Maker Studios

» see makerstudios.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Maker Studios was the largest of the YouTube multi-channel networks (MCNs) that emerged around 2009 when YouTube's partner program was still figuring out how to pay creators. The pitch to creators was simple: sign with us, we negotiate better ad rates than you can get alone, we handle business development and brand deals, we take a cut of revenue. At peak Maker had around 60,000 channels under its umbrella, which put the company in roughly the same business shape as a record label for video creators.

The catch was that YouTube also kept getting better at paying creators directly. Every time the partner program improved, the MCN model lost a little of its rationale. By 2014 the MCN business was already a question mark, but Disney was looking at it as a content distribution play for the next generation, not as a niche middleman service. Disney bought Maker on 24 March 2014 for $500 million up front, with the price contractually rising toward $950 million if Maker hit revenue milestones.

i was not in Maker's audience or its creator base. i was 30 in 2014, watching tech keynotes and university lectures on youtube rather than smosh and pewdiepie content. maker's creator-economy world was an american-teen and english-speaking-mid-twenties phenomenon. i can describe its shape from the outside, but i never felt it from the inside the way someone who actually watched its channels in 2013 did.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

Maker was less of a studio than its name suggested. It did not produce most of its own content. The creators it signed kept making the same videos they were already making. What Maker did was bundle them into ad-sales packages, run cross-promotion between channels, take a cut. The "studio" part was a small slate of in-house productions that mostly did not work.

Inside Maker were sub-networks. Polaris held the gaming channels. Revelmode was the spinoff PewDiePie helped launch in 2016 as a kind of partner brand. There were dozens of these sub-networks because Maker kept signing creators in clusters and then bundling them. The org chart was its own product. Almost none of those sub-networks survived their parent.

~ the pewdiepie moment ~

On 13 February 2017, the Wall Street Journal published a report on a series of PewDiePie videos containing anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery, including one where he paid a group of men in Sri Lanka through Fiverr to hold up a "Death to All Jews" sign. The report ran on a Monday morning. Disney's Maker dropped PewDiePie that same afternoon. YouTube canceled the second season of his Red Originals show within days.

PewDiePie was Maker's single most-subscribed creator. Losing him in this specific way meant Disney's entire bet on the YouTube creator economy was now associated with a public scandal that the parent company could not afford. The PewDiePie split was not the only reason Maker collapsed, but it was the visible reason. Disney announced a major restructure of Maker within ten days. By May 2017 the brand was being folded into the newly-created Disney Digital Network.

~ what it became ~

Disney Digital Network ran for two more years as a brand. It was wound down formally in April 2019. Most of Maker's signed creators had already left their MCN contracts or quietly let them lapse by then. The original Maker headquarters in Culver City was closed. The 60,000-channel network model never came back at that scale. Subsequent attempts at MCN-style businesses (Awesomeness, Defy, Fullscreen) either pivoted away from the model or collapsed.

The thing Maker leaves behind is the idea, now widely accepted, that creator businesses are not record-label businesses. The middleman cut does not survive contact with a platform that wants to pay creators directly. YouTube wanted to pay creators directly. Maker had nine years to find a structural reason to exist between YouTube and its talent. It did not find one.

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