Great to have you guys with us. We're going to be discussing building resilient media companies in the age of disruption, scale versus agility. So we're definitely going to touch on some of the stuff that FA just talked about, which was really cultural, right, and philosophical. But we're also going to talk about the nuts and bolts of building companies and sustaining companies in this landscape. So I've got questions for each of them about how they've done that in their respective spaces. We have quite a, you know, quite a breadth of experience here. But we're also going to ask them some questions that they can all take, you know, take part in a conversation together. So, just, I should say in light of news this week, Kevin, you have to tell us when your tell-all book about your time at Disney is coming out because that's...
Well, there's many of them at this point. Mine's going to be way in the future if at all, but perhaps they'll do it. I'm not sure.
Sounds like, yeah, kick it down the road probably. You each have different size companies. Each one is very valued and successful in their way in the ecosystem. What have you each learned about building resilience and navigating disruption, the topic of this conversation, over these many years?
You must have learned something because you're still here and these companies have done very well.
Well, I think one thing that I've learned is that every time I wanted to sort of do something new in entertainment or my career or whatever it would be, I try to come after it with a very fresh mind, beginner's mind as it were. Try not to be too much of an expert on how things have been so that I could be open-minded about how things might become. I think FA did, I haven't seen him, I've never met him before, I haven't seen that speech. It's remarkably prescient and clear and concise and correct, I think, by the way.
So, but I left Disney, I was at TikTok for a while running TikTok and ByteDance, and I saw things from entertainment from an entirely different angle than I would at Disney. At Disney, of course, we're all filmmakers here. It's about storytelling. It's about doing fewer things better, actually, on scale. At Disney, we used to have a huge number of films when I first joined Disney. We had Miramax. We had Hollywood Pictures. We were probably making 60 films a year back in the early 2000s. And I think we very deliberately and with intention decided to notch that back, take fewer creative swings, put more behind each creative swing. And that we thought, we felt, would actually reduce risk from a business perspective because our quality would be better and also serve our audiences better. So we tried to coalesce around brands and try to do things in a certain way and everything was big and franchise and that's the approach we took. It was very successful, obviously, and I would do the same thing given the same set of circumstances that I was facing 10 years ago.
Now, TikTok, it's all about what AA said. It's the delivery of a very specific piece of content that the algorithm understands appeals to that one audience member at that one instant in the order that it's delivered. So there's an extreme precision, as it were, as to what people see. And the quality, most, you know, if you want to objectively measure the quality of a TikTok video, they're pretty bad. There's nothing hugely high quality about a TikTok video. It's changing with AI and new tools, but it's really about the recommendation being the important thing. And if you have a great recommendation engine, little tiny atomized units of little videos that aren't very high quality can become enormously engaging. You know, that's for sure true. People are spending a ton of time on social media. Yeah, more time, frankly, if you go down in ages, more time, much more time is being spent with that type of video, very low quality, just arranged in a certain way that's appealing, than they are with traditional media storytelling that we see now. And I think it's a shame in many ways, but it's also a fact. That's where time and attention has gone with younger people.
So one of the things I wanted to make sure that we know when I build a new company, I want to pay attention to those dynamics and respect. I want to, I'm going to respect the tradition of storytelling and that is very meaningful, but also respect the kind of the evolution of time, attention, affinity, and people's habituation given the technology that's available to them. When we built Candle Media, we had that very much in mind. We wanted to make sure that we had fulfilled a full spectrum of storytelling from long form, you know, TV series. You've all heard of, you know, many of our TV series, I'm sure, movies, but also social media entertainment, short form, vertical video that became very important to people. So we wanted to do the full suite. And I think the flexibility to acknowledge things that have changed, try to accommodate them without losing your principles is super important. So that sort of flexibility would trump scale at this point in time given the amount of dynamism that our industry is facing more so than ever. So I think agility trumps scale, it trumps size, it trumps all of that. You really do need to be open to new things, react to them the right way, and embrace it. You can't hold back the tide of these changes. It's impossible. So you've got to embrace it. And I'm not saying movies are going away. Nothing like that. And I totally don't think that. But the way they deliver, the way they're made, and the way you have to market them, deliver them to people, be open-minded, take a beginner's mind approach to it, and be extremely agile. That's how you win.
When you... can I just speak a little bit about Synetic? I would say that on the scale or from scale to agility, we're at the extreme end of the agility sector. And in my more bombastic moments, I like to say that Synetic is the first media conglomerate of the 21st century. And by that I mean we are creator-centric. If creation and creators are the scarce resource, then the whole creation continuum, the idea of physical plant, the idea of capital, the idea of even delivery through the advance of technology has been democratized, and the one thing that remains scarce is imagination, human imagination. And our purpose is to empower that scarce segment of the delivery chain.
And it's... Effie, do you want to say something?
No. Maybe. Is it interesting? Yeah. Maybe. You asked about resilience and I just, I was just like, you know, I thought immediately of the beginnings of my journey. I don't come from the film industry. I just really love film. But when I decided to start this, I had no idea about the business. I've never been to a film festival in my life as an industry participant. I didn't know a single person in the industry and I just loved movies and I started coding immediately. And what I learned very quickly is that this is a very conservative business that moves slowly. People are very traditional in their approach to all aspects of filmmaking and they want to continue doing the way they've been doing things for a long time. So the big rule for me was that you just need to have a vision and you need to stick with it because everything takes really long in this business to execute. It took us, I started MUBI 19 years ago now. It took us 15 years to get to a place where we could start imagining even to be able to finance a film by Paweł Pawlikowski. We went from, in 15 years we went from zero to 40 employees and then in the past four years we went from 40 to more than 400. You know, but it took 15 years of putting brick by brick this vision. Everything takes a long time. Just, you just need to have a vision and stick with it would be my resilience formula.
Let me ask you about that temptation to scale up because I mean, particularly these two companies, you've seen in the last few years, and when Candle kind of came onto the scene, you know, things, as you know, moved quickly. You were very acquisitive. You spent $4 billion on acquiring major, huge companies, Moonbug and Reese Witherspoon's company. It's good to be ambitious, but how do you avoid that tricky balance between wanting to be ambitious but thinking about future-proofing? MUBI also grew very quickly and then had to do a little bit of right-sizing, right? So just, and Candle also a little bit of right-sizing. How? Tell me about that. Not the right-sizing, but...
Well, we did move aggressively. I had thought about what I wanted Candle to be and I wanted it to be a very modernly configured media company that had a flywheel around great storytelling told by great personalities who had a great social media presence, who could engage audiences in a two-way conversation on social media, extend their stories onto social media, and then wrap e-commerce into all that. Because one thing you have, if you're an influencer and you have a lot of followers, you have a lot of traction with those followers and creating e-commerce opportunities is quite readily available to you. So I had that flywheel in mind, which is a little bit different than we had at Disney and was definitely informed by what I saw at TikTok. But to get there, look, there is a certain minimum scale you probably need to make an impact and to have the sort of the base upon which you can grow effectively. $4 billion is a lot of money for sure. We did that with Blackstone, the biggest private equity firm in the world, the great partners. And we made a couple of acquisitions that were large. Reese Witherspoon's company was a big one. Moonbug was our biggest. That was three billion of the four billion was Moonbug. And Moonbug's an incredibly interesting company. I'm not sure many people even know what it is in this audience. We have a movie coming out called Cocomelon. And Coco is a very, very popular preschool character. In fact, it's the most popular preschool character in the world. Our Cocomelon and the other preschool characters that Moonbug owns collectively generate about 13 billion views a month on YouTube. And that's where all of our characters are generated. All of our IP comes from YouTube and we wholly own our IP. 13 billion views is more than the entire Walt Disney Company has across all of their divisions on YouTube, including ESPN and everything. It's four times as big as MrBeast. We're by far the biggest publisher on YouTube. But not only that, we've taken those stories, and I'll use Cocomelon as an example. Cocomelon scaled, we took it from YouTube. We created these amalgamations of multiple of our shorts and made them into one-hour episodes, put it on, licensed it to Netflix. And from 2021 to 2024, Coco was the biggest show on Netflix, so with the next biggest one being NCIS. So it had the biggest audience on YouTube, biggest audience on Netflix. You can imagine after that, with that reach and frequency and kind of affinity that that sort of entails, we can generate a whole lot more businesses around it.
And in terms of evolution, John, we can speak to this because we were speaking about it last night and we just put a story up on Deadline about it, which is the first time people can read about this for free at least. Tell us about this new initiative that you've launched at your company as a way to diversify what you guys are doing.
Okay. I guess I'm introducing this from the stage today. So really I'll start with some background. And this relates to documentaries. Just to sort of frame the conversation here, there's a company in the US in New York called Impact Partners. They've been around for about 12 years. I've always admired their business model. Basically, it's a club of high-net-worth individuals. They pay a relatively nominal amount for membership every year. They have no obligation beyond that. Each year they get presented, I would say, between 10 and 15 potential documentary projects. And those presentations come with a menu. And the menu will say, if you want to invest $250,000 as equity, you can have an executive producer and in association with corporate credit. If you want to invest $100,000 as equity, you can have a co-producer credit. And these investors decide whether it's a topic they like, whether they think it's commercial, and they can decide whether to invest or not. Impact has made 160 films in the last 12 years. I have nothing to do with it. I've just always been impressed by that model. So I started thinking about it. And I guess imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery or theft or whatever the aphorism is. So I went to them and I said, do you mind if I steal this and apply it to a sector of potential investors that is incredibly attractive, wildly underserved, and really sort of inefficient? And they said, sure, go with God. And so this is a, I'll describe the sector of potential investors to you. See if you can guess who it is. There are about a thousand of them worldwide. I would estimate they're between the ages of 21 and 36. They have average net worths of between $100 million and $600 million each. And each one of them, almost every one of them, has significant social media followings. Can you name them?
Athletes. Okay. Most people say influencers. Athletes are very generally media-curious people. There has never been an organized way to sort of bring them into our space and sort of train them at a responsible level for what their life might be like after their careers.
I'm going to pivot because I want to talk a little bit about the big consolidation that's coming our way in the industry, in America in particular, but big impact internationally. It will be the biggest consolidation in years and for years to come, which is the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery merger acquisition. What is it going to do to the market, do each of you think? How much of a shock will there be from this?
Well, I think if you're going to be intellectually honest about answering this question, you have to also ask yourself what would happen if the merger didn't happen. So the problem, the thing that I see here is an unfortunate fact again, the industry that we're in is in a secular decline phase. And there are fewer and fewer financial outcomes that are great in the industry. It's driven by a lot of factors. I don't want to indulge them, but we touched on each was touched on today at some point. So you've got to say to yourself, okay, if you let it go as a status quo and you have independent studios, each of which will be having their own cost base, they'll be experiencing the revenue declines that we're seeing in the market. So that's where we're at. And so I think that you end up with a single competitor versus the two. I know it's one buyer versus two, but it's a much healthier buyer. At least for a time it is because the cost reductions, which again are very unfortunate, most of those cost reductions are personnel that are going to be exiting our industry. It's unfortunate, but it's required. And I think one company, one buyer versus two, but a healthier buyer can afford to pay for, you know, to fund a great creative product and distribute it and market it the right way. We're probably going to be better off than what you would compare it against two separate companies each much weaker. So that's the way I see it.
