During an interview at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, hip-hop star Doja Cat confessed her love for true-crime content — and for one specific true-crime creator.
“It’s stories on YouTube, those 40-minute videos of them explaining the crime and how it happened,” she says in a video recording of the interview. “I like MrBallen.”
Doja Cat is far from the only MrBallen fan. A combined 17 million people subscribe to the creator’s content on YouTube and TikTok, along with millions of others across social media and on podcasting platforms.
In the four years since he began creating content, MrBallen has become a fixture in the true-crime world and built an empire that spans video content, podcasts, live events, and a talent-management company.
MrBallen, a pseudonym for John Allen, got his start as a content creator during the pandemic, like many others at that time. He began posting TikToks when the short-form video platform was starting to take off, and stars like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae were emerging thanks to their dance routines to catchy songs.
Allen tapped into true crime, a different, but equally booming, type of content. When one of his first videos went viral, he amassed millions of social-media followers within months.
“I realized that I had first-mover advantage on TikTok,” Allen told Business Insider. “It really was mostly kids dancing and me, a grown man, telling stories. It was so different from what was happening on the platform.”
Allen worked alone for almost a year, handling all the parts of the production of his videos, and expanding beyond TikTok to YouTube. But soon, being a one-man band started taking a toll on him.
“I’m a pretty simple guy. I can tell a really good story, but I don’t really have a good business mind,” he said.
He felt he needed a CEO.
‘A 50-50 partnership through and through’
The MrBallen brand really began to transcend the realm of social media in 2021, when Allen started working with Nick Witters, now the business partner and CEO of Allen’s content company, Ballen Studios. At the time, Witters was working at talent agency Night, and managing Allen along with other clients. Within a year, Allen asked him to join MrBallen full-time.
“When John talked about his vision, I remember I looked down, I actually have ‘advocate’ tattooed on my hands,” Witters said. “I was thinking, ‘If I’m going to be able to do this, I’ll have to leave and I’ll have to focus all of my love and attention to John and this business.'”
When he became CEO, Witters focused on scaling a team and left Allen to handle just the storytelling. He brought in writers, researchers, and video editors, among others, and built a company that now counts around 40 employees.
“This is a 50-50 partnership through and through, where he has his side of the business, and I have my side of the business,” Witters said.
Allen and Witters together have transformed MrBallen into a full-fledged media company. In less than two years, the two have launched Ballen Studios, expanded into the podcast space, inked an exclusive distribution and first-look deal with Amazon Music, hired former EVP of Cadence13 Zak Levitt as head of production, started a talent-management company, and gotten into live events.
And now, after over a year of exclusivity with Amazon Music for the flagship MrBallen podcast — “Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories” — the show will expand to all podcast platforms. (In a similar move, other shows like Joe Rogan’s recently ended their exclusivity deals with Spotify.)
Consistency and repeatability are two pillars of a successful content business
Instead of narrowing in exclusively on true crime, Ballen Studios explores a broader range of “strange, dark, and mysterious” stories — which include unexplained events, medical mysteries, and ghost stories (all topics of Ballen Studios podcasts).
Having a certain style of content and format — but the ability to shift it to different genres — allows for near-infinite repeatability, a key element for the longevity of a content business.
“I’ll never run out of content,” Allen said. “All I have to do is slightly change the genre and I have a thousand more topics to choose from.”
Another key element of MrBallen’s success is consistent output.
“When I decide I’m going to do something, I have a willingness to work really hard for a really long amount of time, same as Nick,” Allen said. “It’s that total grind mentality.”
When Allen first started creating content, he put out three videos a day for months — on TikTok first, then YouTube, too. Now, Ballen Studios publishes four weekly podcasts, with more shows to be released this year, as well as weekly content across all social platforms.
Quality and distribution should go hand-in-hand
Allen and Witters said their recipe for success comes from combining a high-quality product with an effective distribution strategy.
“I’m looking at Sprinkles cupcakes right here. It’s a cool brand, but it’s big because the cupcakes are just that good,” Witters said. “However, you can have the best cupcakes in the world, but if you have no ability to distribute, to market, to have eyeballs, then you have a product that can’t go anywhere.”
Under Witters’ leadership, MrBallen prioritized being “multi-platform,” with accounts on TikTok and YouTube, but also Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, X, and Discord, as well as a presence on all podcast platforms.
“Multi-platform” also translates to the offline world. Live events have become a key component of the company’s development, and it plans to expand into film, television, consumer packaged goods, and books, with additional audio content to be launched in 2024.
“We are just in the business of manifesting,” Allen said. “Nick and I both have a really intense belief in ourselves, probably to the point of it being an issue. But so far it’s served us well — when he and I are on the same page and we want to try something, no matter how audacious it might be, we’ve been able to come and do the things we want to do.”
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