“Which session are you attending?” I asked as I scanned the millionaires’ badges. Some talks were about restructuring or interior design or community events. But now, a few attendees said:

“This session is about the business of YouTube, Dude Perfect, and sports media.” I instantly got jealous.

For 18 months, I had been fascinated by Highmount Capital’s $100,000,000 investment into Dude Perfect. I wrote a research project in my college’s private equity (PE) class questioning how investors model the value of YouTube channels in the same way they model “traditional” businesses, like restaurants, SaaS, trades, or real estate. Media has so many moving parts. Is the value in viewers, advertisers, products, or more?

Now, that investor Jason was in the next room! I left my volunteer shift early and grabbed the last seat.

Amid my excitement, I had actually been worried about Dude Perfect’s future for the past three years. I doubted I would invest $100,000,000 into a YouTube channel. I had seen a flaw that I thought threatened where the industry was headed for large creators.

In the session, I raised my hand to share with Jason this existential threat.

His answer changed my view on what matters in the creator economy.

My Previous View

Three years ago, I predicted that the creator economy was spreading out1. Since barriers to produce and distribute content are decreasing, my thesis was:

1. More creators.

2. Wider selection of content.

3. Viewers gather in niche communities around creators who suit their preferences/interests.

4. Future — AI infinitely tailors content to viewer preferences/interests.

5. Mass-entertainment creators (MrBeast, Ryan Trahan, Dude Perfect) lose popularity because by appealing to everyone, they appeal to no one.

“Mega-creators” monetize with in-person retail or experiences. MrBeast’s Feastables hit $250M revenue in 2024. Ryan Trahan’s Joyride is the #1 candy sold in Target. Dude Perfect is opening a $100M theme park in Texas. If creators stop appealing to the masses, they won’t gather viewers in-person, like at Target or a theme park.

Q&A

Back at the conference, I raised my hand to warn Jason:

Jason replied:2

My Hypocritical Buying Behavior

When the conference ended, I drove home from Missouri to Chicago. Then, I packed my life into boxes as I moved out of my childhood bedroom and into my first apartment in Chicago to start my first full-time job. I realized:

Into my boxes, I packed:

• $100 magazines from

• $80 merch from Ryan Trahan

• $75 hoodie from Yes Theory

• $60 merch/Feastables from MrBeast

• $60 books from Alex Hormozi

While I drove to Chicago, I listened to:

• Colin & Samir

• David Senra

• Tim Ferriss

• Joe Hudson

When I saw my own buying behavior, I realized that my previous view was hypocritical: The creators I give money to are not the creators I watch the most. The creators I watch the most, I’ve never paid.

I buy from MrBeast, Yes Theory, and Ryan Trahan, but I only watch a few of their videos per year. Their brands take up space in my mind when I don’t watch them. They inspire me. They are cultural.

Advertising isn’t the main product anymore, so watch time isn’t the metric. The value in the creator economy is brand (mind-share).

Case Studies

When I listened to my favorite creator podcasts, I was encouraged when some business leaders backed me up:

“[Followers] is the most important metric … And it is actually because it matters so little for distribution … I follow someone because I like their content so much, I don’t want to risk not being able to find them again.”

> Michael Lim, The 505 Podcast

“As things become more online, we’re going to look for increasingly offline things to do. … Netflix is also throwing in-person experiences. We want things to do in-person, but the things we’re interested in, we heard about online. So the translation of how do you take digital IP and bring it into the physical world, I think is a huge trend.”

> Zack Honarvar, The 505 Podcast

Salish and Jordan Matter, for instance, gathered 80,000 fans for their skincare and merch pop-up in a mall in New Jersey.

I’m still questioning how exactly to capture value in the creator economy. Although niche creators own the majority of views, large creators can still create cultural moments. How can niche creators bring people together in real life, too, when their viewers may not be as geographically concentrated?

2 Strategies for Creator Branding

How can creators build brands? It’s all about intention and quality, rather than views and quantity. There are 2 strategies I’ve found:

1. Ruthless filtering

2. Scarce quality

1. Ruthless Filtering

“If you can’t explain your brand in one word, it’s already over.”

“When somebody says, ‘What type of videos do you make?’ you should say one thing. It shouldn’t be confusing for you to explain your thing.”

> Airrack, Jon Youshaei Podcast

Airrack’s one-word brand: mischief.

Airrack doesn’t just chase views. He’ll turn down videos that could do well, but confuse the brand or leave viewers with a mixed feeling. More than views, he wants distinction in the audience’s minds.

His YouTube revenue is entirely AdSense and brand deals (50/50). He’s a media company, focusing on YouTube and advertising as the product. But when he plans to launch a product, he has faith it will succeed.

2. Scarce Quality

Instead of consistency (like Airrack), creators can also chase rare quality, like anthpo. Quality still creates distinction in the mind of the viewer. Anthpo describes his strategy:

“I live on the side of the internet where people are posting every single day, so I need to take up another side of people’s brains. I’m not gonna post every day, but I’m gonna aura farm on you really hard. One day every three months, you’re gonna be like, ‘Holy shit.’ But I’m fighting the most uphill battle.”

> Anthpo, Powder Blue

Anthpo went viral in October 2024 when he hosted a Timothy Chalamet lookalike contest in NYC. There were 10,000 in-person attendees, four arrests, and multiple $500 fines. It made waves across the internet, even being picked up by mainstream news outlets like ABC, CNN, and Inside Edition — and attended by Chalamet himself.

Although the video on Anthpo’s channel “only” received 1,800,000 views, it lives much larger in internet culture (not to mention millions more views from short-form clips and other outlets).

Conclusion

There’s a small overlap between creators I both watch and buy from ( , David Perell, Paul Millerd, Danny Miranda). But views and money are quite separate spheres in the creator economy. Creators can aim to be media companies (views/advertising), or build larger product businesses (brand/distinction).

Writing this essay opened more questions than answers. I’m excited to continue to exploring the tensions between:

• Large vs. niche creators

• Views vs. brand

• Advertising, products, and in-person experiences

All views are my own, not my employer’s.

I (Legally) Exploited My Employer

Last summer, I landed my dream internship at Capital One. My “dream” meant flexing on LinkedIn. My co-interns were from Columbia, Brown, Vanderbilt, and more. I made money that my freshman self wouldn’t have believed. Yet…

“I don’t understand why this job pays so much. It’s so easy, anyone could do it,” one of the Ivy League interns said as we left the office one evening. We were headed to a $50 all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ dinner. Company-expensed, of course.

At the end of the summer, I had a twenty-slide PowerPoint deck to show for ten weeks of work. To me, it was clear that whatever Capital One paid me $60/hour to do, it was not to produce work.

Back on campus that semester, I learned about Marx in a political theory course. Marx argued that companies exploit laborers by paying them less than the value they produce. At Capital One, I felt like I had reversed Marx’s theory. I was paid more than I was worth.

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Internships Are Labor Futures

If Capital One lost money on interns, why were there 1,200 of us? And why were we paid so much?

Capital One wasn’t paying me to crunch data and format graphs. They were paying me to not work for their competitors in big tech, consulting, or finance. And it worked. The day after I received my Capital One offer, I cancelled my interview with Adobe. The work and pay were that good.

College graduates are the cheapest labor market for companies. Experienced hires are either more expensive (hired away from competitors) or more risky (they’re unemployed).

Capital One starts to profit from me if I work there full-time. And they’ll start to make piles of money if some interns eventually stay on for decades to become executives. By hiring as much college talent as possible, Capital One is trading labor futures.

As I wrote this essay, a more troubling question came up:

Wait... Why Would Young People Choose to Work Corporate?

A mentor Zack taught me to treat jobs as opportunities to build skills, not just earn money. The company is not only choosing to hire me. I am also choosing to work for them.

So if AI can replace 50% of entry-level jobs, why would I spend years of my twenties learning skills that will be automated?

Predicting the Future of Work

I doubt that corporations will entirely go away, at least not during the next few decades of my career. We can still learn to work within the system. How can companies position entry-level jobs to still benefit them and attract young talent?

1. Manager Skillsets

In the article “The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy,” Dan Shipper predicts that managing will be a more valuable skillset than making.

“We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not.” Every

At Capital One, instead of learning how to format graphs or pull data from SQL, I could learn how my manager chose which project for me to work on. What did our department prioritize? How did my project fit into Capital One as a whole? What does bad data analysis look like? What made data analysis great?

Instead of knowing what to work on, I was heads-down in doing the work1.

2. Apprenticeship Model

A pilot quit her job and owed her company $20,000. Corporate jobs might start to look more like this.

Because the pilot quit before working for 18 months, she had to reimburse Ameriflight for training costs. She had spent two months learning how to fly cargo planes. These agreements are literally known as TRAPs (Training Repayment Agreement Provisions).

Given that:

1. Companies lose money on early employees

2. Entry-level labor is getting less and less valuable because of AI automation

3. Valuable employees will learn abstract managerial skillsets

… Companies really have to make sure that entry-level employees stay loyal, especially for longer periods of time as they learn complex skillsets.

3. Talent Density

This is a main reason I chose to work in consulting, not a media startup. Startups have fewer people and limited growth opportunities. In consulting, I work with thousands of some of the smartest business minds. The number of people is certainly an advantage of working for a large company, rather than romanticizing the decentralized internet space.

Just like businesses, creators have market sizes: how many viewers can be interested in their work? New creators have room to grow. Top creators have nearly saturated their YouTube audience.

There are two ways for top creators to continue to grow their audience:

1. Vertical: more views from current audience

2. Horizontal: expand into new audiences

Let’s explore the differences, what kind of creator suits each, and which one truly allows for billion-dollar scale.

Case Study #1: Cody Ko (Vertical)

Cody Ko has three channels:

1. Cody Ko: commentary and reaction videos

2. Cody & Ko: livestream highlights

3. Cody Trains: fitness vlogs

One viewer likely watches all three channels. Since Cody is a personality-based creator, viewers follow him wherever he goes. One viewer = multiple views.

The comments already beg Cody to post more content:

Since Cody is personality-based, his value proposition is taste and entertainment. Cody’s just one person. So when he maxes out people who jive with his personality, he can’t really change his personality to expand to new audiences. To get more views, he needs more loyalty from his existing audience.

Case Study #2: Theorist Media (Horizontal)

Theorist Media has four channels:

1. The Game Theorists: video game conspiracies (est. 2009)

2. The Film Theorists: film secrets (est. 2015)

3. The Food Theorists: fast food myths (est. 2020)

4. The Style Theorists: fashion trends (est. 2023)

It’s hard to imagine one viewer being interested in all four of these channels equally. When The Game Theorists capped out their video game audience, it made sense to spread to other niches.

Viewers are loyal to the topic, not to the creator. The comments are thoughtful:

The Food Theorists found people who are already curious about food. They delivered them the best content to satisfy this curiosity. Theorist Media has perfected this edutainment format from data on 2,000+ videos.

Jubilee follows a similar horizontal strategy. Though Jubilee has one channel, it posts topics ranging from politics, religion, gender, sexuality, race, and more. I don’t watch everything. I choose to view what interests me. I’m loyal to Jubilee’s quality and format, not Jubilee as a brand.

Which Strategy Is “Better”?

It might seem like vertical audiences build a better moat. Viewers are loyal to a creator. But at least for where the creator economy is now, a scaled production system and talent attraction (with horizontal) is a great moat, too.

According to a 2024 interview with Colin & Samir, Theorist Media had 22 full-time employees and another 20 freelancers. Each channel has its own creative director, who spent years with the brand to know Theorist’s style, format, and feel.

Even MrBeast admits that creator talent is hard to find. A-Player employees have a perfect trifecta: technically skilled, algorithm nerds, and fluent in pop culture.

“You’re either an A-Player, B-Player, or C-Player. There is only room in this company for A-Players. A-Players are obsessive, learn from mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in Youtube, see the value of this company, and are the best in the goddamn world at their job.”

> How to Succeed in MrBeast Production (Document)

In the interview, Samir predicted that while labor is scarce currently in the creator economy, it will become more available in a few years. Top talent may stop wanting to become creators themselves and instead work within established brands. Not everyone wants to be a founder/operator.

Theorist Media likely shares a team across all four channels. An editor trained once can repeat high-quality, brand-feel videos. Stephanie Patrick mentioned that employees “have drunk the Kool-Aid” of Theorist’s mission and are motivated to work hard.

Theorist has the expertise. They know what works on YouTube. They can scale their format to any niche. It’ll be difficult for competitors to gain access to the talent, data, and brand that Theorist is compounding.

Monetization

Vertical audiences can monetize via direct-to-consumer. Loyal viewers are willing to purchase higher-ticket products like merchandise, physical products, or live experiences.

Horizontal audiences can monetize via advertising. With audiences concentrated across specific segments, brand partnerships and niche products are big opportunities.

Case Study #3: MrBeast (Matrix)

MrBeast follows a matrix approach, that is primarily horizontal.

1. Horizontal: dubbing to 23 languages, “Ages 0-100” relatability, Amazon Prime Video show

2. Vertical: MrBeast gaming, Beast Reacts, Beast Philanthropy, Beast Animations, Beast Games

MrBeast’s monetization is also hybrid. He’s had success with brand partnerships like Shopify, Amazon, and DoorDash, as well as selling his own products like merchandise, Feastables, Lunchly, and Viewstats.

Looking Forward

Vertical audiences can build a solid, profitable business.

For creators looking to build the next Disney, I believe horizontal audiences are the key to expand.

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