In this interview, Reed Dushscher of Night Media explains how his company differs from a traditional talent agency by operating through three pillars: talent‑management services, owned‑and‑operated joint‑venture businesses, and an investment arm that backs emerging software, gaming, and consumer‑product companies. Night Media’s core philosophy is to sign "entrepreneurs" rather than just content creators, focusing on the size and engagement of a creator’s community rather than subscriber counts. The conversation dives deep into the MrBeast Burger venture, detailing how Night Media partnered with Earl Enterprises to launch hundreds of virtual restaurant locations on day one, the challenges of quality control, and the strategic value of providing fans rapid, tangible touchpoints. Reed also discusses the broader creator economy, emphasizing the need for creators to think beyond ad‑revenue, leverage code, capital, and labor, and eventually raise external capital to scale production. The interview closes with pointers to Reed’s Creator Economics channel and social handles.
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This is like, hey, we're going to turn on 300 locations on a single day and then we're going to scale to 600 2 months later.
So you guys aren't like a traditional agency, right? I mean, you guys are very specific about who you want to work with and your structure is different, right? Like, how would you define that?
Yeah, not at all. We're definitely not built like an agency. We do have a services business on the management side, but a lot of our scale and a lot of the things that we're working on right now are really joint ventures and with clients that we believe in. we think have a long-term growth as a creator and as an entrepreneur. And then for us, we have like 3 pillars inside of Night Media right now. And like I said, one is a services business, which is talent management. One is that, like, we'll just say owned and operated business with joint ventures. And then we've also just in the past like 8 to 12 months, we started investing. And so we have a little investment vehicle within Night Media and we invest in a lot of emerging software companies and gaming, And other consumer products.
If someone wants to work with you, right, like what would be the typical, what would be the ideal client profile and how do you typically charge? Because I would imagine all your deals are custom, right? They have to be.
Yeah, they are. I mean, there are some similarities between what each creator deal is and then it gets a little bit more complex as you get into launching other companies and doing virtual restaurants and who's doing what in that relationship. So it gets rather complex per creator. I think what we really look for and what I've learned over the last 3 and a half years is we don't really sign creators. That's not our motto. We sign entrepreneurs. We think that some of the largest creators in the world and even emerging creators, they're actually more entrepreneurs than anything. They obviously love creating content, but they want to do more and they understand that this is just the beginning of where their brand is. And Jimmy understood this in 2018 when we first met. that if he had one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world and he was one of the biggest digital creators in the world, he was going to get access to whatever he wanted and we were going to be able to accomplish whatever he set out to do. And MrBeast Burger is a good example of that, of like, hey, let's be the first digital creator that like really pushes into virtual dining and let's not just do a couple. Let's actually launch with 300 locations. Let's scale to 600. Let's try and get to 1,000 and let's see how big this company can get. That's really what we look for when we're evaluating creators to come inside of Night Media is like, what do they want to do outside of just creating content? And then how big do we think this business can get? We're primarily based on YouTube. That's our core focus is signing YouTube creators, but we have started working with a few people on Twitch, some larger Twitch creators that average over 100,000 concurrent viewers when they go live on Twitch. So we have dabbled a little bit into that side, but the company was really built on the premise of like, we think that YouTube not only is the core platform that we want to focus on, but over the next 10 years, like, we'll bet on YouTube over any other social medium. And that's including like Twitter and Instagram and some of these other ones. And so when we look at a creator, I actually don't care about subscribers. I think that's one thing that people look at and they think that number is incredibly important when it actually isn't because There's a lot of channels out there that have 20 million subscribers or 10 million subscribers that are pulling less than a million views per video. It's really bad, right? So it's all about like, how engaged is your audience? How big is your community? And then we kind of work outside of that. We work within that and saying, okay, if they have a community in this space, how big do we think this actual opportunity is if we were to build this consumer product or if we were to go in this direction? So I think like in the past, we used to actually look at subscriber numbers and care about that number. And now to me, it's just kind of thrown out the window. It's more about like, how big is the community?
Got it. Makes sense. What I'm seeing with a lot of creators, it's they'll build a big channel and they'll start selling merchandise and, you know, they don't really get much more sophisticated beyond that, right? Now, what I find amazing is what you've done with, uh, what you helped do with MrBeast Burger, right? So can you talk about how that all happened and, um, just again, the logistics around that seems like such a pain in the butt, right? So, um, tell To me, he's kind of reinventing what you can actually do once you have a community.
Yeah. And I hope— I actually think we're not even reinventing. I hope people look at it as like, this is the blueprint of what a creator's business should look like when you have a massively engaged community and you pretty much own your distribution of that fan base, right? And hopefully, we're laying the blueprint with MrBeast of like, what can a creator turn into? And we're trying to like figure this out as we go. Like, we're in uncharted territory. Like, a digital creator has never entered into like turning themselves into like this massive media entity that we think MrBeast can become. And so yes, MrBeast Burger, it was something that our president, Ezra Cooperstein, and I, we met with a couple of companies and one of them pitched us on this idea of influencers launching digital kitchens or virtual restaurants. And it initially— we initially like passed on the idea because I don't think we gave it much thought. And the hard thing about, you know, working with Jimmy is there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of pitches, and you kind of got to just like focus on a few things that you have to execute on and like have tunnel vision, and everything else is noise. And I think when they originally pitched it to us, there was just so much going on that I was like, yeah, cool idea, but like not now. And then Ezra and I really started having conversations around, okay, well, If we can actually launch hundreds of locations, like, what does that truly mean for the creator? Well, it means that one, like, we'd be the first mover in this space if we actually think that this is a space where we can build a business. Two, like, we thought it was an interesting touchpoint for us, for our fans, of like, yes, you can go on his website, yes, you can order merch, yes, you can get it 4 days later, or like, we can have this like touchpoint where people can get something 30 minutes later. and we deliver it to their door. And so that's what really kind of expanded our minds on this whole situation. And then finding the right operating partner, we partnered with Earl Enterprises who own the Hard Rock and they started Planet Hollywood. And so that was like the next step, was like finding a really good operating partner, focusing on quality control, which is going to continue to be a struggle as you have 300 locations on day 1. It's not like Shake Shack where they like start in a little Park in New York City, and then they expand over a decade. This is like, hey, we're going to turn on 300 locations on a single day, and then we're going to scale to 600 two months later. So quality control has been an issue, and then it's just finding the right restaurant partners. And we actually didn't do any ghost kitchens. We ended up partnering with small restaurant chains, large restaurant chains. You know, for us, it was like people are struggling, like everything going on in the world right now with COVID And if you don't have a solid delivery business, like restaurants are struggling. And so, you know, we had a lot of— found a lot of pride in like going into these restaurants and doubling their revenue, their per-day revenue, just by giving them an opportunity to help us fulfill MrBeast Burger. And so that was one thing that became important to us was like, how do we help these restaurants when everyone's struggling? And that became now what is MrBeast Burger.
Back in the day, you kind of had to have the business infrastructure first and then, you know, you go build the influence. But now it seems like you build the influence first and then you kind of figure out the infrastructure I'm generalizing here, but is that kind of in the right direction that you're seeing?
Yeah. I think most just don't know. I think most people, they create content, they have an engaged audience, or maybe they don't have a really engaged audience, but that's all they really know. They don't really know like, hey, if I create Minecraft videos, I should probably have my own server, or I should probably have a deal with Microsoft where I can sell on the Minecraft Marketplace. I think a lot of them just don't even pay attention to the fact that there's a much bigger business opportunity here than just making money off AdSense, which is basically what they get paid every time they upload a YouTube video with a pre-roll and a mid-roll.
Yeah. I think the Naval Ravikant quote that sticks with me is, there's 4 forms of leverage. You have code, capital, labor, and media. I think the creators understand the media portion, but then the other stuff around, okay, after you acquire some capital, how can you hire labor and then build leverage with code so you can make money in your sleep? Even more.
Yeah. Yeah. And we haven't seen this yet, but I know this is going to eventually happen. Like creators will start raising capital. They— it's really tough if you're a creator right now looking at MrBeast to be able to try and compete with that, with how much money he spends on a per-video basis and how big his production team is. And like if you want to compete at the highest level on YouTube, some of these creators are probably gonna have to think about like, how do I raise capital? Like, how do I get an influx of cash where I can go hire a production company and spend more per video and really have like this hypergrowth that they've seen a lot of creators have? So it's gonna be so interesting to see like how creators like push into those other pillars. And if they start raising capital, how are they thinking about software? This is all coming, but the industry, like my industry is still like slowly maturing into those things.
Well, Reed, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?
Yeah, I mean, check out Creator Economics. Blake and I, we're trying to upload weekly. It's become incredibly difficult for us to get on a cadence like that, but Creator Economics on YouTube, and then people can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at just ReedJD.
Perfect. Reed, thanks so much for doing this.
Thanks, man. Pleasure.
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