Update, Oct. 6: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the relationship between WME and Erling Haaland.
WME just unveiled Creator Labs, a new team within its Digital Division that helps clients launch and scale YouTube channels without having to independently hire production support.
This team was behind the 2025 launch of former MSNBC host Joy Reid‘s channel (which now has more than half a million subscribers). It also, according to The Hollywood Reporter, helped comedian Julian Shapiro-Barnum get multiple sponsorships for the launch of his late-night-style webseries, Outside Tonight with Julian Shapiro-Barnum. That show’s dedicated channel has a little over 7,000 subscribers.
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Creator Labs handles virtually everything for clients across channel management, production, and distribution. WME says it participates in the very early ideation phase for a channel, and once the channel is live, it offers production services, video posting, and syndicated distribution, plus the aforementioned sponsorship-securing.
With Reid’s channel, for example, it advised on content and publishing strategy, and provided channel operations, video editing and packaging design, livestream support, community management, and monetization setup.
“This was largely a reaction to the state of the entertainment industry and the marketplace where we find ourselves, where YouTube has in many ways deconstructed all the different pieces that you have in what historically was a network or distribution operation and put that in the hands of the creator,” Jad Dayeh, Senior Partner and Co-Head of WME’s Digital Media Division, told THR.
Ben Davis, Dayeh’s fellow Co-Head, added, “We’ve been investing in it and building this out slowly over the past couple years and testing and iterating around it and have found traction born out of how do we evolve our services for this new day and age? Our clients now own their distribution, so how does the role of an agent change.”
WME, which laid off 30 staffers in March to “[reduce] layers, [increase] responsibilities, and [remove] bureaucracy,” hired 11 people to support Creator Labs and its adjacent team Creator Sales. The sales team has worked with clients like Erling Haaland.
Simultaneously, WME announced it’s invested in social video company Astra Media; Astra’s celeb partners include Khloe Kardashian and Kevin Hart. Details about that partnership are slim.
