As independent, creator-owned media companies flourish, Rooster Teeth is looking to join the party
By Alexander Lee • February 13, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Rooster Teeth is officially free from its corporate overlords. Now owned by one of its original founders, the fan-favorite production company appears to be emulating the same independent approach that has paid off for some of Hollywood’s other creator-owned media operations.
Founded by a collective of content creators in 2003, Rooster Teeth spent years being shuttled around between different holding companies, from Fullscreen to Otter Media to WarnerMedia. The company suffered under corporate ownership, shuttering in March 2024 amid reports of a toxic work culture and a decade of unprofitability, as well as a failed rebrand in 2023.
On Feb. 5, Rooster Teeth founder Michael “Burnie” Burns announced that his company Box Canyon Productions had acquired the Rooster Teeth brand and many of the studio’s assets. Now, Rooster Teeth’s millions of fans are waiting to see whether Burns will be able to bring the company back to profitability using a lower-to-the-ground approach.
“I am excited at the challenge of bringing Rooster Teeth back to its roots,” Burns said in a press release announcing the acquisition. “The heart of this brand has always been its fans, and I look forward to writing a new chapter together.” Burns and a Rooster Teeth representative did not respond to requests for further comment.
Corporate troubles
Rooster Teeth is not the only creator-founded media company to stagnate after falling into corporate ownership.
In 2014, Disney acquired Maker Studios, then put the company through a series of layoffs and rebrands before shutting it down entirely in 2019. Smosh, the long-running YouTube collective, initially grew after being acquired by Defy Media in 2011, but faced an existential threat when the company collapsed in 2018. In the two years since Padilla and Hecox bought back the brand in 2023, Smosh’s overall viewership has doubled, and the company’s revenue has tripled, according to Smosh CEO Alessandra Catanese.
In the wake of Rooster Teeth’s shutdown last year, corporate ownership is starting to feel like more of a poison pill than a benefit for creator-owned media companies.
“We don’t have private investors; we don’t have a board that we answer to. We are not very traditional, in the sense of a corporation,” Catanese said. “And I think that our audience, knowing that they’re directly supporting us as well as seeing the dynamics of our talent on camera — it feels very real, and I think that encourages a deeper and more meaningful connection, and allows them to feel good about supporting us.”
Critical Role, a tabletop gaming creator collective and production company that boasts millions of followers across its social channels, has received numerous outside investment offers since it became an independent company in 2018 — and has denied all of them in order to avoid being beholden to shareholders or investors, as well as to prevent the company from scaling up at an unsustainable rate.
“We are fortunate enough for the company to be supported by the audience in a way where we are not reliant on outside funds currently. I don’t know how long that will last; we hope it lasts forever,” said Critical Role CEO and cast member Travis Willingham. “We hope we’re telling stories that continue to inspire people to come to the show and support what we do. And if there’s a day where that doesn’t happen, maybe we’ll look at that more seriously.”
Taking cues
As Rooster Teeth rebuilds, the company has already announced a slate of new productions for 2025, which includes both pre-existing Rooster Teeth properties and an “audio adventure” titled “Again.” Per the company’s official press release, Rooster Teeth plans to “renew its focus on innovation, community engagement, and the spirit of creativity that first defined its success.”
Rooster Teeth’s messaging around its goals for 2025 — and particularly its focus on community engagement and the stressing of Burns’ status as one of the company’s founders — appears to reflect the approach taken by other creator-owned production companies such as Mythical Entertainment, the studio founded by YouTubers Rhett McLaughlin and Charles “Link” Neal.
At the moment, Mythical brings in 500,000 hours of viewership per day across its various YouTube channels, a level of viewership that Mythical CEO Brian Flanagan credited largely to the distribution power of McLaughlin and Neal’s followings, as well as the parasocial relationship between the creators and their millions of fans, which Flanagan said has an uplifting effect even on content in which they did not have a direct hand.
“I’m not the first to talk about the deeply friendship-esque or ‘I love these guys’ relationship that Rhett and Link have through the camera — but it’s true, and it does give us permission to ask fans and viewers to come with us on other adventures in media,” Flanagan said, citing shows like “Mythical Kitchen” and its “Last Meals” series as examples of series that had benefited from the fandom of Mythical’s creator-owners.
Looking forward
Although individual creators’ fandoms are powerful fuel for their production companies, some of these companies are taking steps not to be over-reliant on their central personalities. The media company Complexly, for example, does not lead with its creator-founders John and Hank Green in its sales pitches to prospective advertisers or sponsors. Complexly’s revenue has grown by 20 percent year over year for the last two years and its team grew from 70 to 85 employees in 2024, per CEO Julie Walsh Smith.
“We do sometimes leverage Hank and John, but we don’t default to that; if we can get a deal done without any involvement from them or promotion from them, that’s our first preference,” Walsh Smith said. “We’ve been working towards that for many, many years.”
Although the creator-owners of production companies such as Mythical and Complexly have no plans to jump ship any time soon, Walsh Smith said that Complexly’s conscious push to diversify its sales approach is intended to set her company up for years of future success, regardless of what might occur in the future.
“We are getting out ahead of Hank and John getting hit by a bus one day,” she said. “They’re mortal men, so we want to outlast them.”
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