Entertainment
The Sidemen’s Media Empire: How 7 Friends Built a Content Conglomerate
What began as seven friends recording themselves playing FIFA has now become a hugely successful entertainment and commerce company. The Sidemen (KSI, Zerkaa, Miniminter, TBJZL, Behzinga, Vikkstar123, and Wroetoshaw) have turned a decade of internet clout into a diversified, nine‑figure business. Their output looks less like a creator channel and more like a small network that programs different formats for different levels of engagement. That structure gives them both the attention and the operational footprint of a lean digital studio with its own product
The Sidemen operate a compact media built around a flagship YouTube channel for larger videos, auxiliary channels for gaming, behind‑the‑scenes, and reaction content, and their premium streaming service Side+, as a subscription tier for the most invested fans. Together, they reach tens of millions of subscribers and deliver a consistent baseline of content that also helps them mark their brands. Their calendar leans on set pieces such as long‑form challenges and charity football matches that play more like live events than standard uploads, with weekly videos and shorts filling in the gaps between those spikes. Their latest charity match filled a Premier League stadium, attracted millions of live viewers, and raised a multi‑million‑pound total for U.K. charities, showing how a creator‑led match can now move audience and capital at the scale of a mid‑tier sports property.
The group’s first meaningful business move outside of content creation was Sidemen Clothing, positioned from the outset as a standalone apparel line rather than a basic merch shelf. The brand has shifted toward seasonal drops and collaborations that sit closer to streetwear than fan gear and gave the group a direct‑to‑consumer revenue stream with higher margins than standard ads. From there, the playbook expanded into category‑specific brands that could stand on their own. Sides, their fast‑food concept, uses ghost kitchens and franchise partners to serve customers across multiple markets, with reporting that the business has reached seven‑figure weekly revenue as it scales locations and delivery volume. XIX Vodka, their move into spirits, lets the Sidemen monetize an aging core audience through a premium product that can live in retail, nightlife, and events where creators usually appear as short‑term endorsers rather than long‑term owners.
Analysts and business press now estimate that the broader Sidemen ecosystem is worth nine‑figures when adding up channels, brands, and IP, with most of the upside sitting in assets they control. Ads across their channels are estimated to generate millions of dollars per year on their own, but the more material story is how that attention converts into subscriptions, food orders, alcohol sales, and apparel purchases where the group participates as equity holders. Internally, equal revenue splits and a shared company structure keep all seven members aligned, which reduces the incentive to peel off for individual deals and helps explain why the group has stayed intact through multiple growth phases. That alignment also supports slower, more capital‑intensive bets such as brick‑and‑mortar Sides locations and in‑house production infrastructure that would be hard to justify inside a looser collective.
Their latest phase is about turning a decade of uploaded content into catalog and licensing opportunities. The Sidemen Story, their documentary distributed on Netflix, moves part of the business away from platform‑dependent content toward a film‑length asset that can live across territories and windows and sit alongside traditional entertainment IP. For a company built on weekly releases, that type of project functions as a hedge against changes in recommendation systems and ad markets and puts them on the radar of partners who do not normally transact at the YouTube channel level. Around that core, the group continues to run live events, recurring charity matches, and new product launches in food, beverage, and merchandise that do not rely on a single platform to succeed. The result is a creator business that now looks less like an influencer collective and more like a self‑financed entertainment and consumer brand portfolio with seven founders still on screen to market what they own.
Entertainment
Caedrel Debuts at No. 1 on the Parasocial Streaming 100
The inaugural Parasocial Streaming 100 opens with a League of Legends co-streamer at No. 1 and a Surge 50 where chess players and shooter fans climb in the same week.
The first name on the first Parasocial Streaming 100 belongs to a man who does not play in the tournament he is winning viewers with. Caedrel, the British former League of Legends pro whose real name is Marc Robert Lamont, opens the franchise at No. 1, broadcasting from a co-stream setup while the game’s biggest teams fight on the main stage. Twitch has been his home since 2020.
Caedrel debuts atop the Parasocial Streaming 100 with 3.8 million hours watched and 74.7 thousand average concurrent viewers for the tracking week beginning June 29, according to Borealis, Parasocial’s creator intelligence platform. The edition is dated July 6. Every one of the 100 ranked names is a debut, because there is no week before this one to climb from.
Caedrel live on Twitch — MSI 2026 co-stream (tracking week 2026-06-29)
The timing is the story the numbers tell. The 2026 Mid-Season Invitational began June 28 in Daejeon, one day before the tracking week opened, and Caedrel’s co-stream ran with it. For an event-anchored creator, proximity to a live international tournament is the difference between a strong week and the top of a chart. That is the commercial lesson the inaugural edition hands the creator economy on day one: for co-streamers, the tournament calendar is the business model.
The Co-Stream Became the Main Feed
Caedrel led all League of Legends co-streamers in the first quarter of 2026, generating 19.56 million hours watched on Twitch, nearly double his nearest rival, Esports Charts reported. That is not a one-week spike. It is a lead measured over three months.
His reach is a habit audiences built over years, one tournament at a time.
A co-stream, once the secondary way to watch a match, has become the primary one for a large share of English-speaking fans. The Parasocial Streaming 100 puts a number on that shift in its very first week, and the number sits at the top of the chart rather than somewhere in the field.
The Surge 50 Runs on Origin Stories
The companion chart, the Parasocial Streaming Surge 50, measures velocity rather than raw size, and its differentiator is the origin story behind each climb. This week the top of the Surge 50 spreads across game verticals that rarely share a leaderboard, Borealis data shows.
YoDa opens the velocity chart at No. 1. Behind that debut sits a chess cluster that would have looked improbable on a streaming chart a few years ago. Anna Cramling, the Spanish-Swedish chess player, enters at No. 2, and the sisters behind BotezLive, Alexandra and Andrea Botez, land at No. 5. Chess as a Twitch spectator sport is young; a velocity chart with two of its faces near the top marks how fast that audience is compounding.
The shooter scene fills the other seats. Polish CS2 co-streamer IzakOOO debuts at No. 3, the Canadian speedrunner SmallAnt sits at No. 6, and Mixwell, the Spanish former pro, enters at No. 8 while co-streaming Valorant at the Esports World Cup. Like Caedrel, Mixwell is riding a live event, the Surge 50’s quiet echo of the story at the top of its sister chart.
Chess players and shooter co-streamers surging in the same tracking week is the Surge 50’s argument for existing.
What the First Edition Establishes
Borealis logged no top movers this edition, no Hot Shot Debut, no Greatest Gainer, because those designations need a prior week to measure against. The inaugural chart is a starting line, not a race result.
Next week the movement begins.
MSI 2026 runs deeper into July, and Caedrel’s co-stream runs with it. The second edition will show whether the tournament calendar carried him to the top or whether the No. 1 spot has an occupant who intends to stay there once the main stage goes dark.
Entertainment
Magician Xavier Mortimer Lands a TV Deal After Network No’s
A French illusionist pitched a real-life wizard show in 2019 and got turned down. Seven years and 30 million followers later, the same idea is in development.
In 2019, Xavier Mortimer walked into meetings carrying a single idea: a real-life wizard, doing impossible things in ordinary rooms. The producers passed. Seven years later the same concept is in active development, and the thing that changed is who owns the audience.
Mortimer, a French-born illusionist, is in active development on a television series adapted from his social videos, backed by Viral Nation’s film and TV development arm. He built the audience first on YouTube and his other platforms, and those numbers became the pitch that finally worked.
Tubefilter reports Mortimer carries more than 33 million followers across four platforms: 17 million on Facebook, 8.2 million subscribers on YouTube, 5.5 million on TikTok, and 3 million on Instagram. His own site reports more than 15 billion views and 30 million social followers since 2020. A development executive in 2019 was asked to bet on a concept. An executive in 2026 is being shown a proven audience.
That is the shift the creator economy keeps forcing on legacy entertainment. Owned audience now does the work a pilot order used to do, and it absorbs the risk a network once priced into every greenlight. Mortimer did not wait for permission to validate the idea. He validated it in public, one upload at a time, until the validation was the deal.
Mortimer is blunt about the first chapter.
“I pitched that idea and no one picked it up. I didn’t get my show, basically. Then social media came and I was like ‘Oh! I have a phone! I can do this!'” he told Tubefilter.
Xavier Mortimer — official YouTube channel (Real Life Wizard content series)
The Napkin That Started It
The pivot had a single origin point, and it was small. Mortimer opened a social account as musical.ly became TikTok and posted a trick built around an everyday errand.
“My first viral video was at Starbucks. I made a napkin fly and a cup of coffee come to me. The video instantly got millions of views,” he said.
That clip was the concept the producers had rejected, executed without their permission. The magician does not stand on a stage. He stands in line, and the napkin comes to him. Each upload proved the same thesis, and the audience compounded.
The revenue followed the reach, which let him raise the production stakes. “Now I can invest $20,000 or more into one video, so I start to publish long-form videos on YouTube,” he said. The economics inverted the usual order. Most magicians fund their content from touring or residency income. Mortimer’s content became the engine that funded better content.
From the Strip to the Algorithm
Mortimer was not a newcomer when the phone became his stage. He reached public recognition in France in 2006 with “L’Ombre Orchestre,” performed worldwide more than 1,000 times. He spent a three-year run in Cirque du Soleil’s “Michael Jackson ONE” in Las Vegas, where he created the character Sneaky, and he became the first Cirque du Soleil artist to open his own headlining show on the Strip.
The stage credentials explain the craft. The social numbers explain the leverage. His “Impossible Balance” short, uploaded in January 2021, became the second most-watched short on YouTube ever, with 576 million views as of 2022, according to his site.
Viral Nation signed Mortimer to its talent roster in September 2023, per the agency’s announcement. His Instagram bio now routes talent contact through a Viral Nation address, the same agency now shepherding the series back toward the format that first turned him down.
Mortimer frames the whole arc as a wager he was willing to lose. “I figured, if it works, great, if it doesn’t, well, the TV executives were right. And they were wrong!” he said.
The development is early, and Tubefilter offered no air date or platform. What it offered was confirmation in Mortimer’s own words. “We’re actually in the process of making a TV show from this concept, from what I’ve been publishing online. There are so many things happening now,” he said.
The concept that needed a network’s permission in 2019 now arrives with an audience attached. The pitch deck is the audience, and the audience already said yes.
Entertainment
YouTube Doubles Emmy Slate to Seven Creator Shows for 2026
YouTube enters seven creator shows across 14 Primetime Emmy categories this cycle, up from three in 2025, with nomination ballots open through June 22. Inside the slate, the strategy, and what a first nomination would buy.
Emmy nomination ballots opened Thursday carrying names that did not come up through writers’ rooms or network development deals: Cleo Abram‘s HUGE* If True, Brittany Broski‘s Royal Court, Kareem Rahma‘s SubwayTakes. Every one of these shows grew up on YouTube. Now their makers want Television Academy voters to call them television.
The platform confirmed a For Your Consideration slate of seven creators across 14 category submissions for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, Gold Derby reported on June 4. The submissions span variety, nonfiction, and short-form programming. Last year’s slate had three names on it.
The doubling is the story, and the calendar is the strategy. Nominations voting runs June 11 through June 22. That window is the only time a campaign converts into a ballot line, and YouTube timed its biggest push to meet it. For the creators, a nomination does what no brand deal can. It hands the work a credential the ad market and the rest of Hollywood can price.
Both sides have something to gain here. The creators get the industry’s seal. The Academy gets a ballot that looks more like how television gets made now.
Seven Shows, Fourteen Submissions
Sean Evans’s Hot Ones carries the heaviest load: Outstanding Variety Series, plus writing and picture editing submissions. Broski’s Royal Court joins it on the Variety Series ballot.
Michelle Khare enters Challenge Accepted for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special. Her episode about running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents also runs in three craft races: directing, cinematography, and picture editing.
Short form rounds out the slate. Rahma’s SubwayTakes and Sandra Jeenie Kwon’s Cabin Pressure compete in Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series. Julian Shapiro-Barnum‘s Celebrity Substitute and Abram’s HUGE* If True take the Short Form Nonfiction or Reality lane. Abram added a motion design submission for good measure.
Meet the YouTube creators bidding for Primetime Emmys — YouTube Official Blog (May 26, 2026)
YouTube’s own Emmy contenders post, published May 26, profiles six of the shows. Kwon’s Cabin Pressure appears only in the full category filing. AMPERSAND, the banner of EGOT-winning songwriters Pasek & Paul, produces Celebrity Substitute, which drops celebrities into New York City public school classrooms as substitute teachers.
Two Shutouts Built This Slate
YouTube has run this campaign before, smaller. Its first FYC event came in May 2025 at the Pacific Design Center, behind a three-creator slate of Evans, Khare, and Rhett & Link. Two months later, the 77th Emmy nominations arrived without a single YouTube creator show on them. The shutout was the second in a row.
This year the platform moved the campaign inside the building. Its June 6 FYC event ran at the Television Academy’s own Saban Media Center in North Hollywood. Abram, Rahma, Shapiro-Barnum, and Broski made the case in person.
Hot Ones gives the slate its veteran. The show has logged over four billion YouTube views across 30 seasons. Its two prior Emmy nominations came at the Daytime awards, which makes this run its first Primetime campaign.
“It’s fun to be in the conversation,” Evans said of measuring his show against the late-night incumbents.
The Clock Runs to June 22
The campaign now meets its deadline. Voting closes June 22 at 10 p.m. Pacific, and nominations land July 8. Between those two dates sits the question YouTube has spent two cycles forcing: whether Academy voters will treat a show born on a free platform as a peer of the ones born on a network slate.
The 78th Emmy Awards air live on NBC and Peacock on September 14, with or without them.
