Dhar Mann still often self-identifies as a YouTuber — even though, with 170 million followers across multiple platforms, plus deals with Disney, Fox Entertainment and Samsung TV, and a massive 125,000-square-foot facility in Burbank, California, that’s a little like saying Amazon is an online bookstore.
Not long ago, on a flight, while seated next to a prominent media executive, he decided to leave YouTube out of his story — instead regaling the unidentified woman with his achievements, including producing five to seven hours of scripted content per week, shot across 75 sets.
“And she goes, ‘How have I never heard of this?’ She was blown away,” Mann told Ankler CEO and editor-in-chief Janice Min onstage at MIPCOM CANNES on Sunday, after receiving The Ankler’s inaugural Future of Entertainment Award. “She’s trying to wrap her head around this, and then she goes, ‘Where is your content distributed?’ And I was like, ‘Well, on YouTube.’ As soon as I said that, I kid you not, she completely checked out — as if I’d been selling her wolf tickets this entire time. She put on her headset, reclined her seat.”
Hollywood isn’t tuning out Mann anymore.
The mega-creator — who started out making videos on an iPhone in his apartment — is producing scripted content at a pace that would give most traditional studios a nervous breakdown. He’s also preparing to open Creator City, a four-acre Los Angeles production campus in Chatsworth, with nine soundstages, about 175 sets and room for 15 simultaneous productions. Mann is so bullish on his business that the company purchased the property instead of leasing it. (Sorry, landlords!)
The entertainment establishment that once considered YouTubers beneath it is now scrambling to do business with them.
Call it Hollywood’s shotgun wedding of old and new.
As Dhar Mann Studios CEO Sean Atkins, a veteran of MTV, Disney and HBO, explained onstage: “Your signal that something’s most likely to win in the end is that the incumbent [at first] thinks it’s beneath them.” He used cable TV, Southwest Airlines and Walmart as earlier examples.
The 7-Day Studio
At Dhar Mann Studios, some projects move from script to screen in just seven days. Even the longest take about three weeks. Its non-union writers rooms, production crews and sets operate almost continuously — a stark contrast to Hollywood’s customary development cycles, which can stretch for years.
“When I talk to a traditional filmmaker who’s working on something,” Mann said, “they’re like, ‘I can’t wait to see two years from now what people are going to think.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, how do you even know what the world is going to be like two years from now?’”
Even more striking is how quickly the company’s own business model has changed. Two and a half years ago, Mann revealed, roughly 95 percent of Dhar Mann Studios’ revenue came from YouTube and Facebook. Today, that’s fallen to less than 40 percent, with Mann projecting just 30 percent next year — reducing the company’s exposure to the whims of platform algorithms.
The studio’s brand business alone, Mann estimated, has grown roughly 15-fold year over year.
Which brings the story back to Creator City, the ambitious new campus Mann plans to open during Super Bowl week in Los Angeles next year (in 2026, he was the NFL’s “Chief Kindness Officer” for Super Bowl LX). The facility represents a sizable bet on the future of creator-led production — and a very different relationship between entertainment and advertising.
The idea: Sets feature actual brands for creators to shoot on and integrate into content. A coffee shop could be a Starbucks. A retail store could be a Target. Mann says he’s working with brand partners to make commerce part of the storytelling itself, rather than interrupting programming with conventional advertising.
“It’s basically where creators, brands and culture all come together in one place,” Mann explained.
Mann also just completed a tour of duty at Advertising Week in New York, where he was named the event’s inaugural Chief Creator Officer. His assignment? Help generate $100 million in new business between brands and creators over the next 12 months.
It’s part of a broader push to convince advertisers to treat creators as serious media businesses rather than hired influencers executing one-off campaigns.
“Creators are treated in a very transactional way,” Mann said, describing a system in which brands hand over advertising briefs instead of collaborating directly with talent. Too often, he argued, an integration ends up interrupting a story rather than becoming part of it.
Mann offered a hypothetical example: Why stop a video in the middle of an emotional scene to awkwardly pitch Kleenex when the brand could be woven naturally into the storytelling?
His company now operates an in-house agency working with more than 50 major YouTubers, he said, giving advertisers access to talent, production infrastructure and creative development under one roof.
From iPhones to an Empire
Dhar Mann Studios started eight years ago when Mann was broke, depressed and two weeks away from being evicted. “I honestly thought my life was over,” he said. That’s when Mann started making short videos from his apartment — without camera equipment or formal film training. “We shot everything on iPhones,” he said. “People I wanted to work with would walk inside the door, take one look around our scrappy little apartment and oftentimes walk right back out.”
Today, Mann’s team produces short scripted dramas about everyday themes he says are universal — like bullying, honesty and kindness. He has also expanded far beyond YouTube — producing 20 episodes of scripted programming for Disney; 40 vertical videos for Fox Entertainment that will premiere on the My Drama app; and the just-announced Unlikely Families, a second installment of his Samsung TV FAST channel anthology series that started with Unlikely Romances.
From the stage, Atkins compared traditional studios to massive aircraft carriers, designed for a monoculture that hardly exists anymore and the $300 million blockbusters that came with it. As tech fragmented audiences, legacy players lost roughly 90 percent of their scale, he contends, while the overhead costs remained the same. Meanwhile, he said, creator studios function like speedboats. As Atkins explained, “Creators are making content that is rightsized to the audience expectations and the economics of that platform.”
There’s also a revealing story behind how Mann recruited his CEO.
Atkins initially met Mann while trying to acquire Dhar Mann Studios for another creator company. During due diligence, Atkins began asking why Mann wasn’t pursuing opportunities like syndication and repackaging content for other platforms.
Mann didn’t wait for the acquisition to close. He started implementing the suggestions immediately, helping return his business to growth.
When the prospective buyer ran into financing troubles, Mann came back with a different offer: “Instead of buying us, why don’t you join us?”
Atkins did.
It’s a fitting partnership for a company built by a founder who didn’t know Hollywood’s rules and an executive who knew exactly which ones needed breaking.
And for those in Hollywood feeling anxious about the new world order? Mann offered some advice.
“Every time in my life I’ve ever felt like I was somehow leaving my comfort zone, that’s always when the biggest opportunities come,” Mann said. “Don’t get married to your job title and get more so married to the skills that you have. … On the other side of fear is opportunity.”
In other words, take off the headphones.
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