When it comes to traditional television production, Sean Atkins thinks there’s no contest when compared to his Dhar Mann Studios. Speaking at TheWrap’s annual business conference TheGrill on Tuesday, the CEO shared that views on the eponymous YouTube channel founded by Dhar Mann and their Facebook page far outpaces linear TV with an average 45 million a day.
With a 125,000 square foot production space producing five hours of scripted content weekly, Mann and his team operate at an incredibly high frequency. His studio employs over 200 people and feeds an audience of 140 million fans across YouTube, Facebook and other platforms.
“If I wanted to play against Nielsen. I’ll take all the views – just do U.S., just do primetime, just do 18 to 49,” Atkins told moderator and CAA agent Brent Weinstein, comparing Mann’s channel to traditional ratings categories. “He would be the largest scripted television show on U.S. linear television every single night, just to give you a sense.”
“Any day of the week his streams would have outperformed the finale of ‘Game of Thrones’ by three times,” he added.
Mann himself had to leave TheWrap’s conference at the DGA Theater Complex in Hollywood early due to an unexpected conflict, but his studio’s head of production Toni Gray joined Atkins to give the audience a peek behind the curtain into how their operation works. The studio operates on a 30-day production schedule from ideation to publication. They have eight crews shooting simultaneously with plans to gear up to nine by the end of the year.
Gray came from the traditional entertainment world and said that making the transition to digital was tough at first, but producing impactful work Mann is known for has made it all worth it.
“Hollywood frowned upon jumping into this world, and I have to tell you that it is a totally different life,” she said. “It is an incredible culture. It’s collaborative. We basically tell stories at the water cooler. We can ideate and deliver in 30 days.”
The company has mastered the efficiency of space and time in order to ensure consistent output and quality. They developed a tailored software system that breaks down scripts and lets every department know what is needed for each production the following day.
“If you’re sitting in wardrobe, you get a checklist that says, of these nine productions going on today, the following outfits for this actor or actress need to be in this location at this period of time,” Atkins explained. “There’s no people involved. It’s literally just software that delivers that.”
“You get this unbelievable efficiency, where they will produce a TV episode for approximately 1/100th the cost of a linear average episode,” he said.
Dhar Mann Studios also organizes their productions in such a way so that every studio has the basic setup for any kind of location – be that a school, retail establishment or workplace – to cut time for setup and strike for production crews.
“It’s always about using data to analyze the efficiency, to make sure that we can kind of keep that cost efficiency down,” Atkins said.
Data from National Research Group shared on a lunchtime panel earlier at TheGrill on Tuesday revealed that Gen Alpha (individuals born after 2010) are increasingly interested in going to the movie theaters. Weinstein asked Mann’s team if they had any plans for a theatrical release in the future.
Though Atkins and Gray kept mum about plans for a theatrical push, the CEO said the next step for the company is to lean into in-person experiences with a national tour that allows the “Dhar Mann Fam” to act in their own digital short.
Watch TheGrill’s full The Rise of Creator-Led Studios panel below:
