Economics Explained—YouTube’s largest economics channel—recently premiered a feature-length documentary on CuriosityStream featuring interviews with former White House correspondents and Ivy League professors.
This 90-minute production, which took 18 months to complete and required coordinating three camera teams across the United States, represents the kind of ambitious project that would have remained unrealized without the financial backing and operational infrastructure of Lunar X, a European digital content firm acquiring equity stakes in creator businesses.
“We will buy a share of a creator’s business, co-own the business and run it like co-founders. So we win and lose together,” says Lunar X CEO Lucas Kollmann.
A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree with a background in private equity at firms like KKR and Blackstone, Lucas spent years analyzing traditional media consolidation strategies before identifying similar opportunities in digital content.
The inspiration for Lunar X crystallized when Lucas observed the Blackstone-backed acquisition of Moonbug for $3 billion in 2021. Moonbug had built its business by acquiring and scaling children’s YouTube channels like CoComelon and Blippi into global properties with expanded distribution and merchandise operations.
“That was one of the most successful creator economy exits ever done,” Lucas notes. “When I saw what they built in the kids’ space, I thought something like this can be done in the non-kids space as well.”
Founded in September 2021, Lunar X offers creators immediate liquidity for their business value while shouldering operations, finances, and scaling strategies—a direct alternative to the fee-based management model that dominates the creator economy.
Inside the Equity Partnership Model
Lunar X acquires equity stakes in creator businesses. This structure fundamentally differs from traditional talent management agencies that charge percentage fees on revenue.
“We are not a service provider. We don’t want to charge you for services,” Lucas emphasizes. “We would like to buy ourselves into your business and be a co-founder.”
This approach addresses a critical inflection point in creator business development. As Lucas observes, “Every creator has come to a place where they need help. We will buy a stake in the company, and we will run it together.”
For creators, the equity sale provides immediate liquidity—allowing them to “de-risk” some of their business value—while gaining operational support that solves their primary growth constraint: the conflict between creative work and business management.
“The biggest challenge for creators is to not focus on the creative part, but actually having to build a company and a team and operations around it because this is a different skill set to being an incredible creative,” Lucas explains.
The Transformation Process
When Lunar X invests in a creator business, it implements a structured transformation process that begins with strategic road mapping.
The partnership starts with a fundamental question to creators: “What are all the things you have always wanted to do but never had time to execute on?” These ambitions are then prioritized into 12-18 month roadmaps to guide development.
Next comes organizational restructuring, where Lunar X creates formal structures with the creator at the top, focused on creative direction, supported by specialized teams for script writing, editing, production, and back-office functions.
Operational centralization follows, with back-office functions including finance, tax, legal, and HR managed across Lunar X’s portfolio companies, providing economies of scale and professional expertise.
The transformation continues with talent acquisition—leveraging multiple creator businesses under management to attract higher-caliber production talent by offering broader career development opportunities than single-creator operations could provide.
Finally, Lunar X pursues distribution expansion by negotiating company-wide agreements with platforms like Roku and smart TV manufacturers, extending creator content beyond their original platforms.
The results of this approach extend beyond operational improvements to enable entirely new creative possibilities, as demonstrated by several creator partnerships in Lunar X’s portfolio, which include Live Events formats such as “Creators in Fashion” and animated music-lore channel LoreFi.
Portfolio Strategy: Beyond Key-Person Risk
Unlike many creator economy companies that invest in personality-driven content, Lunar X focuses on creators whose value proposition transcends their individual persona. This approach reflects their investment criteria focused on longevity:
“In the creator economy, unfortunately there’s a lot of come and go,” Lucas observes. “So it’s not easy to build a really long-term sustainable business as audiences demand change, as platforms change, and algorithm changes.”
When evaluating potential investments, Lunar X applies three primary filters that work in concert:
Critical size and scale come first, where creators must have achieved significant audience size and demonstrated consistent demand beyond initial viral moments.
Track record longevity is the second consideration, with a strong preference for creators with extended histories. As Lucas notes, “a creator who’s been around for several years” provides more confidence than one with only two years of history.
Most importantly, Lunar X evaluates content over personality, seeking channels where viewers come for the value provided rather than purely for the creator’s persona. “We like content where people don’t just come for the creator, but they specifically come for the show, for the content, for what they’re taking away from it,” Lucas explains.
This focus on reduced key-person risk has led Lunar X to invest primarily in edutainment channels and animation studios, where content value often supersedes creator personality and offers greater potential for institutional continuity.
Strategic Advantages of Portfolio Scale
Beyond individual creator support, Lunar X’s portfolio approach delivers strategic advantages, demonstrating the “21st-century Disney” vision of a “company that owns the shows and IPs that the next generation loves, inspires audiences, educates them and brings them together under one umbrella to be better by having scale.”
Cross-channel distribution stands as a primary benefit, with Lunar X securing platform-wide distribution deals that individual creators struggle to negotiate independently.
“Being able to distribute content from creators that are all in our portfolio, where we are partial owners of the businesses, being able to distribute that at scale to smart TVs and Roku Hulu, and abled players, where we have a company-wide contract,” Lucas explains.
The portfolio also enables diversified brand partnerships through more sophisticated advertising deals across multiple channels. Lucas emphasizes “being able to focus and zoom in on making sure brand deals are being spread across our portfolio and delivered to the best shows we have.”
Equally important is the talent development ecosystem Lunar X has cultivated. As Lucas notes, “Finding good script writers and editors is so hard. And if you’re an individual creator, sometimes it’s a bit tough because you cannot really offer a career trajectory.”
Across multiple properties, however, Lunar X can offer more comprehensive career paths that attract higher-caliber production talent. These advantages are complemented by content production efficiencies, with shared resources and knowledge across the portfolio enabling faster scaling and higher production values than individual creators could achieve independently.
The Economics Explained documentary exemplifies these advantages. What began as an ambitious creator idea was realized through Lunar X’s negotiation with CuriosityStream, coordination of high-profile interview subjects and deployment of multiple production teams across the United States—capabilities far beyond what the creator could have accomplished independently.
Events, Geographic Expansion, and Industry Cycles
Lunar X’s plans extend beyond digital content into experiential media. “We will have our first—or it’s actually second, but it’s going to be a much bigger—live event at the end of this year,” Lucas reveals. “We’re currently working on building the bridge from online digital content consumption to real-world events and experiences.”
The company is also navigating creator economy market fluctuations with strategic timing. Lucas notes that when they started the company in 2021 during COVID-19, the creator economy was on “an endless growth trajectory.”
He explains, “Because [we] were in the COVID-19 times, and people were consuming on the phones, and they loved content, and brands had a lot of money to spend, it was just one way up.”
This was followed by a period of adjustment. “Post-COVID, there was a realization happening. People spent less time on phones and screens, as the real world started to open up again. Also, there was an economic contraction, so brands didn’t have the same money and budgets to spend,” Lucas explains.
Now, he sees positive momentum returning: “I see a re-acceleration again. So I think 2025 and 2026, we have a good chance to hit that peak again that we had during the COVID times.”
Shorts Cannibalization and Platform Risk
Lunar X’s approach directly addresses two significant challenges facing creator businesses today: the cannibalization of revenue by short-form content and overreliance on single platforms.
On short-form content, Lucas offers a candid assessment: “The key issue creators have been facing over the last three or four years, also since YouTube launched Shorts, is that the viewership has cannibalized away.”
This shift, he adds, has material economic consequences: “YouTube now puts Shorts on the home screen instead of just long-form content. So a certain percentage of viewers now watch shorts instead of long form. But now that the viewer doesn’t make short form content, doesn’t pay anything to the creator.”
By diversifying distribution channels and developing premium formats like documentaries that command higher advertising rates or subscription access, Lunar X helps creators mitigate this revenue cannibalization.
If Lucas could make one change to the creator economy, he would extend YouTube’s revenue-sharing model to all platforms: “YouTube basically gave rise to the creator economy like no other platform because they invented that model and I think it created an industry. It turned something that was a hobby into a professional career.”
Nii A. Ahene is the founder and managing director of Net Influencer, a website dedicated to offering insights into the influencer marketing industry. Together with its newsletter, Influencer Weekly, Net Influencer provides news, commentary, and analysis of the events shaping the creator and influencer marketing space. Through interviews with startups, influencers, brands, and platforms, Nii and his team explore how influencer marketing is being effectively used to benefit businesses and personal brands alike.
Economics Explained—YouTube’s largest economics channel—recently premiered a feature-length documentary on CuriosityStream featuring interviews with former White House correspondents and Ivy League professors.
This 90-minute production, which took 18 months to complete and required coordinating three camera teams across the United States, represents the kind of ambitious project that would have remained unrealized without the financial backing and operational infrastructure of Lunar X, a European digital content firm acquiring equity stakes in creator businesses.
“We will buy a share of a creator’s business, co-own the business and run it like co-founders. So we win and lose together,” says Lunar X CEO Lucas Kollmann.
A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree with a background in private equity at firms like KKR and Blackstone, Lucas spent years analyzing traditional media consolidation strategies before identifying similar opportunities in digital content.
The inspiration for Lunar X crystallized when Lucas observed the Blackstone-backed acquisition of Moonbug for $3 billion in 2021. Moonbug had built its business by acquiring and scaling children’s YouTube channels like CoComelon and Blippi into global properties with expanded distribution and merchandise operations.
“That was one of the most successful creator economy exits ever done,” Lucas notes. “When I saw what they built in the kids’ space, I thought something like this can be done in the non-kids space as well.”
Founded in September 2021, Lunar X offers creators immediate liquidity for their business value while shouldering operations, finances, and scaling strategies—a direct alternative to the fee-based management model that dominates the creator economy.
Inside the Equity Partnership Model
Lunar X acquires equity stakes in creator businesses. This structure fundamentally differs from traditional talent management agencies that charge percentage fees on revenue.
“We are not a service provider. We don’t want to charge you for services,” Lucas emphasizes. “We would like to buy ourselves into your business and be a co-founder.”
This approach addresses a critical inflection point in creator business development. As Lucas observes, “Every creator has come to a place where they need help. We will buy a stake in the company, and we will run it together.”
For creators, the equity sale provides immediate liquidity—allowing them to “de-risk” some of their business value—while gaining operational support that solves their primary growth constraint: the conflict between creative work and business management.
“The biggest challenge for creators is to not focus on the creative part, but actually having to build a company and a team and operations around it because this is a different skill set to being an incredible creative,” Lucas explains.
The Transformation Process
When Lunar X invests in a creator business, it implements a structured transformation process that begins with strategic road mapping.
The partnership starts with a fundamental question to creators: “What are all the things you have always wanted to do but never had time to execute on?” These ambitions are then prioritized into 12-18 month roadmaps to guide development.
Next comes organizational restructuring, where Lunar X creates formal structures with the creator at the top, focused on creative direction, supported by specialized teams for script writing, editing, production, and back-office functions.
Operational centralization follows, with back-office functions including finance, tax, legal, and HR managed across Lunar X’s portfolio companies, providing economies of scale and professional expertise.
The transformation continues with talent acquisition—leveraging multiple creator businesses under management to attract higher-caliber production talent by offering broader career development opportunities than single-creator operations could provide.
Finally, Lunar X pursues distribution expansion by negotiating company-wide agreements with platforms like Roku and smart TV manufacturers, extending creator content beyond their original platforms.
The results of this approach extend beyond operational improvements to enable entirely new creative possibilities, as demonstrated by several creator partnerships in Lunar X’s portfolio, which include Live Events formats such as “Creators in Fashion” and animated music-lore channel LoreFi.
Portfolio Strategy: Beyond Key-Person Risk
Unlike many creator economy companies that invest in personality-driven content, Lunar X focuses on creators whose value proposition transcends their individual persona. This approach reflects their investment criteria focused on longevity:
“In the creator economy, unfortunately there’s a lot of come and go,” Lucas observes. “So it’s not easy to build a really long-term sustainable business as audiences demand change, as platforms change, and algorithm changes.”
When evaluating potential investments, Lunar X applies three primary filters that work in concert:
Critical size and scale come first, where creators must have achieved significant audience size and demonstrated consistent demand beyond initial viral moments.
Track record longevity is the second consideration, with a strong preference for creators with extended histories. As Lucas notes, “a creator who’s been around for several years” provides more confidence than one with only two years of history.
Most importantly, Lunar X evaluates content over personality, seeking channels where viewers come for the value provided rather than purely for the creator’s persona. “We like content where people don’t just come for the creator, but they specifically come for the show, for the content, for what they’re taking away from it,” Lucas explains.
This focus on reduced key-person risk has led Lunar X to invest primarily in edutainment channels and animation studios, where content value often supersedes creator personality and offers greater potential for institutional continuity.
Strategic Advantages of Portfolio Scale
Beyond individual creator support, Lunar X’s portfolio approach delivers strategic advantages, demonstrating the “21st-century Disney” vision of a “company that owns the shows and IPs that the next generation loves, inspires audiences, educates them and brings them together under one umbrella to be better by having scale.”
Cross-channel distribution stands as a primary benefit, with Lunar X securing platform-wide distribution deals that individual creators struggle to negotiate independently.
“Being able to distribute content from creators that are all in our portfolio, where we are partial owners of the businesses, being able to distribute that at scale to smart TVs and Roku Hulu, and abled players, where we have a company-wide contract,” Lucas explains.
The portfolio also enables diversified brand partnerships through more sophisticated advertising deals across multiple channels. Lucas emphasizes “being able to focus and zoom in on making sure brand deals are being spread across our portfolio and delivered to the best shows we have.”
Equally important is the talent development ecosystem Lunar X has cultivated. As Lucas notes, “Finding good script writers and editors is so hard. And if you’re an individual creator, sometimes it’s a bit tough because you cannot really offer a career trajectory.”
Across multiple properties, however, Lunar X can offer more comprehensive career paths that attract higher-caliber production talent. These advantages are complemented by content production efficiencies, with shared resources and knowledge across the portfolio enabling faster scaling and higher production values than individual creators could achieve independently.
The Economics Explained documentary exemplifies these advantages. What began as an ambitious creator idea was realized through Lunar X’s negotiation with CuriosityStream, coordination of high-profile interview subjects and deployment of multiple production teams across the United States—capabilities far beyond what the creator could have accomplished independently.
Events, Geographic Expansion, and Industry Cycles
Lunar X’s plans extend beyond digital content into experiential media. “We will have our first—or it’s actually second, but it’s going to be a much bigger—live event at the end of this year,” Lucas reveals. “We’re currently working on building the bridge from online digital content consumption to real-world events and experiences.”
The company is also navigating creator economy market fluctuations with strategic timing. Lucas notes that when they started the company in 2021 during COVID-19, the creator economy was on “an endless growth trajectory.”
He explains, “Because [we] were in the COVID-19 times, and people were consuming on the phones, and they loved content, and brands had a lot of money to spend, it was just one way up.”
This was followed by a period of adjustment. “Post-COVID, there was a realization happening. People spent less time on phones and screens, as the real world started to open up again. Also, there was an economic contraction, so brands didn’t have the same money and budgets to spend,” Lucas explains.
Now, he sees positive momentum returning: “I see a re-acceleration again. So I think 2025 and 2026, we have a good chance to hit that peak again that we had during the COVID times.”
Shorts Cannibalization and Platform Risk
Lunar X’s approach directly addresses two significant challenges facing creator businesses today: the cannibalization of revenue by short-form content and overreliance on single platforms.
On short-form content, Lucas offers a candid assessment: “The key issue creators have been facing over the last three or four years, also since YouTube launched Shorts, is that the viewership has cannibalized away.”
This shift, he adds, has material economic consequences: “YouTube now puts Shorts on the home screen instead of just long-form content. So a certain percentage of viewers now watch shorts instead of long form. But now that the viewer doesn’t make short form content, doesn’t pay anything to the creator.”
By diversifying distribution channels and developing premium formats like documentaries that command higher advertising rates or subscription access, Lunar X helps creators mitigate this revenue cannibalization.
If Lucas could make one change to the creator economy, he would extend YouTube’s revenue-sharing model to all platforms: “YouTube basically gave rise to the creator economy like no other platform because they invented that model and I think it created an industry. It turned something that was a hobby into a professional career.”