Maker Studios continues to experience enormous growth on YouTube but is steadily building up an arsenal of new distribution platforms for its content.
That’s the word from the Disney-owned multichannel network president Ynon Kreiz, who spoke Tuesday at the Digital Entertainment World conference in a Q&A with Variety editor-in-chief Andrew Wallenstein.
Maker just passed 11 billion video views per month, more than double what the company boasted at the time of its acquisition by Walt Disney Co. in May 2014. Nine months in, Kreiz expressed confidence that there’s more growth ahead for the company.
“We may be in a honeymoon period, but it has been a great honeymoon so far,” he said.
With Disney in its corner, Maker is focusing on translating the conglomerate’s broad range of top-shelf intellectual property from “Star Wars” to ESPN to the kind of shortform programming it specializes in distribution online to young audiences across the world.
Kreiz said this year will see a big increase in the amount of Disney-related content on its platform, citing a successful integration with the movie studio’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” release that helped fuel its success at the box office.
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But Kreiz is equally focused on getting traction on different platforms outside YouTube. Addressing criticism that the company’s Maker.tv property has not seen much growth to date, he noted that this off-YouTube destination is also the streaming player powering 30 different apps each branded by a different top YouTube personality represented by the Maker affiliate network.
“We already have close to 600,000 downloads on the apps,” he said. “We are very happy with that progress.”
Kreiz also cited the presence of Maker in Dish’s new Sling TV app and transactional opportunities its talent is starting to take advantage on Vimeo, not to mention the momentum Facebook and Twitter are experiencing in online video distribution.
