Preston Arsement has been a familiar face in YouTube’s gaming community for more than a decade. His adventures in games like Minecraft have brought 14.7 million subscribers to his PrestonPlayz channel, which has picked up 5.8 billion lifetime views to date.
Those are big numbers, but the creator known mononymously as Preston has upped the ante over the past year. His primary YouTube channel added 204 million monthly views in July 2023 alone. By reorganizing his media company TBNR, Preston has doubled his brand revenue, tripled his production output, and set himself up for even bigger investments.
From 1 to 100
As Preston’s star grew on YouTube, the size of his team quickly ballooned. His wife Brianna and sister Keeley became on-screen personalities, and he a hired post-production team that could “edit better for retention.” Brianna’s primary YouTube hub has amassed nearly 11 million subscribers, while Keeley reaches 2.3 million subs on her channel.
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As a result of its growth spurt, TNBR is quite busy these days. The content studio’s name is an acronym that stands for “The Best Never Rest.” It’s a reference to one of Preston’s channel names, though he’s been off the hustle culture vibes for some time now. The company’s staff now includes more than 100 team members.
“That was really the start,” Preston told Tubefilter in an interview. “How do we get post-production team members to think like the viewer, and then how do we get creative team members to do the same thing?”
But Preston eventually found out that building a collaborative work environment is easier said than done. In 2022, he launched an internal inquiry in order to improve TBNR’s operations. “We just didn’t have enough transparency within our project management systems,” Preston told Tubefilter. “And so we really had to go in and rebuild the foundation, so to say.”
Preston’s inquiry revealed numerous issues. Valuable numbers — including video budgets and ROIs — were not being properly recorded. Individual team members had to dig through different messages and messaging services to find necessary information. Project management snafus made it difficult for TBNR to take advantage of a global talent pool. “That was a really big eye-opening moment for us,” Preston told Tubefilter.
To help make sense of the mess, Preston brought on an old friend. Tony Uckun joined TBNR full-time in June 2022 and currently serves as its Chief Strategy Officer. The tech founder and entrepreneur had previously worked alongside Preston on the popular Cosmic Minecraft networks.
Uckun describes himself as an optimization obsessive who loves analyzing systems through reverse engineering. As he looked into TBNR, he saw an opportunity to streamline operations by increasing reliance on cloud-based systems. He worked with Preston to develop processes that would allow team members to access relevant info from anywhere in the world. “The idea of not being able to leverage the global talent pool has always seemed a bit silly to me,” Uckun told Tubefilter.
Reorganizing internal systems allowed Preston to take more of his operations in-house.
The 29-year-old creator had previously worked with Night, the firm known for representing MrBeast. That partnership eased Preston’s transition from a gaming-focused creator to a more versatile producer. “There was a certain number of brand partnerships that you can only kind of get if you were a gaming content creator, whereas when you’re creating live-action content, it opens up that pool to different types of advertisers,” Preston said. “That was really beneficial.”
Preston is no longer linked up with Night. These days, his gaming and non-gaming operations are both run out of a “giant space” in the Dallas area, which serves as the TBNR HQ. At a warehouse space about 30 minutes away, an art department designs the sets for the high-production-value videos that complement Preston’s gaming adventures. “This is a team of about 15 skilled individuals who are creating these set pieces that are really rivaling some of the top set pieces on YouTube right now,” he told Tubefilter.
With TBNR running smoother than ever before, Preston has started moving services in-house. His brand partnerships unit and his legal team both operate under his company’s banner — no outsourcing required.
This “in-housing” effort has produced immediate results. Preston has doubled his brand revenue, which rose to $2 million in the first half of 2023. His content empire is now getting 870.3 million views per month across 16 channels, which collectively reach more than 81 million followers. Before his reorg, he had hovered around 450 million views per month.
Preston videos have become a team effort, which leaves the titular figure in an interesting spot. Recent drama at Linus Media Group has shown the tensions that can arise as employees adapt to the intense posting schedules utilized by individual YouTube stars. As the leader of TBNR, Preston must uphold the values of his brand without ignoring input from his 100 full-timers.
“You should have your do’s and your don’ts and give these guiding principles to your team members,” Preston told Tubefilter. “But ultimately you want them to eventually become better creatives than you are, right? Because they have the time to allocate and dedicate and focus solely on coming up with content ideas. Whereas you are split and spread more thin because you’re trying to scale.”
Some of the changes that have come to TBNR help Preston strike the proper balance. He and Uckun have opened up “bottlenecks” by making sure that no one person is responsible for an entire project. “Everybody here is really passionate about what they’re doing, which also helps us avoid burnout, but it’s also being able to have the correct leaders in place,” Preston said. He is building “systems and guiding principles that will continue to help the teams feel like they’re personally evolving and they’re also growing in their careers.”
Now that he’s created a better content studio, Preston is future-proofing it.
The strategies that have been put into place at TBNR are optimized for the current era of the creator economy, but as the industry shifts, Preston will need to shift with it. That’s where his Chief Strategy Officer comes in handy.
Since Uckun joined TBNR, the studio has upgraded its wifi and servers. That change is not just a quality-of-life increase for employees; it also ensures that Preston’s empire can continue to grow without devolving into the disorganized system it used to be. “We really believe that if you’re not leveraging these tools and this technology and these innovations today, you’re going to fall behind the next two, three, four years,” Uckun told Tubefilter.
TBNR is amassing enough server space to store the entire Preston backlog in 8K, which makes it easier to ink syndication deals with platforms like Roku. And as the brand brings in thumbnail artists from all over the world, those new hires “can leverage the hardware we have in-house at extremely low latency,” according to Preston. “We’re in it for the long haul,” he said.
For the TBNR brand to continue its rapid rate of growth, it needs more than just server space and fast wifi. Preston and his team are actively investing in artificial intelligence products that can bring even more efficiency to the production pipeline. “In the future of a giant media conglomerate…we’re going to need the right tools,” Preston told Tubefilter. “And with AI continuing to grow, we want to be able to take advantage of that.”
Given the amount of success Preston has had online, many of his viewers may think that he has this YouTube thing all figured out. But one conversation with him shows his true colors: Even though he has already had a more remarkable career than most creators, he is constantly tinkering with his formula in hopes of fostering unprecedented growth. Technology, streamlined operations, and big-budget videos are all pieces of that puzzle. All Preston needs to do is keep building.
