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Why Creators Like Kai Cenat are Playing Dodgeball for $500K
00:23:05
Next in Media spoke with Drew Muller, VP and General Manager of House of Highlights, about how the Warner Discovery-owned property is looking to bridge sports fandom with top creators' content via the Creator League. The event, founded in 2023, features top creators such as Kai Cenat, Jesser and FaZe Rug playing a series of tournaments in sports such as slamball, dodgeball and basketball for big prize money, both on social platforms and streaming services like HBO Max.
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- [00:00]
A
Looking to get more out of your YouTube advertising? With view Planner, you can buy with total confidence and clarity. View Planner is a verified YouTube brand suitability and contextual targeting partner in the YouTube measurement program. Recognized by Google as a trusted and independent leader in driving and measuring performance on YouTube, their advanced technology gives you a clear edge. Only with View Planner we're talking custom curated contextual collections, exclusive content strategies, transparent reporting and AI driven optimization to deliver real results. Don't let your budget go to waste. Partner with View Planner. Experience the difference. Visit viewplanner.com now to unlock your full advertising potential on YouTube. That's V U E P L-A-N-N-E-R.com this week on Next in Media, I talked to Drew Mueller. He's the VP General Manager of House of Highlights, which amazingly has been part of Warner Discovery slash Bleacher Report family for over almost a decade. Mueller caught me up on the brand's growing streaming presence, particularly this year's ongoing rollout of Creator League, which pits big name YouTube and Twitch stars against each other, playing stuff like flag football and dodgeball. Mueller also talked about what it's like trying to get young viewers to watch a new live event and how brands like Pizza Hut are dropping into the fray. Let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to NEXT to Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Drew Muller. He is the VP and General manager of House of Highlights. Hey Drew, thanks for being here.
- [01:27]
B
How's it going Mike? Great to be here. Great to be chatting with you.
- [01:30]
A
Yeah. Excited about to talk to you about a bunch of things you guys have going on. You know, I think most people know the House of Highlights story and that, you know, the, the, the, the legend of the one guy starting an Instagram thing and it gets bought by a big media company. It's been a long time, but maybe you catch people up on like where things are, how you guys are integrated, what you're, what's the, what's the latest state of affairs for the brand?
- [01:50]
B
Yeah, definitely. So over the last six, seven years or so, House of Highlights has, you know, gone from that Instagram account to becoming the biggest sports brand on social media in the U.S. so what that means is, you know, we're over 100 million followers. We're typically doing, you know, 3 to 4 billion views a month just across our, our social accounts. And you know, strategically the focus has been on scaling House of Highlights into a multi platform media business. So my role again as, you know, the general manager, overseeing the business has been, how can we focus squarely on the under 34 sports fan and build content and platforms for them to come into our ecosystem and spend as much time with us as possible. So from a consumer standpoint, fans are typically interacting with House of highlights on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and they're seeing a mix of the best sports highlights that they need to see. Viral youth culture and user generated content, as well as creator led IP in different series that we've scaled to entertain fans and get them spending as much time with our content as possible.
- [03:00]
A
All right, so hold that point on the creator stuff, but has the mission, the editorial mission changed? It's in the name. It was very highlight driven. Where it sounds like you've really branched out of doing a little bit more just being a collector and aggregator to really being like an original content producer or having your own identity.
- [03:16]
B
No, that, that's exactly right. I think we, we solved a real audience need early on, which was distributing highlights on social media before it became something that everybody did. And I think that gave us an amazing lens into how young people consume sports and consume content. So once we got really good at just, you know, the distribution of highlights and viral content, we said to ourselves, well, you know, can we make more of what we curate? And that led us to some really successful franchises and just kind of insights around where young people are spending their time in ways that we can not just distribute highlights there, but also create additional entertainment and content so that they're spending even more time with House of Highlights, which I think has shaped how people view what the brand is today, which is more than just kind of an aggregator and is a, that one stop shop for everything you'd want to see in sports and youth culture and entertainment.
- [04:14]
A
It's funny, my, my 15 year old like was excited. Like when I'm, when I'm like interviewing someone from the trade desk, he's like, I don't just find that very interesting, this one. He was like, he's like, oh, I know some of those guys. Who is it? Like, it's interesting that you've been able to maintain that youth audience over time, which is always changing and hard to do.
- [04:30]
B
Yeah, especially as you get into, you know, 70, 80, 90 million followers. Right. It's, it's that natural evolution where you know, you have this more niche young audience in the early years and then as you get to mass scale, you know, youth culture always influences broader culture in the same, you know, forever rock and roll and a million other instances. But the Challenge that we kind of always confront when we're talking as a team is how to continue to serve that young audience as our number one consumer despite now reaching tens of millions of people that are not in that target audience. And it can be easy to try to, you know, be something to everyone, which at scale can really water down your voice and your strategy. So I think it really does put the onus on us to continue to stay relevant to, you know, the, the 15 year olds out there and say what, what does House of Highlights need to be doing now so that that next generation is still interested in us?
- [05:26]
A
Okay, so then where, how have things changed in terms of the business working with brands? Where there at one point you were a primarily social media driven thing, you are still, you know, they're only have so many sales rights probably, but now you're on television. How is that evolved with how you can work with brands and what you can bring to the table as a business?
- [05:44]
B
The advertising business for House of Highlights has grown to a, you know, well into the eight figures. And I think the way that we've partnered with brands historically has been figuring out creative ways to bring them into culturally relevant conversations and deeply engaging formats that don't just feel like kind of advertising and brand slap creative, but are natural and fun and, you know, ephemeral. So as we've moved more and more out of kind of short form and quick hitting content into longer formats, the ways that we've integrated brands I think have been just more leaned in I guess is the best.
- [06:21]
A
It's harder when you have only so much time to do those things.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So instead of just kind of end cards or quick hits, we're able to kind of develop, you know, minute, two minute custom segments and things into longer form content. But I think it also informed a lot of our investment in YouTube where House of Highlights has scaled massively over the past few years. And knowing that that is the future of TV from our perspective and our ability to kind of be the leading sports channel on the future of TV is where we see a lot of advertisers showing a ton of interest is to say, like, hey, you know, you have, you know, 30, 40% of your consumption on YouTube actually coming on TV devices. How do we get into that lean back environment where you actually have teenagers and you know, 20 some odds watching House of Highlights, YouTube on the living room TV. So like that's where we want to be. That's opened up a lot of new doors for us with brands for sure.
- [07:16]
A
And you kind of led me to the question, I'm assuming you've seen the patterns change, like are the CTV sessions or the YouTube CTV sessions, I guess longer and different kinds of content, different audiences. Like, what does that look like compared to, you know, what we think of as the phone centric crowd?
- [07:32]
B
No. So we've seen our TV device consumption on YouTube, I would say double over the last three years. And on House of Highlights, YouTube. One of our bread and butters has always been the full game recap. Meaning, yeah, we have it for, you know, we've done it for NBA, mlb, Club, World cup, even French Open most recently. And the beauty of it is to say, hey, you might not have watched the full two or three hour game, but we're going to give you the eight, nine, ten minutes of just what you want to see in a, in a condensed format. And people watch that, you know, at such a high degree and such a high scale on TVs that it's kind of informed how we're thinking about investing in new league properties and also the types of ways that we can bring brands into that format. So it doesn't necessarily make it feel intrusive to the, to the viewer, but it definitely has opened our eyes to how much kind of house of Highlights can become that TV brand. And thinking about our programming as almost TV shows because a TV show, right, is not just a series or a sitcom, it's just what is on the TV device. And that's how we're really thinking about some of the longer hour, two hour programming bets that we're making.
- [08:46]
A
Yeah, that was his staple in my house during the next playoff run. It's funny that you guys show up in SEO just as prominently as many of the traditional sports news services or broadcasters, which is kind of, it's pretty, it's pretty powerful, I would imagine.
- [08:59]
B
Absolutely. And a lot of that came from the comment sections, right? Like we read the comment sections religiously every single night. And a lot of the formats or the decisions within those full game recaps, knowing that many channels try to do the same thing, is informed by a feedback loop with fans of like, hey, you actually missed this type of moment. Or I'd like to see like for, for tennis for example, which we had never programmed before, we got a ton of feedback of people saying, hey, you're missing all of the break points. And that might not seem impactful from a, you know, a non tennis fan, but those are.
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A
The tennis knows the game is like, you got to show.
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B
And we made that small Change and, and there's a million examples like that. But I think that's what separates the approach we take to those formats versus some of the others.
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A
Interesting. Okay, you met, you touched on how you were, you were working a lot more with creators, obviously. Tell us, so what is the Creator League? It's going on right now, right? Give us the origin story and where is it headed?
- [09:56]
B
So Creator League, for those that don't know, it's House of Highlights, owns and operates a sports league for creators. So what that means is instead of athletes competing in sports events and competitions, it's some of the Internet's biggest Twitch streamers and YouTubers and TikTok creators. And you know, where this came about was about three years ago. A bunch of us were in a room doing a big brainstorm and we, you know, we said, what would a sports league look like in the future that was built specifically for, you know, super online Gen Z sports fans? And we kind of wrote down a couple of the things that we all clustered around and it was the idea of having creators compete instead of traditional athletes. It was about having formats that were super action dense with, you know, very little downtime or timeouts. It was about it being two way and interactive. So like allowing fans to kind of influence outcomes, to talk with each other, to have a lean forward viewing experience.
- [10:53]
A
Where they're participating to a degree.
- [10:54]
B
Exactly. Very participatory. And to also distribute it on social and just to meet people wherever they were and to make it as easy as possible to watch and consume it. And that's what resulted in Creator League.
- [11:07]
A
And but this wasn't. Sorry to interrupt you. This wasn't like a, a goof or. This wasn't like a. This reminds me of like celebrity softball or my mind goes to like MTV Rock a jock, if any remembers that.
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B
Like this was totally.
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A
It sounds like you were trying to do something, you know, quote unquote serious.
- [11:21]
B
No, absolutely, absolutely. And it's become more and more serious since then. But it really came from that insight of saying, you know, we program the traditional sports leagues as well as possible.
- [11:33]
A
Right.
- [11:33]
B
But what if we wanted to own our own league? And the reality is, you know, we're not going to compete with the traditional sports leagues in terms of high level of competition and professional athletes. Where we could win and compete is seeing where young people were spending their time and it was consuming creator live streams and creator content. So the challenge was then how do we translate that into House of Highlights as role as a brand and what's our right to win. And it was sports entertainment. So taking creators that, you know, maybe your children or nieces or nephews are used to watching behind their, you know, streaming setups in their room, they've never maybe seen them below waist level. Right. Putting them on a basketball court and saying let's play. It just led to a very different novel entertainment idea that is then scaled into a full league format this year. So we kind of went from singular moments in time, like these big kind of pay per view moments to a full on season. Totally. So like a four team, you know, six event, $500,000 on the line is where we currently are with the season that's rolling out and culminating in November.
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A
What events did you start with and what are you doing?
- [12:40]
B
This year we did a golf like closest to the pin showdown was our first event tied to the match. Since then we've done five on five basketball and dodgeball and slam ball and go karting. Kind of a variety of different fun formats that kind of check that action dense box. This season we have a lot of those similar formats. We've done dodgeball, we just did a slam ball event. We have flag football coming up next weekend in Atlanta and then it continues with basketball knockout and five on five basketball and then a championship series as well. But again, a lot of what we found success with at the time was a legitimate gamble. Like it seemed like something we were, you know, throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck and now has been replicated by a lot of the biggest leagues that are now doing their own versions of creator competitions. But at the time, you know, it's really a credit to the TNT sports and be our leadership to hear this pitch idea and say like yeah, you know, go for it and it. And it really is a matter of how they've kind of empowered House of Highlights to be this, you know, innovation hub that goes out and tests new wonky things that they see in the in the next gen consumption and come back with learnings and insights and let that inform what becomes our big IP bets.
- [13:55]
A
And so what kind of creators are we talking about? Are they in all the same events? Because I'm assuming just because you're good at basketball doesn't mean you're necessarily good at dodgeball or vice versa. So it's got to be hard to find those. What does the roster look like and who's good and what.
- [14:10]
B
So right now we have four teams that are captained by huge creators. So one of whom is named Mark Phillips. He's known as Supreme Dreams online He's one of the members of RDC World, Jason the Ween, who's a huge Twitch streamer your age, who's a huge Twitch streamer, and Ray, who's also a huge Twitch streamer. So we are optimizing more for audience fit and audience relevance in terms of choosing those captains versus athletic prowess. And what we did this year was we allowed them to draft teams from a pool of creators that we signed up. And that pool of creators had over 250 million followers. But we want to pick personalities and characters that will really care and view it as a pride badge and something.
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A
They want to win.
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B
Exactly.
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A
It's fun, I'm sure, but they are, they are competitive.
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B
Yeah, we want competitive people who really care. And that, that literally started on draft night and has continued ever since. So that was why we made this investment in a formal league structure, so that we had continuity and smack talk and anticipation that could go from event to event as opposed to just having a huge spike and then, you know, talk to the audience again in three or four months.
- [15:22]
A
Right. And so the season goes on over a period of time. You know, like you, you have a great promotional platform built in, obviously, but it's not easy to start a new league. You know, in general, people would assume that this audience doesn't watch things live as much or with regularity. Have you been able to create that urgency? What kind of patterns are you seeing in terms of viewership?
- [15:43]
B
So that that has been the North Star of, you know, what we challenge ourselves with for Creator League to make sense. Right. It's like if we can drive live appointment viewing audience for the under 34 demo, we've achieved something because that's the audience that we see kind of coming out of that sports cable viewing experience so aggressively. And that's where we've really won. For for example, Creator League this season, season to date, is driving just over a Hundred thousand under 34 average viewers across a two hour broadcast Friday night primetime. So essentially that's how we're viewing kind of the parallel of, you know, how many under 34 live views. That's a pretty great rating in, on.
- [16:27]
A
In any time period, right? For that audience.
- [16:30]
B
Exactly. So that's where we're starting first and foremost is building like a can't miss live viewing experience for under 34 fans to show up in Mass. But then at the same time as House of Highlights, true to the name, like we don't want to program live events if there aren't rich viral highlights that come of it. The Highlights that have come of it have been wildly beyond our expectations. So, like, again, just using the first two months of this season as a proxy, We've done over 300 million highlights from creator League again. So like a made up. A made up sports league that we own has driven hundreds of millions of views against creators playing competitions, like competing against each other. And I think that is what really kind of stands out to us as the magic sauce of it. Of like, it's not just the live moment, it's right. People want to continue to consume highlights for the 28 days between that event and the next one. And it kind of builds this really.
- [17:27]
A
Compelling fly where the highlights are almost. I don't want to say that they're the core product, but they're more integral than they would be in a traditional league, perhaps.
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B
Absolutely. Yeah. And the more that the highlights are seen, the more that there's interest in not missing the next event. And it kind of continues to compound.
- [17:43]
A
You know, this was pretty new the last couple of years, like you said. Did you bring brands into the mix at the beginning? Do you wait, kind of wait and see how it builds? Like, what can advertisers learn or do with you guys this year or beyond?
- [17:55]
B
Yeah, so typically we like to build audience and have real confidence in something before bringing in an advertiser. And for this, similarly, I think we did maybe two or three of them before we brought it to market. And then when we did, we did it on a very limited basis. So we brought it to brands that kind of had authenticity and brand voice with under 34 audience. And one of our first partners was Pizza Hut, who sponsored several events. And we integrated them in really fascinating ways because again, we own the league and we're able to insert brands into the competition in ways that you just can't do with traditional.
- [18:31]
A
You're not a partner, it's your ip, so you can kind of do what you want to do.
- [18:35]
B
Exactly. So. So we, we were able to both say, hey, you can have commercial spots, you can have logos, you can have, you know, things on the court, all the traditional placements. But, you know, for Pizza Hut, for example, we did something with them around a go kart competition where we made a Pizza Hut power boost where fans could vote on which creator they wanted Go Kart to have another five miles an hour. So you kind of like, okay, like, if this is your favorite creator, vote for them for the Pizza Hut power boost. And then someone got a boost of their speed and it led to that person winning the competition. So like those types of things where you can insert the brand into the actual fabric of the competition are like, those are the asks we've gotten for years within traditional sports that you can't do. Right. You don't want to baseball game or.
- [19:20]
A
Whatever to throw pizza.
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B
But that's in the fun of this type of format for sure. And then since then, like partnered earlier this year with Apple around a soccer specific showdown as they really wanted to focus and build attention towards their MLS rights and season kickoff. And we did a huge partnership with Nissan tied to Final Four where we did a big creator league competition from the Final Four footprint and they're, they're a huge NCAA partner, so everything kind of, you know, made sense there.
- [19:47]
A
Are any of the creators surprisingly really good?
- [19:50]
B
Definitely, yeah, it's, it's a fascinating role to be in where you're kind of casting agent too. But yeah, you're a little bit reality.
- [19:58]
A
Show, a little bit, you know, Survivor producer and sports league guy or something.
- [20:02]
B
Exactly. So you need your toxic personalities. You also need your, your, your kind of ringers that are just like super good at certain sports and you need folks that are like somewhere in the middle and some folks that you've never seen play sports, like there's no footage and you just have to kind of take their, their word. But everyone thinks they're an incredible athlete. So you kind of put it through its own prism too. But we, we intentionally try to have that type of mix where you have really good athletes and some, some people are, you know, squarely basketball creators for example, where they're very, very good at basketball and others are more gaming focused or you know, viral content focused and, and don't focus on it as much, but this is their one come in and, and, and compete.
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A
I'm wondering, going looking forward, I guess a couple things. What's, what's left on the calendar? What should people look for if they want to, if they want to check it out and then do you think, do you want to, does this make you want to do more live stuff? I know that, you know, you can only do so many big events a year, but, but I, I wonder, I wonder if this is opening your eyes to like, hey, there's something here.
- [21:03]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. So for the rest of this year we have flag football as I mentioned, coming up next weekend and Then knockout and 5v5 basketball to close out the regular season for creator league. And then you'll see the championship that happens in late November. So that will cap the first kind of official creator league season in 2025 and then in 2026, I expect that to expand substantially either in terms of the teams that are competing, the stakes, and also the locations where these live events happen. I know I mentioned Final Four earlier, but just being a part of TNT Sports and all the incredible league partners that we have, you can only imagine how eager the team is to think about, you know, our new Big 12 partnership and how could we maybe activate, instead of doing flag football where we are in Atlanta next weekend, should we do it at a college football tailgate? And same goes for the other sports and competitions we're thinking about. So that's, that's really the, the exciting opportunity is as this continues to build, an avid audience that is under 34, that's in the millions. How can we make that an interesting complement to our linear sports portfolio and our league partners to add something different outside of just coverage and highlights? And that started to open up some really interesting conversations with those partners.
- [22:22]
A
I want to see you throw these guys into Roland Garros and see what that looks like.
- [22:26]
B
Our head of production is a former huge tennis player and he's pushing that hard. It's a matter of finding creators that are worth watching. Swing a racket for more than five minutes.
- [22:37]
A
As big a pool probably as basketball, but that should be funny.
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B
Maybe pickleball or paddle.
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A
There you go. Not a bad idea, Drew. Awesome stuff, fun conversation. Let's. Let's chat again, but we'll have to check it out.
- [22:46]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Great. Great to be chatting with you, Mike, and hope to talk again soon.
- [22:50]
A
Thanks a lot. Thanks again to my guest this week, House of Highlights, Drew Muller and my partners at View Planner. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to menu, so please hit that subscribe button. See you next time for more on what's next in media. Thanks for listening.