At a session titled “Claynosaurz: Rise of the Interactive Franchises: Why the Future Belongs to Creators,” Claynosaurz co-founder and creative director Nic Cabana told a packed View Conference room in Turin what many studios suspect but struggle to operationalize: Audience behavior has outpaced linear release cycles and the next franchises should consider building in public, across platforms, with fans inside the tent from day one.
“Entertainment’s nonlinear,” Cabana said, adding that for creators, “Distribution is free.” His thesis: if you design for the way people already move through culture with short-form video, games, GIFs, digital stickers, toys, pop-ups, the “show” becomes only one node in a networked IP. “Kids want interaction, especially today,” he said. “We create with the internet. We don’t silo ourselves.”
Cabana sketched a rapid three-year ramp for Claynosaurz, the dinosaur-driven transmedia brand launched by alumni from Sony, DreamWorks, Illumination and Disney. The team self-funded an initial short, which later won a Webby, then used a drop of 10,000 high-fidelity digital collectibles as a crowdfunding mechanism. Those avatars now flow through every surface of the brand from social clips, a forthcoming mobile game with Gameloft, merchandise, live events and, soon, a YouTube-native show co-produced with Mediawan, recently reported by Variety.
“We’re in development for an episodic show. It’s gonna be 40 episodes, 7 minutes. We’re gonna go straight to YouTube,” Cabana said. The choice is deliberate: Episodes are modular, ‘Family-Guy’-style, so discovery can start anywhere the algorithm lands a viewer. In parallel, Gameloft is building a long-form mobile game; Claynosaurz is also layering a loyalty system and “proof-of-view” tech that can reward accounts for watching specific episodes, turning viewing into a gamified viewing loop.
The content lab runs on nonstop A/B testing. The team “make thumbstopping content on social media,” think short reels, evergreen mini-stories, trend “cameos” when they fit, and measure what travels organically. “We do not cheat the algorithm,” Cabana insisted. The numbers he cited: roughly 910,000 followers across platforms, videos approaching one billion views, some individual clips near 60 million, and about 300 million views for Claynosaurz GIFs on Giphy. This is a company with much in common with the tech startup sector’s approach of capturing an audience fast and mastering monetisation later.
Crucially, the audience isn’t only engaged, it’s enlisted. “We consider them co-creators,” Cabana said, pointing to recurring “casting” of community avatars into shorts, hiring prolific fan artists onto the team, releasing free rigs for students at France’s Annecy Animation Festival, and encouraging memes, fan art and remixes, something traditional IP may struggle to get passed legal departments. Building “in the open,” he argued, is a creative superpower: rough storyboards, concept sheets and desk videos spark comment-driven micro-iterations and deepen buy-in well before release.
Cabana said it’s latest digital Telegram sticker pack sold $223,000 worth in 20 seconds, while the latest digital collection launch of Popkins drew $18 million in demand. That strange phrasing “in demand” used a random blind box system whereby anyone could buy in but only a portion of participants won a Popkin character. Those who missed out were refunded automatically. The novel strategy virtually guaranteed an instant sell out and provided tangible data of what true consumer demand was in real time. He framed the strategy bluntly, “We de-risk IP by prepackaging it with culture in advance.”
By Cabana’s account, the approach has already shifted the company’s leverage with incumbents. “You do not need the studio system,” he said.“We made $3,000,000 in our first year… we’ve made $11 million total in year three,” he told Variety, adding that the broader collectible ecosystem trades around $40,000,000 in value with the company receiving royalties on every trade. Organic traction, he argued, translates into better-structured talks with streamers, toy companies and distributors, as the audience is demonstrably there.
For studios, Cabana’s message is part provocation and part market signal. The target product may be a YouTube series instead of a pilot; the marketing may be the making-of itself; the IP bible may be updated weekly by the community. “Our mantra was… we’re going to meet the audiences where they’re at, which is everywhere. Entertainment is clearly nonlinear now,” he said.
The north star, he suggested, is brand memory: not just a show someone watched, but a sticker they used, a pop-up they queued for, a toy they unboxed, a short you shared with a friend because “that’s so you.”
There’s nothing theoretical about the urgency for studios to take note of different approaches, Cabana pointed to peers following adjacent tracks from Glitch’s “Digital Circus” to creator-merch viral character Nobody Sausage as proof the model scales when characters, not formats, are prioritised. From that broad, passionate fanbase, characters can later be slotted into film and series formats or anything else one might imagine.
