Disney is now the producer of PewDiePie, Game Grumps and more

Disney is no longer just the producer of children movies such as The Little Mermaid and Frozen, the last few years the company has started to focus more and more on gaming and action movies. The Walt Disney Company already bought both Marvel and Lucasarts for 4 billion US dollars, and today it has also bought Maker Studios. You might not be familiar with Maker Studios itself, but you probably do know one of these: PewDiePie, Game Grumps or TotalBiscuit.

Maker Studios is the producer of these and 55.000 other YouTube channels, and is now owned by The Walt Disney Company after they paid about 500 million US dollars for it. All these channels combined have a total of 5.5 billion views each month and over 380 million subscribers in total. Maker Studios gets a small cut of the profits on the ads that run on the videos of these channels, but what does Maker Studios exactly do? It’s pretty simple, they take care of all the promotion, merchandising, royalty-free music in the videos and the technical support. This way the YouTubers can focus on their channel and on making quality content.

At the moment it’s what the effect of this takeover has on the channels that are connected to Maker Studios. YouTuber TotalBiscuit posted the following on his Twitter page: “Yup, Disney now owns Maker so also owns Polaris. No idea what this means for us, but I’ll make the content I want to make or go elsewhere”.

It wouldn’t be a wise move of Disney to force channels to drastically change the way they produce content, as the channels are able to leave Maker Studios. I also doubt that we will suddenly see a lot of Disney content on these channels, as Disney might just want to learn what teenagers watch and analyze their online behaviour. As a YouTube channel you can see the race, age, what country the viewer is from and how long the viewer has watched the video and this data may be of use to Disney.

But who knows what Disney has in mind with this purchase, but I am sure we shouldn’t worry about it too much. The chance is big that Disney just wants to have a market share on a profitable business on the internet, like they are also trying to get a share on the gaming market with Disney Infinity.