You know 5-Minute Crafts. Now meet its owner TheSoul Group, which is building a distribution powerhouse across 100+ YouTube channels, streaming, and MSN.

If you’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes, chances are you’ve seen a video from TheSoul Group.

5-Minute Crafts is its flagship, an uberviral DIY outlet that’s racked up tens of billions of views and 400+ million followers across social platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Known for its high-energy, memeable style and sometimes impractical projects, 5-Minute Crafts has lodged itself firmly in the lexicon of digital video. Say its name, and people know exactly what you’re talking about.

But TheSoul Group’s name isn’t as ubiquitous–and the Cyprus-headquartered content producer and distributor is behind a lot more than 5-Minute Crafts. What began as a social-first content business has grown into a global streaming distribution powerhouse, with more than 8,000 long-form episodes distributed across 60+ streaming platforms in 180 countries, alongside a growing arm helping creators, brands, and IP owners navigate the rapidly converging worlds of social video and television.

TheSoul Group has built out over 100 family-friendly channels, including Bright Side (47 million subs on YouTube), 123 GO! (13M), and Teen-Z (6M). It’s also worked with brands like Crayola, Hasbro, Mattel, Audible, Play-Doh, Anchor Electronics, and Fortnite to custom-make social content based on their IPs.

For Crayola, that was crafting series Crayola Create, with episodes that drew on TheSoul’s experience with DIY video; it garnered 600 million views and 650K subscribers in seven months. With Hasbro, TheSoul developed stop-motion series Transformers One: New Adventures, which used the toy company’s own figures to tell ancillary tales around its successful 2024 origin film.

Those two partnerships are a glimpse at what really goes on at TheSoul HQ. While it built its initial business on producing social content for 5-Minute Crafts and its fleet of owned channels across multiple languages, it has since evolved.

Jonathan Shrank, its VP of Streaming & Content Partnerships, describes TheSoul in its current state as an “end to end” media company that not only is disseminating its own content on social and FAST channels, but also has a thriving white-label business working with dozens of creators, IP owners, and brands to distribute their content both online and on living room TVs.

Shrank, who joined TheSoul in 2022, spearheaded the company’s push into content placement outside socials.

“What we’ve done is taken TheSoul’s owned and operated content and built it into a streaming business,” he says. “That started by building our shows into 11- or 22-minute episodes with opening and closing title sequences, different metadata, different descriptions, and building a bouquet of FAST channels and VOD, which is essential as much of our audience originally comes from social media and they’re used to watching things on demand.”

All of this development brings TheSoul to a place where it has over 8,000 22-minute episodes of VOD content distributed on more than 60 streaming platforms in 180 different countries, he says.

Shrank also teamed up with Microsoft to secure TheSoul the rare position of official aggregator for MSN, which (through its Partner Hub) displays content to millions of daily active users on Windows, Bing, Edge, and MSN.

Being an MSN aggregator means TheSoul is able to send its house-made shows and content from its stable of partners out to all those users.

“We’ve had huge success with our third-party content partners across entertainment and news genres specifically,” Shrank says. “We’ve become really adept at understanding the platform side of [aggregation], the curational side, the format side, the length of episodes and the cadence of posting, and as a result we’ve become a trusted partner of Microsoft and a trusted partner of creators and brands as well.”

TheSoul just secured another similar partnership with Yahoo, he adds.

As a result of building TheSoul’s FAST distribution and its aggregation success with MSN, the company has been able to open additional opportunities with more partners across its entire business. (TheSoul and 5-Minute Crafts also nabbed FAST Channel of the Year at the recent 2026 TellyCast Digital Video Awards.)

TheSoul has also built partnerships with leading entertainment companies like the Harlem Globetrotters and Banijay, with whom it builds YouTube channels from the ground up, manages them, and finds streaming opportunities.

“We’re bringing new people into our over-the-top ecosystem, but then also bringing them into our YouTube ecosystem,” he says. TheSoul always has its eye out for new creator partners, but says it can be “quite judicious” when it comes to choosing whose content it distributes. Or, as Shrank puts it, “It has to be the right content for the right platform.”

For TheSoul’s own house-produced and white-label videos, the company “has become really adept at making fun, entertaining content for a global audience,” he says. “We don’t do anything political. or sports. We don’t do anything controversial. It’s just good entertainment for all ages–everything from preschool to kids to teen to family entertainment to general entertainment.”

When it comes to partners, TheSoul Group looks for creators, IP owners, and brands that hit certain criteria.

“We are looking for partners where we mutually see long-term opportunities to work together,” he says. “When we think there’s an opportunity, we commit.” Opportunities tend to come with “forward-thinking brands, and ideally nice people to work with,” Shrank adds.

At the same time, evaluating a new potential partner–whether that partner is a creator with a large library of content or a brand looking for fresh production–involves TheSoul looking to its digital and FAST platforms to develop an individualized strategy suited to the partner and their content.

For example, TheSoul will outline “a production and distribution play for a brand, letting them know what we think the opportunity would be,” Shrank says. “Then simultaneously, as it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation, we’re having those informal conversations with our platform partners to gauge their interest early. We manage those two conversations at the same time.”

During those conversations, TheSoul errs on the side of “not being overly prescriptive,” he says. “It’s really a case of making sure we have a deep understanding of what content platforms are looking for, so we can make sure to match up what potential partners are offering and the right fit for a platform.”

One example Shrank cites is what he calls an “extensive partnership” with French multinational TV production and distribution company Banijay. The first IP to emerge from TheSoul and Banijay’s collaboration is a YouTube-first series called Ava & Digger.

The series was born from a conversation at MIPCOM, Shrank says, where he and a Banijay contact were discussing pets and found out they both owned yellow Labradors.

“We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘This would make a great show,'” Shrank explains. Now, as the show is about to drop, he says it’s a “fresh, funny, and emotionally resonant series that really showcases the best of what TheSoul can do, from ideation, to production, to distribution.”

And for any creators who are intrigued by FAST and/or MSN distribution but worried about it impacting their digital presences, Shrank says exploring these new avenues has led to nothing but growth for TheSoul and its partners.

“We’re bringing our content to a whole new audience who possibly hasn’t seen it before, and as a result of that, we’re not seeing any detriment to our YouTube channels,” he explains. “In fact, it’s the opposite: We continue to grow and flourish. It’s the same thing for our creators. A whole other way for them to disseminate their content, reaching their existing audience in new ways, but also bringing in a whole new audience they haven’t had the visibility of before.”

The end result? “More watch time, more reach, more monetization, and then of course that’s a virtuous content cycle,” Shrank says. “In other words, when viewers are watching on streaming, they’re then aware they can watch on YouTube as well. It really helps creators as a kind of flywheel.”

Looking forward over the next 12 to 18 months, Shrank says TheSoul Group anticipates YouTube’s boom on TV screens to continue, and for both creator and legacy entertainment investment in short-form to grow too. He also foresees further entanglement between the digital video space and legacy entertainment, pointing to examples like the BBC’s partnership with YouTube, Fremantle’s deal with PBS Distribution, and TheSoul’s own partnership with Banijay Kids & Family.

“I think FAST content, which has become pretty ubiquitous in the U.S., will continue to grow in other key territories,” he adds. “We’ll see attraction to free, high-quality content that’s disseminated on platforms, especially connected TV platforms, and that’s why it’s been so important for us to have platform partners across multiple territories, not just the U.S.”

These are predictions, but TheSoul is ready to be nimble, Shrank says.

“What we’ve done is we’ve really tried to understand where the market’s going and pivot accordingly,” he says. “But we’re always retaining our core proposition: disseminating fantastic programming from both TheSoul and our content partners.”

Creators, content owners, brands, and media companies interested in working with TheSoul can get in touch here.

 

TheSoul Group is a Tubefilter partner.