The Creator Economy moves to mainstream media at Mipcom

Besides hosting YouTube’s flagship for the first time, this year Mipcom also highlighted the different models that support the creator economy at a packed session on Tuesday morning.

The Creator Upfronts were hosted by Shira Lazar, CEO of What’s Trending, featuring Callum McGinley aka “Callux” and Ben Doyle aka “Rvbberduck” from After Party Studios, followed by Sean Atkins from Dhar Mann Studios and Kudzi Chikumbu, Tubi’s Vice President of Creator Partnerships.

Callux and Rvbberduck were joined on stage by Nella Rose, a hugely popular YouTuber and presenter who previously starred in the UK reality series “I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here” and has over 4 million followers across TikTok and Instagram And YouTube. Rose announced her new show, “The Nella Rose Show,” which After Party Studios will produce and showcase to potential broadcast and streaming partners.

This wasn’t the first time the Cannes TV market offered an in-depth look into the world of digital creativity. A decade ago, as Mipcom President Lucy Smith reminded the audience during her presentation, the conference hosted the Mip Digital Upfront, a one-off initiative that she said was “well-received, but seemed a bit premature for the market.” The creator economy is now “shaping the future of entertainment” and there are more and more partnerships with traditional media, as evidenced by BBC Studios’ recent deal with YouTube which was discussed on Monday by BBC Studios’ digital VP Jasmine Dawson and YouTube’s EMEA head Pedro Pena.

During the after-party session, Rvbberduck said he met Callux in 2015 at a KFC “Around the World in 99 Carts” campaign, where he noticed a disconnect between what the client wanted from Callux, which was “an entertainment format that was basically a long-form chicken commercial,” and what the director was aspiring to do, which was to do “crazy things” with the audience in mind.

“When we returned to London, we decided to start our own studios to bridge the gap between mainstream and digital, and become the No. 1 producer of the most culturally relevant content on the internet,” Callocks said.

“We did it by thinking like a creative,” he said. The company has expanded to a team of more than 30 people who “approach every project as if they were the creators,” which he sees as key because “these social platforms were built and sculpted by creators.” In the end, After Party Studios has positioned itself “neatly in that place in the middle between creators, brands and commissioners,” Kallox said. Some of the banner’s collaborations with broadcasters include the Channel 4.0 show ‘Hear Me Out’ and Sky Sports series ‘Scenes’ for next generation football fans.

There is still work to be done to find common ground in terms of style and creative freedom. Rose spoke about her different experiences working in television on shows such as I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and in digital media, emphasizing the fact that there is still more creative freedom in the digital space.

“There’s a big difference with reality TV; it’s scripted from beginning to end. And a lot of people don’t know that… Whereas in digital, I can be 100% myself, and my audience reacts to the way I’m physically present more in digital than on television,” Rose said. Her next format, “The Nella Rose Show,” which After Party Studios is developing independently, will seek to capture her restless spontaneity even as it plays to broadcasters in the future.

At Dhar Mann Studios, Atkins spoke about how the company, which specializes in inspirational short films, has become one of the biggest creators on Facebook and YouTube, with 143 million followers worldwide.

“The good thing about storytelling is that it’s fairly universal, especially with what we do that’s about human emotions,” he said, “dealing with themes like acceptance or rejection and inequality.”

The banner has also thrived through lean operations, said Atkins, who joined Dhar Mann Studios in 2024 and previously headed MTV and served as chief digital officer at Discovery.

Dhar Mann Studios produces five-and-a-half hours of television programming each week with just nine crews, working about 18 hours a day, seven days a week, he said.

“If you walk into a plot of land, it’s like you’ve walked into a Warner Bros. plot or you’ve gone to Pinewood here in the U.K. But in terms of how it works compared to the traditional type of media, it’s more flexible and more efficient because that’s what the economics require,” Atkins said. “It’s like if you want to make a feature film, you need thousands of people. If you want to make a TV show that’s broadcast, you need 100 people. To make a TV show, you need dozens. If you want to make a digital show, you need one person. It’s just an exponential curve.”

Atkins also spoke about the revenue model for Dhar Mann Studios, which he says comes from various sources. One is basic revenue sharing, where the creator receives roughly half of the money generated across six platforms; The second is brand deals, which are actually more lucrative for creators and represent approximately 50% to 60% of their revenue; And then additional business development as Dhar Mann Studios works with its agency, Fifth Order, to help creators manage their assets.

The Upfronts concluded with a discussion about distribution with Tubi’s Chikumbu, who said the AVOD service was an attractive destination for creators because of its strong reach. “We have grown our fan audience to over 100 million monthly active users, many of whom are Gen Z and Millennials,” he noted. The executive said 70% of them “want content from independent filmmakers, but also from creatives.” So far, Tubi boasts a large library of “nearly 300,000 episodes and a really robust recommendation system” and the platform’s ultimate goal is to build “a world of creators.”

“[It’s] “A place where creatives can access Hollywood while also retaining their authentic creativity,” Chikombo said.

said Lazar, who hosted the Mip Digital Upfront 10 years ago diverse In a post-mortem conversation, the show offered “three perspectives” on the sector. She noted that After Party Studios is a “creator-founded company” that “collaborates with other creators, launches shows on their platforms that they fund in a cost-effective way, and then finds other distribution deals or then decides to leverage popularity to get some deals,” while Dhar Mann Studios was built around its creator’s personality and has expanded into a production powerhouse. “He is not only doing it for his own platform, he is doing it for others, creating other formats with talent, doing feature scripts and scripts in a successful way and generating income as well,” Lazar said. On the distribution side, Toby explains how “streamers are doing these partnerships with creators through their archive and library, similar to the way traditional media did.”

At Mipcom this year, a number of collaborations with traditional media companies were announced, including Banijay’s partnership with YouTube to launch the Entertainment Creators Lab in France and its acquisition of a majority stake in Dutch company Werktitel.