By Alexander Lee • August 28, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
As more digital creators look to expand beyond the content grind, some are finding that their skills and knowledge are a good fit for the world of talent management.
On Tuesday, YouTuber Isaiah “Wendigoon” Nichols became the latest prominent creator to enter the talent management business by announcing his part-ownership of the talent management firm Mana Talent.
Nichols, whose conspiracy-theory-focused YouTube channel boasts nearly 4 million subscribers, was a Mana Talent client for years before deciding to take the plunge as a co-owner. Though he declined to share the financial details of his stake in the company, he made it clear that Mana’s origins in the creator space were a key factor behind his decision to buy in.
“Every conversation I’ve had with Mana felt like I was talking to someone who completely understood where I was coming from — someone who had business expertise, but didn’t feel like I was talking to a suit,” Nichols said. “So, when the company said, ‘we want you to be an owner,’ I was like, ‘yes,’ immediately. We didn’t have a conversation about numbers or anything until a month after I said yes.”
Fortunately for Nichols, Mana’s numbers appear to be trending in a positive direction. Since launching in 2022 with three full-time staffers, Mana has expanded to eight full-time staff, including a dedicated brand partnership team.
“We are risk-averse; we’re trying to be smart with our financials and how we set things up, and we don’t want to overhire to force ourselves into a growth model, where you are then stuck behind the 8-ball,” said Mana Talent president Ben Deaney.
Mana Talent currently has roughly 250 creators on its roster and has convinced 115 of them to enter into exclusive relationships with the company over the past two years. Deaney told Digiday that Mana has consciously avoided expanding its roster above 250 to ensure that it would maximize profits for its pre-existing creators rather than dedicating resources to acquiring new talent.
“The last two or three months have been the highest deal-flow numbers that we’ve done in the last two years,” Deaney said. “So we’re really hitting an inflection point right now, in terms of brand deal volume, while not adding too many more people to the roster.”
The boutique nature of Mana Talent underlines its deep roots in the creator space. In addition to its star-studded ownership group, which includes prominent YouTubers Charles “MoistCr1TiKaL” White, Gina “Gibi ASMR” Klein and Tyler “Jimmy Here” Collins, many of Mana’s top executives have a personal hand in content creation, including Deaney, who is married to Klein. For Mana’s clients, this close connection to the lives and experiences of actual content creators is one of the company’s core strengths.
“We wanted to make sure, if we were going to create an exclusive contract, that it was something I would be comfortable signing my wife to,” Deaney said. “That’s why we have these creator-owners — to make sure that, when we’re creating a contract like this, we’re not being predatory.”
Mana Talent is not the only creator-owned talent management agency to experience success in recent years. RTS, the talent management agency founded by top livestreamer Imane “Pokimane” Anys in 2021, has since expanded its roster from the single digits into the double digits, according to company CEO Stuart Saw, in addition to growing its live fighting game tournament, Evolution Championship Series, to record-breaking attendance numbers in 2024.
Saw credited much of his company’s growth to its ownership by Anys, who is the most-followed female streamer on Twitch.
“She herself was a talent, and therefore we didn’t want to burden her with the operations of the business. But, mutually, there was an exciting opportunity to solve some of the problems of creative talent management,” he said. “So, in the early days, she imparted a great amount of wisdom to our team.”
As more creators look for talent management that fits their specific needs, Saw anticipates that the trend of creator-owned talent management will continue to pick up momentum.
“I think you will see hundreds and hundreds of management firms exist, because the beauty of this industry, and the reason why this industry exists, is because there is content for the niche within a niche within a niche, and there are specialized management services for the niche within the niche within the niche,” he said. “There’s a lot of really special talent and special talent managers that have to be paired together.”
https://digiday.com/?p=553724
