Chris M. Williams Talks Creator Economy Franchise-Building

Chris M. Williams, founder and CEO of pocket.watch, closed day one of the TV Kids Summer Festival with a keynote on franchise-building from the creator economy.

Amid the teeming, fragmented landscape that is YouTube, pocket.watch has assembled a network of 50-plus creators, from top-rated channels like Toys and Colors to the ubiquitous Ryan’s World. In a keynote session you can watch here, Williams discussed the company’s early-mover advantage and offered some advice for those understanding how best to work inside the YouTube economy.

Williams has long been a believer in the creator economy, dating back to his days at The Walt Disney Company. Williams had been chief audience officer at Maker Studios when it was acquired by Disney. “During that period, I saw a profound shift in how kids were consuming content. They were moving pretty aggressively from traditional linear television to YouTube. It was apparent in my house as a dad—I would see my kids sit in front of my big screen TV and fire up their iPhones to watch YouTube videos—and, of course, in the data. It begged the question from a Disney perspective—a company that I admire tremendously, particularly for their franchise orchestration—why aren’t we looking at these stars, characters and IP on YouTube with massive fan bases and expanding them into franchise economics? And that is what led to the launch of the company.”

From a network of five creators, pocket.watch now works with over 50 of YouTube’s most popular kids’ and family stars. “It starts with popularity,” Williams said on what the team looks for in talent. “We are not necessarily the folks who find a creator who’s small and make them big. We generally partner with them after they have been through the democratic process on YouTube for determining what is going to be popular with kids and families. We will never partner with anyone who does not share our values. From day one, we’ve partnered with kids and family creators who prioritized the health, safety and well-being of kids. They don’t necessarily always know exactly how to embody this mission to do right by kids, but as long as they have the desire, we can help. We’ve created things like a creator handbook that we update every year. It tells them what the appropriate amount of screen time is for a kid to be in front of a camera and how to book a studio teacher. And then we look at it as a chessboard of diversity. We want kids reflected back at themselves in the content, so diversity of race, nationality, ethnicity, gender. And also diversity of formats. This is one of the gifts of YouTube. We can have gaming content, but we can also have art instruction. We can have a family that does everything on a farm in Texas. We can have imaginative role play. We are looking at that mix to present the best packages to our potential content distribution partners.”

Ryan ToysReview was among pocket.watch’s first round of partner creators. The company has worked with Ryan Kaji and his family to scale the Ryan’s World brand, which now includes an SVOD service, a FAST channel and a theatrical feature.

“He proved the model,” Williams noted. “He created the category. When we were going out with Ryan and his family and engaging with business partners, we had a lot of biases to overcome. Having that proof of concept [was crucial]. A hit Emmy-nominated Nick series with Ryan’s Mystery Playdate. The success of Ryan’s World content and series on over 40 platforms, including Hulu, Peacock and Amazon. A billion in retail sales. Fifty million game downloads. A feature film in theaters. And, of course, a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! These opened the doors and helped us create an entirely new category that our creator partners and others can now walk through. We take a lot of pride in having been one to take the arrows at the beginning to open up that door more widely for not just kids’ and family creators, but all sorts of creators. I contend there’d be no Feastables without Ryan’s World toys, because Ryan’s World toys really proved the model. It gave Walmart the appetite to expand into this category. There is still friction in the market. With all our success with Ryan, being the first, it did get looked at as a little bit of an anomaly. Now, with success from MrBeast, Ms. Rachel, CoComelon and others, it feels more like a trend. That’s a good place for us to be because the doors are more open.”

The conversation then moved to how the company uses its deep well of YouTube data, including creating its own tools to help it process all of those analytics to better inform programming, marketing and distribution decisions. “What within their content needs to be done to make it exportable to premium platforms? Where is their most popular content, and how can it be repackaged? On the non-YouTube platforms, it becomes a little more challenging. Typically, YouTube creators’ [content on other platforms] will perform to the relative success they found on YouTube. One extra layer of viewership and watch time from our third-party platforms and owned-and-operated channels and services gives us some additional information with respect to what’s hardest to measure, which is love. Love is what you need to drive a viewer into a consumer. In the kids’ category, it’s very hard to measure, rightfully. We have laws to protect the data of children, as we should, and so it becomes more difficult. There are lots of missing data points that would help understand love. So, when we distribute the content onto other platforms, it helps us understand whether there’s demand for that IP and that content off of YouTube, and that can steer future investment as well.”

I asked Williams what his message is to traditional kids’ platforms that have thus far resisted bringing creator economy content into their platforms. “You’ve seen new data come out of Nielsen over the last 18 months, two years, that shows that YouTube is not only dominating mobile screens and PCs, but it is dominating the living room television. It’s the only one that’s truly growing. It’s gone from 6 percent when they started reporting to 12 percent of all watch time in the U.S. on television. This did open up some eyes. The early adopters will see the most success. We’ve been very successful with our partners at Hulu, Peacock and Amazon, who’ve expanded their portfolio of our creator content and are making investments in additional content with other creators. All the major global players certainly have or are formulating strategies around digital creators. The local players, particularly internationally, will be slower to adopt. I expect that flood to come after. It’ll start with the global players who are all clearly leaning in, and I think at that point the local players will realize that in order to compete with YouTube, they’re going to have to adopt some of these strategies and embrace creator content.”

On the future for the kids’ media ecosystem, Williams noted, “It was great news a couple of weeks ago when Netflix picked up new episodes of Sesame Street globally. As someone who appreciates the full breadth of the kids’ and family content landscape, a brand like that is critical. A lot of the opportunities, obviously, are going to come from YouTube and digital creators. We’re going to continue to bet big there. It’s only going to grow in success. Another area is gaming. Some people have done this well. There’s been a lot of experimentation. Roblox and Minecraft will continue to do well, and Fortnite could emerge as a winner there as well. These are similar ecosystems to YouTube. They are driven primarily by a creator class that’s creating these games. The best use of those platforms is going to come from collaborations between existing creators on those platforms and traditional IP or maybe new IP. It’s going to come from a mix of all those things in the same way that we see it landing for YouTube.”