Goodbye Rooster Teeth 👋

A 21-year run comes to an end.

Author

Emily Burton
March 07, 2024

TOGETHER WITH

It's Thursday and Chucky is coming to Roblox. Players prepared to make a friend ‘til the end can immerse themselves in an “interactive horror experience” called Griefville: Survive the Nightmare.

CALLING IT QUITS

Rooster Teeth is saying goodbye after 21 years

Rooster Teeth’s decades-long run is coming to an end.

The announcement: Rooster Teeth General Manager Jordan Levin announced the entertainment company’s upcoming closure in a company memo, which cited “challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage.”

  • According to Deadline, Rooster Teeth’s shutdown process will take several months and affect roughly 150 staff members (plus dozens of contractors and freelancers).

  • Only one part of the company will remain operational: its podcast division. In addition to Rooster Teeth’s flagship podcast, The Roost hosts 20+ shows from creators like Smosh, Anthony Padilla, The Try Guys, and Theo Vonn. (The division’s survival can be attributed to Warner Bros. Discovery’s interest in selling it.)

  • Rooster Teeth will offer further details about its shutdown in a March 7 livestream.

The context: The last few years haven’t been easy for Rooster Teeth. The company was folded into WarnerMedia in 2018, following its 2014 acquisition by multichannel network Fullscreen (and Fullscreen’s subsequent acquisition by Otter Media in 2018).

  • By 2022, WarnerMedia had merged with Discovery, resulting in the creation of Rooster Teeth’s current corporate owner: Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. It was then that Rooster Teeth began facing allegations of fostering a toxic work environment with low pay.

  • Rooster Teeth has struggled to regain the trust of its audience over the last two years, but its closure reflects more than the lasting effects of controversy. Warner Bros. Discovery is the latest in a long line of tech companies that have enacted mass layoffs over the past few months—a pattern that’s likely to continue alongside the rise of generative AI and the ongoing conglomeration of major streaming services.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

COLUMNS • STREAMERS ON THE RISE 📈

This auto chess streamer is gearing up for her next big tournament

Everything changed when Emily Wang discovered auto chess.

How it started: It wasn’t that the creator was new to gaming. If anything, Wang had grown up on games: she spent her childhood playing Neopets and dabbled in Fortnite, PUBG, and League of Legends as a young adult.

  • Something about auto-chess was different. The strategy-heavy genre (which revolves around placing characters or other game elements on a digital game board and watching them battle it out) never seemed to get boring, and it wasn’t long before Wang was “really, really addicted.”

  • Despite working full-time as a lawyer, she found herself playing games like TeamFight Tactics as often as she could, sometimes for as long as 12 hours a day.

  • Streaming was the obvious next step—and the right one. Wang realized quickly that Twitch viewers were just as invested in TFT as she was. Within a year, her channel had grown to the point that she could afford to stream full-time. So, she quit her job.

How it’s going: Two years later, Wang’s passion for auto chess is still going strong—and so is her channel. Her streams now reach 220,000 followers, and she’s an active participant in TFT tournaments.

  • Wang’s current training regimen involves a different kind of competition (at least for the next few days). Between March 8 and 10, the creator will face off against 23 other Twitch streamers in a massive Tekken tournament.

What’s up next: Once that tourney wraps up, Wang plans to double-down on TFT. She aims to take the next set “pretty seriously, and then take the set after that very, very seriously, because I do want to go and compete and do well.”

DATA • MONTHLY U.S. TOP 50 📊

This creator group is harnessing the power of collaboration—and brand-safe content

The channel: Amp World combines everything YouTube’s algorithm seems to love: brand-safe content, short-form videos, a consistent posting schedule, and a pre-existing audience. Since launching in 2020, the challenge-focused channel has become a home base for some of YouTube’s top short-form stars.

The strategy: Creators like Brent Rivera, Lexi Rivera, and Ben Azelart have built Amp World into a Shorts machine by posting collaborative challenges that attract both their impressive individual followings and first-time viewers.

  • The channel’s family-friendly videos combine popular sounds with short-form trends—and thanks to Amp World’s setting in a shared home, its videos are instantly recognizable to even fast-scrolling fans.

  • (FYI: Amp World is affiliated with the eponymous media brand founded by Brent Rivera and Max Levine in 2020, not the AMP group that includes Kai Cenat.)

Amp World hit a major high in February. Data from Gospel Stats.

The stats: Amp World’s skillful combination of star-powered collabs and popular video trends has earned its creators a whopping 4.6 billion lifetime views. The channel’s top three Shorts alone have brought in nearly 580 million views—many of which flooded in over the last several weeks.

  • Amp World collected 12% of its lifetime views during February 2024. Its monthly total: 331.8 million monthly views.

  • All that traffic added up to a month-over-month viewership bump of 74%.

  • The result: Amp World rose to #67 in our monthly U.S. Top 100 chart.

WATCH THIS 📺

The breakout star behind “Who TF Did I Marry?!?” is going places

The viral sensation: Since debuting her viral TikTok series on Valentine’s Day, ReesaTeesa (aka Tareasa Johnson) has collected nearly 40 million views, scored a blue check mark, and appeared on Good Morning America. Now, the “Who TF Did I Marry?!?” creator has also snagged a representation deal with CAA.

  • (If you haven’t had a chance to catch Johnson’s 51-part tale of love-gone-wrong, don’t worry about hunting down each segment individually. As the creator explained in a recent “PSA” video, the full series is now condensed into a chronological playlist at the top of her TikTok profile.)

  • CAA already has plenty of work to do. With companies like Audible shooting their shots in her comment sections, ReesaTeesa’s creative future looks bright—and busy.

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. Drew Baldwin helped edit, too. It's a team effort.