Milestones, Fortune’s favourites and new evidence that cryptids exist. Plus, the satisfying ordeal of wealth creation.
In the interests of ado, welcome to our fiftieth issue of Inside the Media C-Suite! It’s been a long time coming. I’m Dr. Thomas Kingston, Publisher of the Media C-Suite and 30+ year veteran of the private equity industry.
Private Equity has been in the process of collision with Media & Entertainment for a long time. Not so much like a slow-motion train wreck as a collision of worlds, really. And for good reason. Over the past decade, Media & Entertainment has become a coherent industry in its own right, with global revenues of US$3.065 trillion last year: growing at nearly 5% CAGR.
That places our industry as the seventh largest in the world. But that’s not why PE is so interested in M&E. We are also the most influential industry in the world. In fact, all other industries are dependent on our industry to get the message out about what they have to sell, why they are good or why they aren’t so bad.
Our industry delivers stories. And stories are how we all receive information. They are how we come to believe what we believe. Why would Private Equity investors not be interested in the one and only industry that sells knowledge?
If only they knew!
See
Narrative Economics: How Storytelling Becomes Economic Power
The theory of narrative economics describes how storytelling turns private thought into shared information and then into collective action.
What they do know is that M&E makes money, and they want it; whether they understand how and why it makes money or not.
There has been wreckage in this collision; fortunes have been lost. In fact, one highly relevant euphemism out of the entertainment side is this:
“The fastest way to become a millionaire is to step into Hollywood as a billionaire.”
Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire, right?
And with that …
Let’s Get Started
A number of fortunes have been lost to Media & Entertainment. Media & Entertainment has, however, built a few fortunes of its own. Quite a few. And many lately.
One legendary fortune built within M&E is that of the Forbes family, which has taken an interest in such things. According to the 2025 Forbes World’s Billionaires list, there are today 116 billionaires who made their fortunes in M&E (up from 104 in 2024). Forbes ranks M&E the 9th most prodigious industry for generating billionaires, ahead of Energy.
This is what happens when starving artists unite.
Among the milestones on the road to global domination by M&E are a number of newly-minted Billionaires. Oprah Winfrey is a Billionaire. Arnold Schwarzenegger is too. Tailor Swift is a Billionaire. Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Magic Johnson are Billionaires. Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen and Rihanna are Billionaires. Kim Kardashian is a Billionaire.
Each of these Billionaires is also an investor.
Forbes doesn’t include “Tech” within Media & Entertainment, even though the majority of Billionaires from Tech are Billionaires due to social media and other technology companies that exist because of Media & Entertainment.
We’ll wait for Forbes to catch up.
While we do, our industry’s reach, depth and revenues continue to grow. And to coalesce.
This is, in part, due to Private Equity investors recognising something exceedingly rare; disruption unfolding within an expanding market.
This article explains: The Now Literal Reality of a Virtual Age
PE will always seek to profit from the decay and collapse of legacy business models that didn’t see technology coming as well as from the development of new business models arising from native, tech-borne generations that can both challenge and replace the old guard.
The market for Media & Entertainment’s product, that being content of all kinds, is limited only to the attention that humans will give it. Our population continues to grow just as technology is simultaneously freeing up and capturing our available attention.
This is a recipe for making money.
Our Take
The Media & Entertainment is no longer a collection of isolated business segments disbursed across a sector of the global economy. We are now a cohesive international industry comprised of an upstream, creative production segment and a downstream commercial distribution segment that delivers content to a globally-connected marketplace of ideas. Our product is information of every kind, conveyed as stories and delivered in every format to every person in every country.
Films and television shows are M&E. News is M&E. Sports is M&E. Video games and music concerts and social media and paperback books are M&E. Every type of content that needs to be produced by creative minds into stories for audiences to pay for is a product delivered by the M&E industry.
Economists may not yet recognise us. The concept hasn’t yet come into focus for them. But governments and billionaires and investors of all kinds are beginning to see it.
Our US$3.065 trillion in global revenues last year was generated by and around audiences. The opportunity is no longer who controlled access to the audience yesterday, but in who has access to the audiences tomorrow. To be clear, audiences are comprised of all 8.3 billion of us.
We are all the audience. We no longer require studio permission to pay attention to content we can find anywhere online.
Small, socially-adept and technologically savvy entrepreneurs evolving out of the creator economy are the drivers of audience attention today. And that is where the money is.
See:
Audience First Media Strategy in a Digital First Media Era
From acquisition to monetisation and scale, audience-first media strategies underpin today’s digital-first media enterprise.
The concept of an “audience first” business model is alien to legacy media mindsets focused entirely on ownership of distribution infrastructure. Until today, that has been the focal point for revenue generation, as well as a mechanism of separation between audiences and the creatives that produce content we all demand.
To legacy studio execs, and the investment analysts who study them, the idea of a creative with direct access to a meaningful audience has been but a myth. Any notion that such a being might generate meaningful revenue without “studio” support and distribution is fantasy. Such a creature is no more of a threat to multi-billion dollar, publicly-listed media conglomerates than Big Foot, the Yeti or the Loche Ness Monster. These cryptids do not occupy the minds of financial analysts, or studio execs.
Unless a creative mind decides to put a cryptid into wide theatrical release.
This happened last weekend.
Just Catching Up?
A lot of people are.
The cryptid in question is referred to as Markiplier by those who’ve actually seen him. His scientific name is Mark Edward Fischbach.
Mr. Fischbach is making headlines for producing and releasing an independent film, Iron Lung, on over 3,000 cinema screens and generating over US$18 million in box office receipts on its opening weekend. What’s notable about Mr. Fischbach as Markiplier, is that he accomplished this without the support of any major studio’s production or distribution by leveraging more than 38 million fans that he has cultivated online via YouTube.
See:
Platform Risk and Audience Ownership: Why Attention Without Control is a Fragile Asset
For years, such an event has been discussed in remote locations and on-line forums.
Now, the cryptid is out of the bag.
What It Means
Big things start small.
This is what Private Equity is all about. Venture capital and angel investing is the process of investing into small companies so that they can grow into big companies. Buy low, sell high.
That is the process for creating wealth. That is the opportunity audience first, direct to consumer business models offer to investors. This is how millionaires are made. Doing it again, and again, is how Billionaires are made.
It took Markiplier nearly ten years to build his YouTube audience and learn the craft of film-production before he could leverage profits from a wide theatrical release of a debut film. But what he has done is demonstrate that it can be done.
Media entrepreneurs will now build on this. What they will need are investors.
In the US, the venture capital and angel communities will begin to review a flood of new pitch decks.
In the UK, the government has another option:
Fortunes’ Favourites: The UK’s Secret Benefit to Startup Investors
The UK has a startup investment proposal. It comes with up to 72% downside protection and unlimited upside potential? Worth the risk?
Looking Forward
We are living in interesting times. Opportunities are everywhere for those with enough knowledge to recognise them and enough intelligence to act. A bit of courage helps.
I’m hopeful that the Media C-Suite can continue to offer both knowledge and insight to our community of media entrepreneurs and investors.
The 2026 Media Investor Survey
We’ve now surpassed 150 professional investors ready to take the 2026 Media Investor Survey. This is our biggest turnout yet and three times larger than our inaugural year, 2024.
I’m truly grateful for all of your support.
Our survey questionnaire is being finalised now and we hope to begin distributing them by the end of this month. With luck, and a lot of hard work, we should have the 2026 Media Investor Survey ready by early Summer.
Inside Narrative Capital
A new monthly periodical will be coming out shortly from our narrative economics team.
We’ll be tracking where capital is flowing within M&E.
The focus will be on the financial performance of narrative capital as demonstrated within both the public equity markets and private companies via announced M&A transactions and dealflow insights from both private equity professionals and media entrepreneurs.
We look forward to publishing this, and to your feedback.
In the meantime, I’m grateful for your continued support each time you visit the site and read one of our articles.
Please do comment. You can also help push us to deliver more value by adding your voice and suggestions to our Community Forums.
Help us all to “Be in the Know”. Read the Media C-Suite.
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Related Pillars
Creative Value is one of four strategic domains within the Media C-Suite. The adjacent domains are:
Explore Also: Our Industry
Representing the entire team, posts from “The Publisher” offer deeper insights into the collective mind of the Media C-Suite. Our acting Publisher is Thomas Kingston, and you may recognise his voice and style in much of the work posted under the by-line of The Publisher.
