For most of the last century, Disney's instinct when somebody else used its characters was to send a lawyer. This week it did the opposite. TikTok creators are getting licensed access to Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and FX, and the best of what they make will be carried on Disney+ itself.

We also went into our own data and found the opposite of the advice everybody gives about posting consistently. Sixteen channels that upload once or twice a quarter each published a video longer than forty minutes in the past seven days, and every one of them cleared a million views. One of them is an 88-minute Minecraft documentary that has done 6.4 million views in three days. In Creator on the Rise, we meet the engineer building the Chrome dinosaur game as a real physical machine, who has pulled 43 million views on a single Short doing it.

Plus the sword company whose own YouTube channel has 23 million subscribers, and a week of releases led by the biggest opening weekend in box-office history. Let's get into it.

This week's deep dive

Disney Hands Its Characters to Creators

On Wednesday, August 5, Disney and TikTok announced a licensing agreement that lets TikTok creators build short-form videos using characters and scenes from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, FX and hundreds of other films and series in the Disney library. Creators opt in, and a curated selection of what they make will run in two places: on TikTok, and inside Disney+ in a feed called Verts. Verts is Disney's own answer to a TikTok feed, launched in March this year for US subscribers on mobile: you tap an icon in the navigation bar and swipe vertically through short clips pulled from films and shows in the Disney+ catalogue, with an algorithm choosing what comes next and a one-tap jump into the full title. There is also a Disney Creator Ambassador Program attached, offering rewards, extra visibility, access to exclusive events and what Disney describes as career development pathways. It pilots in the US in the coming months, with other markets to follow.

It is worth being clear about how large a reversal this is. Disney effectively wrote the modern playbook for intellectual property enforcement, and its default response to fan-made content has been the takedown notice. What it has agreed to here is not tolerance, it is distribution. The company will license the characters out and then carry the results on its own paid service. Disney's Chief Marketing Officer framed it as "The best storytellers are fans first," which reads better once you see the scale of what Disney is responding to: TikTok users shared an average of 6.5 million film and television posts a day across 2025.

The strategic logic is about Verts more than about TikTok. Disney+ skews older than Disney would like, vertical video is where the young end of the audience lives, and a feed like this needs a volume of content that Disney cannot produce itself at short-form economics. When Verts launched in March it carried only catalogue clips, and Disney said at the time that creator content reflecting its fandoms would follow. This is that plan arriving. Licensing fans is the cheapest content pipeline available for a vertical feed, and every video doubles as promotion for the franchise underneath it.

This is also the second time Disney has built this exact pipeline, and the first one is the more revealing. In December it signed a three-year agreement with OpenAI covering more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars for use in Sora, alongside a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. Talent likenesses and voices were excluded, and, as with this week's deal, a selection of the fan-made shorts that came out of it was earmarked to stream on Disney+. Twice now Disney has licensed its characters to somebody else's short-form tool and then routed the output back onto its own service. The company has evidently decided that the risk of its characters turning up everywhere is smaller than the risk of them being absent from where attention actually is, and that if fans are going to make this content regardless, licensing the characters and taking a share of the distribution beats issuing takedowns.

Zooming Out

For twenty years the argument about fan content was a legal one. This settles it as a commercial one. Disney has decided that its fans are a production capability, and no per-video production budget has been announced, so what creators are being paid in is reach on Disney+ and a place in an ambassador programme. The mechanism worth watching is the curation. Whoever decides which fan videos get promoted onto Disney+ is running one of the most valuable recommendation shelves in entertainment, and no part of this week's announcement explains how that decision gets made.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

The Channels That Almost Never Post

Every piece of advice about growing on YouTube tells creators to post often and keep it short. In the past seven days we logged sixteen channels with at least 250,000 subscribers that upload once or twice a quarter, and every one of them published a video longer than forty minutes that cleared a million views. The longest runs two and a half hours. These are the channels that look asleep right up to the week they do not.

This week's single upload, channels that post once or twice a quarter

Wifies · 88 min · 1 upload in 90 days — 6.4M

Nexpo · 52 min · 1 upload in 90 days — 3.0M

The Walten Files · 80 min · 2 uploads in 90 days — 1.6M

MinuteTech · 2 hr 26 min · 1 upload in 90 days — 1.4M

Each bar is one video. Wifies posted "The Search For The Leviathan" on Monday, an 88-minute fictional documentary investigating whether a sea monster exists in Minecraft, and it has done 6.4 million views in three days, running 1.7 times the median of everything that channel has published in two years. Nexpo's "The Internet's Deepest Rabbit Hole" runs 52 minutes and has done 3.0 million. The sharpest jump belongs to The Walten Files, an indie analog-horror series whose usual upload is a 12-minute episode: "Faces of Grief" runs 80 minutes and has done 1.6 million views in five days, 3.8 times that channel's two-year median. MinuteTech's "Surviving Lifesteal" is the longest of the group at two hours and 26 minutes.

The pattern is not uniform, and it is worth saying so. Several of the sixteen came in below their own norms: Sam and Colby's 91-minute asylum video did 4.19 million views against a two-year median of 11.3 million, and ErikTheElectric's 42-minute ghost-kitchen video did 2.71 million against 12.0 million. Posting rarely does not guarantee a big number. What it does guarantee is that when the number arrives, it arrives on one video instead of thirty. Samay Raina published a single video in the previous 90 days, and Sunday's episode of India's Got Latent has done 30.9 million views.

Why it matters

Almost every workflow for finding creators sorts on recency and upload volume, because those are the fields that are always populated. A channel with one upload in 90 days looks dormant in a dashboard, has no rate card in circulation, and gets filtered out before anybody reads the title. It is also, per placement, some of the longest-dwell inventory on the platform, and a viewer who stays with something for 88 minutes is a different proposition to one who watches a 90-second Short. The useful adjustment is to stop screening on how often a channel posts and start screening on views per upload, which produces a completely different list.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

→ YouTube is testing outlier multipliers inside its Research tab, which tell a creator how far a video ran past its own channel's average, alongside a filter for what their existing viewers watch elsewhere on the platform.

→ Razer bought the assets of StreamElements on July 31 for an undisclosed sum, which puts the overlays, alerts, chatbots and sponsorship-management tooling used daily by 2.6 million creators inside a hardware company.

→ YouTube terminated six female-run ASMR channels for linking out to adult content hosted elsewhere, and says the removals apply a long-standing policy rather than any new rule about ASMR.

→ Reddit's CEO told investors the company will test a spoken version of Reddit later this year, after watching nearly 10 million TikTok posts get tagged #redditstories by creators reading its threads aloud.

→ PUBG put $95,000 of prizes behind a contest for creator-built experiences inside its new Playgrounds sandbox, joining Roblox and Fortnite in paying people to build things in its game.

Add to your watch list

Creator on the Rise

Engineezy

Mechanical engineering builds • ~1.28M subscribers • Canada

Engineezy is a mechanical engineer who builds physical versions of things that only exist in software, and his current project is the Chrome dinosaur game. The intellectual property here is worth naming, because it explains why the series works: the dino is the offline error-page game Google has shipped inside Chrome since 2014. Nobody markets it, nobody sells it, there is no film in development and no rights holder promoting it, and almost everyone has played it by accident. That leaves a universally recognised piece of IP sitting completely unattended, which is a rare thing for a creator to be able to build a series on. His Shorts documenting the build, first a scrolling conveyor-belt cactus track and then a working jumping mechanism, have done 43.6 million and 10.8 million views against a channel median of about 1.6 million, so 27 and roughly 7 times his normal. He has 659 million lifetime views and posts as rarely as the channels in our data story above. For brands he is one of the cleanest fits on the platform for tools, CAD software, 3D printing, electronics and prototyping services, and his biggest builds are running with no sponsor attached in our index.

Watch the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Mini Katana Built the Audience Instead of Renting It

Mini Katana sells Japanese-style swords direct to consumers. It was founded in 2020 by Isaac Medeiros, it is not a household name, and its own YouTube channel has 23 million subscribers, which is more than almost any other brand-owned channel on the platform and more than the vast majority of full-time creators. The company treats that channel as its primary marketing rather than a support act. In the last 90 days our index logged 138 Shorts from it, pulling 57.1 million views between them, and on August 1 a single Short titled "Every Katana Owner Starts Like This..." did 14.6 million views on its own, roughly a quarter of everything the channel gathered in three months. Medeiros has said the business reached eight figures in revenue without buying ads.

The move worth stealing is that the content is about the product and it still works. There is nothing lifestyle-adjacent in that Short, it is a sword being tested at close range. Most brands assume their own product is not interesting enough to hold a feed, so they buy access to somebody else's audience instead and start again every quarter. Mini Katana built the audience around the thing it sells, which means every view is already qualified and the marginal cost of the next video is a filming day rather than a media buy. The honest caveat is that this needs a product people want to watch and it takes years to compound. If you sell something physical and demonstrable, though, it is worth asking whether anyone has seriously tested what your own channel could carry.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" Breaks the All-Time Opening Record

The film opened on July 31 and took roughly $360 million domestically in three days, past the $357.1 million that Avengers: Endgame held, making it the biggest opening weekend in history. Film YouTube is in full breakdown mode: New Rockstars has published five separate videos on the film in ten days, and its spoiler breakdown has done 2.47 million views, close to 11 times what that channel normally lands. Read the numbers.

SummerSlam Ran Two Nights in Minneapolis

WWE staged SummerSlam across August 1 and 2 at U.S. Bank Stadium. The Hell in a Cell match between Oba Femi and Brock Lesnar has done 2.81 million views on WWE's channel, nearly 12 times its usual, and Roman Reigns retaining against Seth Rollins on the second night has added another 1.32 million. Kevin Owens also returned after 17 months out with a neck injury, which is generating its own run of reaction videos. See the full results.

Ariana Grande Returned With "petal"

Her eighth album arrived on July 31, her first in over two years, and the title-track video has done 14.6 million views in six days. It was shot on VistaVision and ends with Grande taking a garden chainsaw to a panel of executives, which has given music YouTube plenty to work with in reaction videos and frame-by-frame reads. Watch the video.

K-Pop Stacked Two Big Releases in Two Days

BABYMONSTER's "MOON" landed on August 2 and has done 23.5 million views, and aespa's "Switchblade" with Ty Dolla $ign followed on August 3 and has done 12.1 million. Reaction channels, dance covers and vocal-analysis creators are working through both at once, which is what makes a stacked release window reliably good for the K-pop coverage economy. Watch "MOON".

"Lanterns" Premieres on August 16

HBO's Green Lantern series arrives in ten days, with Aaron Pierre as John Stewart and Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan investigating a murder in the American heartland. The trailer that dropped on July 24 has kept accumulating rather than fading and now sits at 31.3 million views in our index, so there is a fortnight of theory videos and DC-continuity explainers ahead of the premiere. Read the details.