Latest / Influencer Marketing with Fexingo: Creators, Sponsorships, and Modern Endorsement Deals / Why Influencers Are Now Buying Their Own Production Studios
Transcript
- Lucas: So last month, Emma Chamberlain — who's been one of the most durable creators in the space for almost a decade now — closed on a 12,000-square-foot production studio in Studio City. Not leased. Bought. Luna: Wait, she bought the building? I knew creators were buying factories and ad servers, but a full-blown physical studio feels like a different scale. Lucas: It is. And she's not alone. MrBeast has a complex in Greenville, South Carolina. Marques Brownlee has a warehouse in New Jersey. Even mid-tier creators with around half a million followers are starting to ask whether renting studio space by the day makes sense when they're filming four days a week. Luna: Alright, so walk me through the math. What does a studio actually cost? Lucas: Let's use a concrete example. A decent commercial space in a secondary market — say, 3,000 square feet in a place like Austin or Nashville — is going for about $18 per square foot annually on a triple-net lease. That's $54,000 a year before utilities and build-out. Then you need soundproofing, lighting grid, green screen, maybe a kitchen set. Build-out costs run $100 to $200 per square foot. Luna: So we're looking at $300,000 to $600,000 just to get the space ready, plus the lease. Lucas: Right. And if you rent a similar turnkey studio by the day in LA, you're paying anywhere from $1,500 to $8,000 per day depending on the rig. If you're shooting 120 days a year — which a lot of daily creators are — that's $180,000 to nearly a million dollars annually. So at a certain volume, buying or building starts to make sense. Luna: But is it just about cost savings? Or is there a creative control piece too? Lucas: Honestly, the creative control angle might be bigger. When you rent a studio, you're on the clock. You have to prep, shoot, and strike in a window. There's no room for iteration. Creators I've talked to say owning the space lets them leave a set up for days, try different lighting, reshoot a segment because the energy wasn't right. That's not a luxury — it's becoming a competitive advantage. Luna: I interviewed a creator in Austin last month who's part of a shared-studio collective. Five creators each chip in on a 10,000-square-foot space. They split the build-out cost five ways, so each paid about $80,000 upfront. And they have a booking system so nobody overlaps. Lucas: That's smart. The shared model lowers the barrier. For a solo creator just hitting a million subscribers, $80,000 is a big check but not a company-ending one. Especially if it saves them $4,000 a month in rental fees. Luna: Yeah. And the booking system sounds like it could scale into a small business. They're thinking about opening it to non-members on off days. Lucas: Which is essentially becoming a studio landlord themselves. That's a whole other revenue stream. But I want to focus on something else: how owning a studio changes the relationship with brand partners. Luna: How so? Lucas: When a brand comes to you and says, 'We want to shoot at our agency's preferred studio,' you're on their turf. They control the environment, the lighting, the crew. But if you say, 'No, we'll host at our studio,' you're now the production partner. You can charge a production fee on top of the sponsorship. Plus your crew handles it, so you keep more of the budget. Luna: So it's a negotiating power move. You're not just talent anymore — you're a vendor. Lucas: Exactly. And some brands actually prefer it. They'd rather write one check to a creator who handles everything than coordinate with three different vendors. The creator becomes a mini-production company. Luna: That shift — from talent to production company — is probably the most important takeaway. But I wonder about the risk. What if a creator's content style changes and they don't need the studio anymore? Lucas: That's the real downside. Studio assets are illiquid. You can't just sell a soundproofed room on Facebook Marketplace. And if your channel pivots to, say, all outdoor adventure content, that studio becomes a very expensive storage unit. I've seen creators get stuck with a lease and a build-out they can't recoup. Luna: So it's a bet on consistency. You're betting your content format will stay studio-based for at least three to five years. Lucas: Right. And that's why the smart ones don't go all-in. They either share the cost, like that Austin collective, or they buy a space that can be reconfigured or subleased. Emma Chamberlain's building in Studio City — it's 12,000 square feet, which is bigger than she needs. But it's in a commercial district where she can lease out half of it to other creators and cover her mortgage. Luna: So it's an asset play too. Real estate with a content purpose. Lucas: Exactly. And let's be clear — this is not for everyone. If you're a creator doing 40,000 views per video, renting a studio once a month is fine. But the top 1% of creators — the ones doing multiple videos per week, with brand deals and merch lines — they're starting to realize that renting is just burning cash they could be equity-building. Luna: You know, it's funny. We've spent over a hundred episodes talking about influencers buying factories and ad inventory and TV networks. But a physical studio feels almost retro. Like, the creator economy started in bedrooms, then moved to coffee shops, then to co-working spaces, and now we're circling back to owning the room. Lucas: I think it's maturation. The creator economy is roughly 15 years old now. The infrastructure is catching up. And when creators start buying real estate for production, it signals that they see themselves as permanent institutions, not trends. Luna: Speaking of permanent — if this conversation gave you a concrete idea you might actually use, that's exactly the kind of thing that keeps this show ad-free. If it was worth a coffee to you, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. We don't run ads, so listener support is what keeps these episodes coming. Lucas: Yeah, and we mean it — no upsell, no perks. Just a way to say this was useful. And it goes directly into production costs. Luna: Alright, back to studios. I want to talk about one more angle: how owning a studio lets creators experiment with formats they'd never risk on a rented clock. Lucas: Great point. I've heard from creators who use their studio to shoot low-stakes test content — trying a new editing style, a new lighting setup, even a new hosting persona. Because the space is theirs, they can afford to fail. And some of that test content ends up being their most viral work. Luna: So it's not just a cost play or a power play — it's an innovation play. Lucas: It is. And that's the part I think we'll see more of in the next year. The barrier is coming down. There are now turnkey studio-in-a-box companies that will build out a space for you for a fixed fee — $150,000 for a 2,000-square-foot package. Financeable over five years. So the monthly cost is around $2,800. Compare that to renting three days a week at $600 a day — you're already ahead. Luna: That's compelling. At what subscriber count does that pencil out? Lucas: Rough estimate: if you're doing 500,000 views per video and posting twice a week, with two brand integrations per month, you can probably justify it. That puts you in the top 0.5% of creators, but it's a growing cohort. Luna: So the message is: if you're a creator at that level and you're still renting by the day, you're leaving money on the table — and creative freedom. Lucas: That's the takeaway. The studio used to be something you graduated to. Now it's something you invest in to keep growing.