signals that a new wave of executive hires at creator companies could be coming. These executives are likely to be more focused on content, including franchise or brand development. It may not be too long until we see a creator company hire a CMO.
It’s important to note that chief content officers sit at the intersection of content and business. Their focus is on ensuring that content strategy aligns with broader business objectives, rather than creative output. That’s generally reserved for chief creative officers, who are sometimes the creators themselves: Ashley Flowers is chief creative officer of her podcast company Audiochuck.
For these executives, many of whom come from traditional media, marketing and finance backgrounds, joining a creator company offers a new challenge.
“I’m either going to go work at a really big company and figure out how to make the distribution work really well, or I'm going to go work at a creator company and figure out how to scale into a big media company,” Matt Starker, told us recently about his decision to join Audiochuck as CEO in April 2025.
But these moves don’t always work out. Gustav Langberg Hossy, for example, took over as CEO of Chamberlain Coffee after Chris Gallant left the company. His exit came ahead of reports of challenges at the Emma Chamberlain-founded business.
The Round Up
Oracle’s stake in TikTok’s US business is worth about $2 billion, according to a regulatory filing.
Spotify announced more than 13,800 artists generated at least $100,000 from Spotify royalties in 2025, while more than 1,500 earned over $1 million. The company has been trying to counter criticism about low payouts to artists by releasing more data on royalties.
Substack announced a new desktop feature called the Substack Recording Studio where users can record a video of themselves or a conversation with up to two guests. The tool will also auto-generate clips and thumbnails. Users cannot edit the video before they publish, but they can add a free preview to nonsubscribers. The feature builds on Substack’s recent video push, which includes launching a TV app.
Yamaha announced a “Creator Pass,” a subscription that bundles tools for podcasters and musicians from different companies, including podcasting software Riverside and music promotion tool Groover. Yamaha Music Innovations is also sponsoring the creator economy track of SXSW this week. (Read more about what to expect from SXSW here.)
Billion Dollar Boy and its creator community FiveTwoNine are partnering with Patreon for a second creator fund, which offers tickets for creators to attend Cannes Lions in the South of France in June. This year’s fund is affiliated with the major advertising festival, which has revamped its creator track and programming. Creators can apply for the creator fund here.
Deals, Deals, Deals
Meta Platforms acquired Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, which launched less than two months ago. The founder Matt Schlicht and chief operating officer Ben Parr will join Meta’s AI division, dubbed Superintelligence Labs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Apple is partnering with TikTok on a new “Play Full Song” feature, so that Apple Music subscribers can listen to full tracks they find on TikTok without leaving the short-form video app. Artists will also be paid for those streams. Ole Obermann, who is co-head of Apple Music, used to be the global head of music business development at TikTok parent company ByteDance.
Animaj, an AI content studio producing kids content for YouTube, raised $1 million from Google’s AI Futures Fund.
Soundbite
What’s the most important thing you need to start a successful creator business? A good idea. That’s according to Max Maddox, head of creative at Donut Media, the car-focused channel and media company with more than 9 million subscribers on YouTube.
Everything comes down to the concept. Like you can have a great thumbnail. You can be the best presenter in the world. You can have great edits. But if you don’t have a good idea, then nobody's going to pay attention to you.
Unlike most YouTube channels, which start with a creator and then turn into a business, Donut Media was a business first. We spoke with Maddox and Donut’s editor-in-chief Nolan Sykes about Donut’s origins as an ad house, where most of its watch time is coming from now and where things are headed next (hint: video premieres in theaters).
Watch our full conversation with Max and Nolan below, or on YouTube.
🎤YouTube’s Podcasting Ad Play
YouTube on Thursday announced a new “top podcast lineup” for advertisers, which allows them to buy video podcast ads across topics including sports, news, true crime and comedy. It reminds us of YouTube Select, which bundles top performing channels into a premium package for advertisers.
It’s also similar to how YouTube’s ad sales team positions sports packages to advertisers. “Selling podcast content like the rest of YouTube in some ways doesn’t make as much sense,” Steve McLendon, product lead of podcasting at YouTube, told us. That’s because podcasting “doesn’t necessarily look like the rest of YouTube.”
A dedicated podcast ad product also puts YouTube more in line with how podcast ad buyers already purchase ads on other platforms, McLendon said. That could help direct more podcast ad spending to YouTube, as advertisers often bucket YouTube and podcasts separately.
Creator Moves
🛟”Baywatch” is getting a reboot on Fox and it’s tapping social media stars including Noah Beck, model Brooks Nader and actress Shay Mitchell. Their casting is helping generate buzz online and media coverage.
Jake Paul interviewed President Trump. He teased the interview in a short-form video of the two of them dancing.
Whalar Group announced the launch of Lighthouse Studios, a new creator-led entertainment studio. The company sits within The Lighthouse, Whalar’s physical campus for creators in Los Angeles and New York. Akshay Mehta, formerly of Bron Ventures and CAA Media Finance, will be CEO of Lighthouse Studios. (Scalable is a joint venture with The Lighthouse.)
First up for Lighthouse Studios: a new joint venture with Cole Bennett’s media company Lyrical Lemonade. Bennett, a music video director and record executive who has worked with Eminem and Justin Bieber, will build out a video network as part of the deal. Mehta told Variety it plans to do similar deals with other big creators.
