Chocolate beats content: the rise of creator-led brands and studios

The attention dividend

Every creator business starts with the same asset: an audience that pays attention without being paid for. For years, creators monetised that attention through platform ad shares and brand deals. Goldman Sachs Research's 2023 survey data put brand deals at about 70% of creator revenue. The next step was obvious. Instead of renting the audience to brands, become the brand.

That step has now been taken by enough creators, at enough scale, to count as a business model rather than a novelty. It also changes the relationship between creators and the brands that used to hire them: the biggest creators are increasingly competitors on the shelf, not just media partners.

Exhibit A: Feastables vs. the channel

The most detailed public look at this model comes from investor documents for Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson's Beast Industries, reported by Bloomberg in March 2025 (via InvestmentNews). The figures, covering the first three quarters of 2024 with estimates for the rest, are striking:

• Feastables, the chocolate brand, had sales of about $250 million and a profit of more than $20 million.
• The media business, which includes the YouTube channel and the Amazon Prime Video show, had sales of a similar size but lost almost $80 million.
• The parent company lost almost $60 million overall in 2024.

Put simply, the world's best-known YouTube channel works partly as a very large marketing budget for a candy business. The documents projected Feastables would roughly triple over the next couple of years. They also projected that media would turn profitable in 2025 and 2026, shrink to about a fifth of total sales by 2026, and that the company would earn about $300 million in profit in 2026. Those are the company's own projections to investors, not reported results.

Earlier Bloomberg reporting, carried by Net Influencer in February 2025, said the holding company had been seeking money at a valuation of about $5 billion. Amazon had committed $100 million to the first season of Beast Games, and Donaldson said he lost tens of millions on that production by going over budget.

Beast Industries goes beyond snacks

Since then, Beast Industries has behaved less like a channel and more like a conglomerate. Under CEO Jeff Housenbold, its portfolio spans content production, Feastables, MrBeast Burger, merchandise and commerce ventures (The Block). On January 15, 2026, BitMine Immersion Technologies, Tom Lee's Ethereum treasury company, announced a $200 million equity investment, with the money earmarked for growth and for exploring decentralised-finance features in future financial products (The Block).

Less than a month later, on February 9, 2026, Beast Industries agreed to acquire Step, a mobile banking app for teens and young adults that had raised $491 million across six funding rounds, according to Crunchbase figures cited by Decrypt. The price wasn't disclosed. A creator whose main channel has more than 460 million subscribers is now buying fintech companies aimed at the same young audience. That is the attention dividend taken to its logical end: the audience becomes a customer base for whatever product category the company chooses to enter.

Exhibit B: Skims

Kim Kardashian's Skims shows the same model with celebrity reach rather than YouTube scale. The shapewear brand launched in 2019. In January 2022 it raised $240 million in a round led by Lone Pine Capital, with D1 Capital Partners joining existing backers including Thrive Capital. That round valued Skims at $3.2 billion, double the $1.6 billion valuation it had reached the previous April, and Kardashian and CEO Jens Grede kept a controlling stake (CNBC).

In November 2025, Bloomberg Law reported a new round valuing the company at $5 billion. Skims raised $225 million and expected 2025 net sales above $1 billion. The founders' influence now reaches beyond their own brand: Grede was among the investors in Substack's $100 million round in July 2025 (University of Waterloo).

Exhibit C: Prime

Prime, the drinks brand backed by YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI, shows how fast creator distribution can move physical product. Prime debuted in January 2022 and sold about $250 million in its first year. By November 2023, it was on track to pass $1.2 billion in annual sales, with shelf space at Walmart, Target and Kroger (BNN Bloomberg). The brand is run by Congo Brands, a Louisville, Kentucky product-development company that also runs Alani Nu, which shows a common structure: creators bring the audience, an operating partner brings manufacturing and retail know-how.

Who is writing the cheques

The investor lists show how mainstream creator-led companies have become. Skims' 2022 round brought in hedge funds Lone Pine Capital and D1 Capital Partners alongside venture firms such as Thrive Capital (CNBC). Beast Industries' 2026 backer was a publicly traded crypto treasury company (The Block). Substack's 2025 round, led by BOND and The Chernin Group with a16z participating, also included Klutch Sports Group CEO Rich Paul (University of Waterloo). Patreon, which Axios reported had raised more than $400 million, was last valued at over $4 billion in 2021.

These are not small angel bets on personalities. They are institutional investments made on the assumption that creator audiences convert reliably into revenue, and that the businesses built on them can grow beyond their founders' channels.

Why the model works

The source material points to four structural reasons:

1. Customer acquisition is built in. The audience is the distribution. Every video or post works as an ad for the product that the brand doesn't have to buy.
2. Physical goods can carry the media. At Beast Industries, chocolate profits cover the costs of making expensive content. Few traditional media companies have a cross-subsidy like that.
3. Investors value product companies more highly. InvestmentNews' headline makes the point: MrBeast's investors are more likely to profit from chocolate than from videos.
4. Partners fill the gaps. Prime's arrangement with Congo Brands shows creators don't need to build supply chains themselves to sell at national retail scale.

From creator to studio to holding company

Platforms are encouraging the shift. In his February 2025 letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan argued that creators were building studios like traditional media companies, pointing to Alan Chikin Chow's 10,000-square-foot Burbank studio and new production spaces in Birmingham, Alabama and North Vancouver (TV Technology). His 2026 letter went further, describing a push to treat creators as studios with commerce tools built into YouTube (Net Influencer).

The next stage is institutional. Later co-founder Lyle Stevens predicted in January 2026 that top creators will become structured media companies with teams, formats and IP. He also predicted that the first creator media company will file for an IPO, crediting the idea to industry analysts Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg and citing Beast Industries as an example. That is a forecast, not an announcement. But it shows how much of the industry now treats creators as companies rather than individual talent.

The risks the hype skips

The same documents that make the model attractive also show its fragility. Media budgets can overrun badly, as Beast Games did. The company's profits depend on projections. Moves into finance and crypto-linked products bring regulatory and reputational exposure that a snack brand doesn't face. Creator brands also depend on one person's reputation. A Northeastern University finding cited by eMarketer, that brands suffer more damage when a virtual influencer backs a product customers dislike, is a reminder that audience trust can be lost quickly, whoever is doing the endorsing.

What it means for brands and creators

For traditional consumer brands, creator-led labels are now direct competitors with lower acquisition costs. Some will respond by partnering earlier, through co-branded lines, licensing or equity deals, rather than buying one-off posts. For mid-sized creators, the Prime model, in which an experienced operator handles manufacturing and retail, is likely more realistic than building a Beast Industries. For agencies, the opportunity is in brokering those partnerships.

The takeaway

For the top tier, content is turning into the marketing department and products into the profit centre. The more useful question for the rest of the market is whether mid-sized creators can replicate the model through licensing, white-label products and retail partnerships. That is where brands and agencies should be watching.