Dude Perfect: A sports league from first principles
On formats, franchises, and becoming a platform
The next major sports league won’t look like the last major sports league.
In the Tech Canon, the legend goes that important things are often initially “dismissed as toys.” Dude Perfect (DP)—fifteen years after their first trickshot video, two years after raising $100M on $35M annual revenue, and a year after hiring an ex-NBA executive as their CEO—might have the best shot at turning their toy into a bona fide sports league.
I remember feeling betrayed in 2018 when the Toronto Raptors traded DeMar DeRozan for the league’s best shooter at the time, Danny Green.1 I thought it was wack to win a championship with an entirely different core team. But my friends who happen to be actual lifelong Raptors fans dubbed me a loser, and reminded me that the point was to get a win for the franchise, not to get attached to a collection of individual character-personalities. They were right of course, but it was a timely reflection on continuity in the media business: characters are temporary, franchises are forever.
Over a decade into what we might call the creator economy, a similar story is playing out as individual YouTube channels attempt to transcend their personnel and create something that can exist beyond the original talent. It’s insane that Dude Perfect has been able to pass the baton from their original winning format over to skits, to a variety show, to a thriving product business, to a mobile game, to selling out NBA stadiums for their annual live tour. In a vacuum, those would be incredible revenue lines for any media business. But I suspect that the sum of those parts are combining into something especially unique for DP.
While every media empire wants to draw their own “Disney Map,” DP seems to be closer to recreating the NBA. If you squint, you can start to see the shape of what’s to come: an evolution from an individual sports franchise to the operation of a modern sports league that’ll long outlive the original five “Dudes.”
I. Formats as paratext
The core format of a sports league is, of course, the sport itself. The National Basketball Association. The National Football League. But DP doesn’t really have *a* sport. They’re just dudes who play sports, plural. That may seem like a convenient leap for my “modern sports league” thesis, but it’s a funny parallel to the archetype of a “creator” generally—this flattening of all mediums of artistry into a single vague act of “creation.”
Even in major leagues that revolve around a single sport, the modern product is no longer just a 48 minute long event. These leagues are now more a world of formats2 that act as paratext3 to the core sport.
Look at the NBA as an example. Andrew Yaffe, Dude Perfect’s new CEO and former EVP of Digital at the NBA, says that the league’s live viewership in the under-25 cohort has fallen off a cliff. As a normie fan myself, that’s no surprise: I’m just skimming statlines and scrolling NBA Twitter until the playoffs come around. You could blurrily point to a whole host of root causes, from sports betting to fantasy leagues to the decline of cable TV. But the second order impact is clear: an extended universe of peripheral formats have sprung up all around the league, and it’s now how young people are most often consuming the sport. Inside the NBA, player podcasts, Polymarket aura edits.4 Purists say it’s ruining the sport. But at the very least, new formats can meet young fans where they are, and give them surface area to connect with teams and players on their own terms. They get more invested in on-court storylines when there’s a rolling universe of off-court commentary to follow along with.
Independent media businesses also have to launch new formats to stay top-of-mind. Formats live along an S-curve—you can’t grow to infinity off one forever. But when creators launch new formats, it often feels like they’re trying to crack a new market or replace old formats entirely. Instead, each new DP formats actually feel like it lives in a shared universe. Each new series is an opportunity to build out the world around their core sports: Overtime is a desk show that almost feels like their answer to Inside the NBA; recurring kits like Rage Monster add to the lore of specific cast members, and feel like an inside joke with the audience; Squad Games is more compelling because you know which sport each Dude excels at from their All Sports series; competitions feel like an opportunity to bring in new talent into their universe.
It feels like they’ve recreated the formats around the NBA from first principles. By added context on the peripheries of their empire, fans have more surface area to fall in love with the core Dude Perfect product.
II. Franchises and the race for residuals
Formats do not a business make, nor content a moat.5 New formats are often in service of an existing revenue stream, such as unlocking a new audience that might buy from you elsewhere. Think: a handsome Substack writer who starts recording Reels to funnel new readers to his existing paid subscription options. But the real money comes when these formats evolve into defensible franchises—business units with independent revenue streams that are loosely connected to the rest of your empire.
Independent media businesses can be lucrative, but there’s a fine line between “making a salary on the internet” and “making money while you sleep.” The former often scales linearly with each additional unit of input: you put out a piece of work, you land a brand deal for it, and repeat.6 If you’re not putting out videos or new writing or whatever it may be, you’re stuck clinging to inconsistent revenue spikes. In that context, your moat might be some combination of timing, audience, and talent. But the latter is how a media business actually transcends any individual creator. A “franchise” in this context is just any IP that can be operated and monetized beyond your personnel’s time: brands, physical products, digital products, events, etc.
To that end, DP uses a “Stadium, Show, Shelf” framework to build a franchise business around each successful new format. Take “Overtime,” their variety desk show as an example. The show originally existed as a YouTube series, which was monetized like most other videos on the platform via brand deals and AdSense. They then spun it off as one of the core components for their very first live tour, which was monetized by ticket sales and summarized with a documentary. They have dedicated Overtime merch lines. And now, ten years after their first serious live event, their latest tour covered enough formats to repackage it into a limited theatrical release. Four ways to make money off one core product.
It feels like a callback to the golden age of the Hollywood studio model. You can take bigger swings on risky franchises (e.g. mid-budget rom-coms) if you know that the sure bets in your portfolio will pay residuals into the future (e.g. DVD sales, international licensing, cable TV). In DP’s context, they’re able to reallocate money from dependable franchises to riskier bets, such as launching new channels with new talent (e.g. DP Outdoors7). Then, if the new franchise lands, they can once again run their tried-and-true playbook to squeeze out some residuals.
This evolution from formats to franchises unlocks two parts of the DP empire: a business model that enables them to take bets on bigger projects (such as the long-teased DP theme park), and a portfolio of IP that can exist without direct involvement from the original talent. All of which then positions them for the next stage of the business—building a modern sports league.
III. Come for the sport, stay for the league
A network effect is when every new node increases the value for everyone in the environment. The classic example is a telephone—it becomes more useful as more people own one. The catch, of course, is that the inverse is also true: why would I use a networked product if there’s no one else in the network? In Chris Dixon’s seminal essay on network effects in software, his answer to that chicken-and-egg problem is to first build something with single-player utility and then layer in multiplayer utility over time. You don’t want to get caught fighting a two-front war. Attract people with something that doesn’t require a network for it to be useful, and then they get them to stay for the network once other nodes add irreplaceable value to the core product.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but you could theoretically apply the same framework to a sports league. In theory it could be interesting to watch high-level athletes run drills or play practice games against their own teammates, but it’s obviously infinitely more interesting to exist in a league with multiple franchises in competition. The value of the entire network increases for every new team, new star, or new storyline that emerges as a function of a multi-team format. That’s one of many reasons it would be impossible to directly start a competing basketball league with the NBA.
But DP has already won their version of the single player experience! We come to watch the Dudes compete against each other or themselves in a wide range of wacky sports and activities. They don’t need other parties to make their videos competitive. But, conveniently, they also happen to exist within a network of trickshot YouTubers, like How Ridiculous, Legendary Shots, and the Hulett Brothers. Fan interest in these sorts of crossover episodes has already been validated by their new Squad Games series, where they face off with another YouTube channel across seven different sports. After fifteen years, DP is perfectly positioned to build Chris Dixon’s “multiplayer utility” into their product: a competitive league that only gets more interesting as more nodes join the network. Three advantages in particular will help them get there:
Parental permission
One of DP’s slogans is “Totally Trusted Entertainment.” Fifteen years is a long time to be making media. Their core audience is 8-14 year olds, which means that it’s possible that individual families have three generations of exposure to them now: the parents of the first generation of viewers, the core first generation of viewers, and now the children of that first generation of viewers. The Dudes often tell stories of fan meet and greets where new parents will approach them and say that they were fans of the show growing up, and now their kids are hooked too. It can’t be overstated how important of an advantage this is. They often attribute their success to their Faith8, and are publicly proud of how much parents trust them as a vetted source for clean entertainment. No one has the opportunity to aggregate talent like DP because no one else has the same parental stamp of approval.
Distribution
Not only does DP have 61M subscribers on YouTube, far and away the biggest platform for an independent sports channel (>2x the NBA’s YouTube presence), but they’re also working on their own platforms of distribution. They know YouTube is currently the most powerful engine for a media business, but they also know they are not exclusively a YouTube business. They launched their own DP app, featuring kid-friendly creators vetted by a team of Moms. According to their interview with Colin and Samir, the app crossed 2M downloads as of a year ago. The value proposition is clear: it’s difficult for parents to let their kids roam YouTube freely, and instead they hand over the reins to the DP team to filter for trusted options. It’s a win for the families, it’s a win for DP, and it’s a win for the smaller creators that DP can amplify.
Infrastructure
If Generative AI is driving the cost of production towards zero, then some of the most important media moats of tomorrow will exist in meatspace. Think of the fifteen years of infrastructure that DP can provide to smaller YouTubers: relationships with NBA and NHL stadiums, access to big box retailers, etc. All of these structural advantages seem to be culminating in DP’s 2026 summer tour: Squad Games. By design they don’t announce many details of their tours in advance, but if their Squad Game series on YouTube is any indication, it’s likely that these events are going to feature live competitions with other prominent trickshot YouTubers. You can easily imagine a world where some of these competitors will be playing in front of their own hometown crowds, taking a % of ticket sales so they’re incentivized on the upside, or just co-branding physical products with the Dudes.
When you combine parental trust (governance), centralized distribution (their app and massive YouTube presence), and an infrastructure for live competition, DP looks far less like a single sports franchise, and a hell of a lot like they’re operating a sports league for the YouTube generation.
I’m not sure how generalizable the lessons from DP are. It can be helpful to think about formats and franchises and revenue streams from day one, but I doubt they were trying to build a sports league until they realized that they had effectively already created one. They’ve fallen into a commissioner role: a suite of family-safe formats, an opportunity to assemble teams of other creators, ownership over the calendar (tours/events), and incredible distribution (their own channels + the DP app). But it’s the sort of thread between all of their properties that only starts to take shape in hindsight.
It’s a fraught time for media broadly, and I definitely don’t purport to know anything or propose anything about the especially depressing journalism industry in particular. But it’s heartening to see what’s possible over an extremely long time horizon for an independent media business with principles and a vision. A good media business is just art with a way to make money, and I can’t wait to see what DP’s structure will unlock for them next.
Plus the convenient addition of Kawhi Leonard.
Recognizable recurring media products.
Elements that surround the core media product, specifically to guide its interpretation.
My dawg Danny Green made it to the thumbnail baby
Some clear caveats here for any catalogues that compound over time: Ad Sense revenue on evergreen videos, dynamic podcast ads on back catalogue episodes, and arguably subscription revenue.
The channel launched a month ago and already has 171k subscribers and an upcoming product line. Compounding is crazy.
I watched soooo many DP videos for this post, and it never got old to hear a grown ass man yell “gosh dangit” instead of swearing. Mashallah for real.