YouTube’s latest animation darling gets picked up by Netflix

Netflix has picked up streaming rights to Glitch Studios‘ megaviral animation series The Amazing Digital Circus—but, unlike with most deals it signs, it’s giving up exclusivity and isn’t going to pull TADC off original home YouTube. In fact, moving forward, all episodes of TADC will premiere for free on YouTube and for subscription on Netflix on the very same day.

Netflix has done this sort of deal before with preschool hit Cocomelon, which also found its first home on YouTube and drives 2 billion views a month there. As part of that partnership, Netflix developed its own exclusive Cocomelon series, Cocomelon Lane, but also airs the same content folks can find for free on YouTube.

That approach is the same one it’s taking with TADC, and it’s a big difference for a streamer that normally produces its own shows in-house, or acquires outside productions for pretty tight (and often multiyear) exclusive deals. Netflix doesn’t really do free.

Why change up the model for YouTube content?

We attribute its flexibility to the fact that animated content for all ages can absolute explode on YouTube. That’s where The Amazing Digital Circus comes in. The adult-aimed show follows a motley cast of characters trapped in a virtual-reality video game, and its 25-minute pilot, uploaded by Australia-based Glitch Studios Oct. 13, 2023, now has nearly 350 million views. Its second episode, uploaded May 3, 2024, now has 122 million.

There are also hundreds of millions of views on fan content about the show, with creators like Andreas Eskander jumping into YouTube’s Top 50 most-watched channels worldwide thanks to his TADC Shorts.

The series garnered so much attention in our space that its creators were invited to headline this year’s VidSummit, where they gave a talk about how the TADC

pilot’s success on YouTube helped them find producers and raise funds to make the reason of Season 1.

We’ve seen how badly it can go when creators try to paywall content they previously promised would be free, so Netflix’s strategy to keep TADC‘s already-established YouTube fanbase happy, while introducing TADC to its own subscribers and maybe earning some AVOD revenue off it, could be a win-win for both streaming service and TADC.

YouTubers used to dream of growing off the platform and getting their own TV shows—and some of them did. But with the number of creators getting scooped up by Hollywood and now Netflix and YouTube “feed[ing] each other pretty nicely,” according to Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos, we’re thinking creators these days are looking less at TV for their next steps, and more at streaming and Hollywood studios.

Either way, TADC being on Netflix will expose the show to a whole new audience—one that’s been growing consistently since the service cracked down on password-sharing. During its last quarterly report, it said it had 277.65 million paying subscribers, an increase of 8 million from the previous quarter, and the sixth quarter in a row where Netflix saw year-over-year growth in the number of people willing to pay seemingly ever-increasing prices for its content. During that same quarter, it brought hefty profit of $2.15 billion, up 44% from Q2 2023.

So, suffice to say, Netflix is doing well. And now it’s clearly hoping to do even better by bringing the Circus under its big top.

The first three episodes of TADC go live on Netflix Oct. 4.