Hollywood has a lot to learn from creator animators (and their IPs), YouTube says in latest Culture & Trends report

Indie animation is flourishing on YouTube.

From the pop culture juggernaut that is The Amazing Digital Circus, to star-studded Hazbin Hotel (which sold to Amazon Prime Video after gathering a fandom with a YouTube pilot), to smaller titles like Worthikids‘ Bigtop Burger and Luke Humphris‘ Space Station Weird, YouTube has become a prime location for animators and studios to self-distribute their projects.

And YouTube knows it: The platform’s latest Culture & Trends report centers on the rising tide of “Animation’s New Wave.”

“At a time when the traditional media landscape is dominated by preexisting IP, independent online animators are proving the exception, creating original characters and stories with engaged fan communities and showing what it takes to be successful in entertainment today,” YouTube wrote in the report.

Basically, while Disney is busy milking yet more mediocre Marvel and Star Wars sequels and spitting on the legacies of its most beloved animated films, original animators are making megafandoms by uploading their fresh IPs to YouTube.

The report’s leading stat: 63% of 14- to 24-year-old animation fans watch original animated series created for YouTube at least once a week.

A big theme of this report is reach. Using data from “people who are active online, age 14-49,” YouTube found that indie animations on YouTube have significant international appeal, often see engagement from fans outside of official installments, and have long tails where they continue generating views months after episodes are uploaded.

For an example of all three types of reach, YouTube cited Alien Stage, an original musical series from Korean YouTuber/illustrator VIVINOS in collaboration with co-director/animator Qmeng. The show is set post-alien takeover, and follows singers who must compete live onstage, with the loser facing immediate execution.

YouTube said that from Jan-Sept. 2025, videos with “Alien Stage” in the title brought over 330 million views, 90% of which were from outside Korea. Not too surprising, considering 50% of animation fans it surveyed said they watch animation series in languages other than their own.

“Even a few years ago, it would have felt novel to see videos from an animated Korean show appearing on YouTube’s top trending video lists around the world, from the U.S. and Mexico to France and Japan,” YouTube wrote. “Yet that’s exactly what the ‘Final‘ episode of the series ‘Alien Stage,’ a YouTube-first show, achieved in 2025.”

F I N A L alone brought 40 million views. But YouTube points out it wasn’t just official episodes of Alien Stage–or official episodes of other original animated series–that get fans’ attention.

Shows like Digital Circus and Hazbin Hotel have inspired thousands of YouTube-posted fanworks–everything from meme compilations to music videos to full-blown fan episodes, drawn, animated, and even voiced in the canon’s style. These all help drive the shows’ overall traffic–and savvy animators/studios embrace that.

“In some cases, this means purposely producing content that fans can turn into remixes and memes,” YouTube wrote. “For example, the first episode of The Amazing Digital Circus

features a scene where the main character, Pomni, opens a series of doors leading into rooms. Glitch posted that still frame online but changed the room to a green screen, anticipating that fans would turn it into a meme. They did just that, helping to organically spread awareness of the show from the start.”

Glitch also carried that forward into its next production, Knights of Guinevere. In the first three days after the pilot’s release, “there were already more than 1.4K [videos] with ‘Knights of Guinevere’ or ‘knightsofguinevere’ in the title, featuring fan reactions and animatics,” YouTube said. (The pilot has 18 million views to date.)

Another reason for indie animators’ success is their willingness to source talent from YouTube, the platform said, citing EPIC: The Musical as a case study. EPIC is a Broadway-ready retelling of The Odyssey from composer Jorge Rivera-Herrans.

When Rivera-Herrans, who isn’t an artist, began posting drafts of his songs on YouTube, fans responded with animations. In the first six months of 2025, more than 4,000 fan-created videos were uploaded about EPIC, including hundreds of animatics from skilled artists.

“Noticing fans were imagining scenes and characters and turning them into animatics, Rivera-Herrans recognized these creations by uploading reaction videos to the animatics on his own channel,” YouTube wrote. “Rivera-Herrans then sourced artists directly from the active fan community, commissioning them to create official animatics for the series.”

That collaboration paid off: YouTube says the live premiere party for the full musical’s first run-through became Rivera-Herrans’ most-viewed long-form video. It has ~4.4 million views to date.

Building a fanbase on YouTube has a more direct financial upside, too.

We just covered how Luke Humpris raised $450,000+ on Kickstarter to release a TTRPG based on his original YouTube animations. YouTube cites further examples of original animated series raising big bucks from backing fans, like Dungeon Flippers raising $178K and Far-Fetched raising $57K.

Ultimately, “The creativity demonstrated by independent animators is not just transforming the entertainment ecosystem on YouTube–it’s already changing the broader industry, which is rushing to license shows and work directly with creators,” YouTube wrote. “These creators are building a blueprint for breaking through, one that shows how their processes and methods can be adopted and implemented by others to see success.”

One closing note: On the back of Iron Lung‘s success and ahead of Kane Parsons‘ A24 backrooms film premiering, legacy entertainment has attentive eyeballs on how creators are going to continue crossing into spaces once limited to Hollywood.

They might want to look to Digital Circus. Listings for a feature called “The Last Act” have popped up on Regal and Cinemark‘s websites, leading fans to suspect Glitch plans to release the show’s ninth and final episode on the big screen this June.