These days, with YouTube and TikTok the entertainment space for all ages, one-third of kids want to be content creators when they grow up. But back in 2012, if you asked a bunch of ten-year-olds what their dream jobs were, the digital world was still fledgling enough that you would’ve gotten a lot of traditional answers–things like “astronaut,” “teacher,” and “veterinarian.”
Not if you asked Jordan Barclay, though.
Barclay was just five years old when he first started editing YouTube videos, and was ten when he posted his first video as EYstreem. He knew he wanted to do this for as long as possible, and officially registered “The EYstreem Company” as a teenager.
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Now, at 23, Barclay’s original channel is the most-watched global gaming YouTube channel produced in Australia. He has 13.6 million subscribers and brings in between 75 and 100 million views a month by posting new Minecraft content at least once a week.
But his business has grown far beyond his own channel. “EYstreem” went on to become Spawnpoint Media, a multimillion-dollar production studio in Melbourne. Barclay opened the studio in 2024, backed by a $5 million deal with Spotter, and now it posts dozens of long- and short-form videos a month to a handful of proprietary channels, including Firelight (4.2M subs), Milo and Chip (4.1M), EMazing (307K), and Make Waves (424K).
As we wrote back in 2024, Spawnpoint operates on a unique model. When it wants to add a channel to its portfolio, it doesn’t go hunting for an established creator to sign. Instead, it conceptualizes and develops a channel’s creative identity and planned content, then goes external and casts local Australian talent to become the channel’s face and voice.
Spawnpoint’s team–now numbering over 100 people–scripts each video, builds any digital set they’ll need in Minecraft, and brings in the actors to record their voiceovers in the Melbourne studio’s booths. Some content, like all videos on the Make Waves channel, require live-action teams and completely physical sets.
In the last two years, off the back of the deal with Spotter, Spawnpoint has become “more than just a full-service production company, we have expanded staff globally and locally to bring business functions internal,” Barclay tells Tubefilter. “Data analysis, brand partnerships, marketing, ecommerce operations and finance, product–it’s all internal.”
“The Spotter deal came at a really critical time for us,” he adds. “We were at a stage where we needed significant capital to take the business to the next level, and that meant building our multi-story HQ here in Melbourne.”
The headquarters now has 12 recording suites, a cyclorama, a full soundstage, automated AV systems, offices, conference rooms, and more. “That facility is what’s allowed us to scale production the way we have, and it’s what makes our live action content like Make Waves possible,” Barclay says. “Creative work really benefits from having people in the same space, and live action simply isn’t possible without it. So that early capital was very critical for us, and it’s a big reason we still have a really good relationship with Spotter.”
And, to pair with all that high-production-quality content, Spawnpoint has focused on developing long-term partnerships with brands.
Spawnpoint’s strategy with brand deals has involved appealing to parents. Barclay is very well aware of just how many parents co-view YouTube with their kids, so Spawnpoint keeps parents front-of-mind when developing ad integrations.
“The reason brands love us so much is because we have better conversion,” he says. “We significantly exceed their expectations.” The reason? Spawnpoint factors in longevity. Compared to, for example, kids’ content airing on TV, “These videos live forever,” Barclay says. “So we treat ads as content, and because of that, we have multiple ads where we see 0% viewership drop because our viewers have chosen to watch.”
He calls attention to Odoo, a business platform that’s one of Spawnpoint’s longtime partners. Content promoting Odoo is obviously aimed at co-watching parents, but it still has to be interesting enough that kids don’t want to move on to another video.
“One month,” Barclay explains, “they wanted us to promote their inventory product. So we created a Minecraft video where an underwater civilisation had been destroyed by the land people, with some light education around overfishing. To rebuild the city, we needed a lot of resources, which meant we needed inventory management. The ad is built into the story. It’s part of the content, not separate from it.”
That, he says, is “how we achieve 0% retention dip on many integrations, by treating integrations like our own content, not ads. Viewers choose to watch out of enjoyment, rather than be forced to.”
And because they choose to watch Spawnpoint’s ads, the company is “selective about who we work with,” Barclay says. “We’d rather say no upfront than deliver a bad result.”
On top of income from brand deals, Spawnpoint is now making “a lot” from what Barclay calls “non-YouTube platforms.”
That includes “syndication across platforms like Roku, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Spotify,” he says. “So we’re looking ahead at things like Netflix and Netflix kids.”
The studio is specifically looking for expanded opportunities for its kids’ brand Milo and Chip, which follows two brothers through their Minecraft adventures and generated 16 billion watch minutes from May-October 2025. (For reference, the megahit KPop Demon Hunters generated 20.5 billion in the same time period.)
“It’s been a massive success. 16 billion watch minutes between May and October 2025 is almost the same as SpongeBob SquarePants, and well over half of Bluey’s global watch minutes. So it’s doing really great.”
Barclay adds that Spawnpoint is dipping its toes into new monetization with Milo and Chip, with the IP selling hundreds of thousands of Minecraft skin packs and thousands of Milo plushies.
“The first [Milo and Chip] skin pack outsold Star Wars on Minecraft Marketplace and is still our number one best-seller,” Barclay says. For the Milo plushie, “We launched and within two weeks, we were completely sold out. We had 4,000 orders with no paid marketing whatsoever.”
“We didn’t anticipate how strong the IP had become,” he adds.
Now that Spawnpoint knows what its creations are capable of, “Our real focus for the next year or two is brand partnerships and merchandise,” Barclay says. “We see both of those as significantly bigger businesses than our content business.”
Spotter is a Tubefilter partner.
