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In early June, I pulled up to a giant lot in Burbank, Calif. about four miles down the road from Warner Brothers Studios, where “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory” were filmed. I was there to tour the set and offices where YouTuber Dhar Mann runs a growing entertainment empire.
Mann, who leases the 125,000 square foot production studio, part of which was once the site of a gym, is suddenly everywhere. Over the past six months or so, I’ve seen him speak at industry conferences, receive awards, get a spotlight on YouTube’s blog, and claim a spot on Forbes’ top creator list due to his estimated $56 million in annual earnings. Mann’s public relations blitz coincides with an aggressive expansion of his business.
The production studio, which Mann started to lease in 2021, is a physical reminder of how YouTubers and other online entertainers are encroaching on movie and streaming studios’ turf. Mann’s highly-produced, motivational videos compete on living room screens for the family viewers that have been the bastion of prime-time TV. Whereas once kids and parents gathered to watch “Dawson’s Creek” or “Seinfeld,” they are flocking to his 20-minute scripted YouTube shows on school crushes or thwarting an evil babysitter, say Mann’s staff.
His channels have garnered 25.8 million subscribers on YouTube and 37 million followers on Facebook. And Mann is expanding his business into production for streaming television and providing consulting services to other creators, like Jordan Matter and Zach King.
As the creator economy grows, “there are going to be lots of folks who follow our footprint as well,” Mann told me.
A set at Dhar Mann Studios.
Mann, 41, started on YouTube seven years ago posting inspirational videos about believing in himself or how to handle stress. In recent years, Mann has taken a page from the Hollywood playbook and hired other actors, writers and producers to make videos that tend to drive home a moral lesson (i.e., don’t make fun of kids with autism, which garnered 68 million views) that are the equivalent of linear TV’s after-school specials.
Mann’s operations now produces five hours of scripted videos per week, which some of his 200-person staff shoots and edits in Burbank.
The studio lot gives him a lot of backdrops to work with, ranging from a mock legal court room to a shoe store. Mann-branded golf carts whiz visitors between the three buildings. Mann’s teams are also able to transform spaces within the studio often overnight into something else, like turning a post office into a doctor’s office.
His staff say they can produce high-end videos within days, a contrast with Hollywood productions that take months or years. That speed, they say, keeps the videos relevant with viewers raised on a diet of quickly changing internet memes and trends.
Hollywood “executives greenlight content based on internal instincts or dated testing mechanisms, with little opportunity to iterate based on real-time audience feedback,” said Sean Atkins, the CEO of Dhar Mann Studios.
“Dhar’s approach flips that. He can move from idea to execution in days, and immediately put content in front of his audience.”
The tour was impressive—both the elaborate sets and the sheer size—and drove home just how professional the operations of creators have become. But it also showed how far they still have to go. The lot’s close proximity to the airport means that the team constantly has to deal with the whizzing noise of planes landing and taking off—which means the need for occasionally stopping filming or throwing out some footage. (Other studios, which are farther from the airport, don’t have to deal with this issue.)
And his business still largely relies on revenue directly from YouTube and Facebook. In fact, that accounted for 95% of revenue, Mann told me in June. Such a concentration makes Mann’s business vulnerable to changes the apps make to showing types of content or sharing revenue with creators.
That reliance is starting to change. Mann and his team went to the major advertising festival Cannes Lions this summer to get face time with chief marketing officers as he hopes to strike more deals with advertisers. For example, he’s keen to figure out opportunities to place products in the background of videos, tapping into lucrative revenue source for movie producers. You could see the coffee shop set for example turning into a Dunkin’ or Starbucks, or the mock convenience store stocking products from Procter & Gamble.
He’s also started a new division of his company called 5th Quarter Agency, which helps other top YouTubers earn more revenue from their existing videos.
These days, Mann spends more time providing creative direction than in front of the camera. He’s hired executives and content makers, including Atkins, who is the former president of MTV, and Toni Gray, a production executive on MrBeast’s Amazon reality competition show, who joined in March as head of production. Last week, Mann announced he’s hiring for more than two dozen new roles, ranging from a podcast producer to a senior design associate and short-form video producer.
Dhar Mann Studios is also growing its reach beyond social media. Last month, Mann announced a deal with Samsung TV Plus to produce 13 original episodes that will premiere on his free-ad supported channel on the service.
As for why Mann is suddenly everywhere, he said he’d been so focused on writing scripts for his videos for the past seven years. “I’ve not had much time to do much else,” he said. But now that he’s hired an executive team, “I have some breathing room and can focus on other opportunities.”
Here’s what else is going on…
Deals & Debuts
See The Information’s Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.
Instagram introduced a new feature for college students on the app to connect with other people on their campuses. TikTok rolled out a similar feature last week.
YouTube expanded its “hype” feature, which helps smaller creators get noticed, to 39 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Japan and India. How it works: Viewers have the opportunity to “hype” up to three videos per week for a creator with under 500,000 subscribers. When a video is hyped, it receives points that offer it a chance to end up on a new leaderboard on the Explore page.
Nascar on Thursday launched its first Substack newsletter, becoming the first major sports league to partner with the newsletter publishing startup, as it tries to reach new and younger audiences.
Guild, a new blockchain startup helping musicians and creators “own” their work, launched on Wednesday and announced $2 million in funding. Its features include smart contracts to help creators split royalties and protect their intellectual property, as well as AI agents that help them distribute and post their work across platforms.
Big Number: $330 Billion
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is launching a new employee share buyback that will value the company at more than $330 billion, Reuters reported.
The company plans to offer current employees $200.41 per share in the buyback program, up 5.5% from the $189.90 each it offered them about six months ago which valued ByteDance at roughly $315 billion.
Policy Notes
Meta Platforms will spend tens of millions of dollars on a new Super PAC, which will oppose AI regulation, Politico reported.
People on the Move
Jeremi Gorman is now chief revenue officer at Fanatics, the sports merchandising company. Gorman was previously president of global advertising at Netflix and chief business officer at Snap. Read my 2022 profile of Gorman here.
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