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Forbes’ recent Top Creators coverage and a wide-ranging conversation with Dhar Mann on the Forbes Top Creators Show underscore a simple truth: the old media elite are being outpaced by producers who actually know how to reach people. In an episode hosted by Assistant Managing Editor Steve Bertoni, Mann lays out how he scaled a digital storytelling operation into something that now looks more like a modern studio than a hobby channel. This is newsworthy because it shows the power of entrepreneurship over gatekept legacy institutions.
Mann’s operation is not small or sentimental — it’s industrial. Forbes and other reporting note a roughly 200-person studio and a large production footprint that has allowed his teams to pump out consistent, high-volume narratives aimed at young audiences. That level of organization and output proves a point conservatives have been making for years: when you let people build businesses without being strangled by red tape and woke oversight, they scale.
What’s especially galling to the self-congratulatory press is how creators like Mann have moved beyond YouTube’s ad dollars into real distribution and licensing deals. Mann has struck deals to put creator-led channels on FAST platforms and to produce vertical dramas with major entertainment partners, demonstrating that creative Americans can build alternatives to the old networks and their preferred narratives. The media establishment should have seen this coming, but they were too busy policing speech and staffing diversity desks to notice.
Mann’s emphasis in the interview — rapid production cycles, diversified revenue, and investing in his cast with equity and retirement benefits — reads like a blueprint for modern small business success. He even describes turning scripts into finished content in weeks and partnering with tools and platforms to train the next wave of creators. That kind of hustle and practical thinking is the opposite of the performative virtue-signaling that passes for leadership in many corporate newsrooms today.
Conservatives should recognize and champion this model: decentralized, market-driven storytelling that competes on merit and audience, not on who can shout the loudest on Twitter or swipe their corporate credit card for a diversity consultant. At the same time, we ought to keep an eye on the cultural consequences of content aimed squarely at impressionable young viewers and insist that creators act like responsible adults rather than corporate moralizers. Entrepreneurship with accountability is the right recipe — not censorship or condescension.
The Forbes profile and Bertoni’s interview put a spotlight on a larger shift: power is flowing away from credentialed gatekeepers and into the hands of creators who actually produce what people want. That’s a salutary development for a free society, and it should make anyone who believes in free enterprise smile. If the mainstream media wants to keep relevance, it should learn business lessons from creators rather than lecture them from the sidelines.
