Why Daily Wire Burned $100 Million on Bentkey

Imagine telling Netflix exactly what you want to watch next month…

And then paying the bill to make it happen.

Sounds nuts, right?

Well, it's not just possible now. It's funding entire shows. And the guy who built that model told me back in 2022 that capitalism would find a way around Hollywood's gatekeepers.

Spoiler alert… he was right.

His name is Marcus Pittman. He's the CEO of Loor TV. And four years ago, when he came on episode 437 of The Brian Nichols Show with this wild Netflix-meets-Kickstarter idea, a lot of very serious investors laughed in his face.

They're not laughing now.

Because while Marcus was quietly funding nearly 40 pieces of content for under a million bucks… Daily Wire was lighting $100 million on fire.

And here's the part that should keep every conservative media executive up at night.

Marcus predicted it. To the dollar. Years before it happened.

So let's talk about what actually went wrong… and what it teaches every founder, creator, and entrepreneur trying to build something real.

The $100 Million Question Nobody Wanted to Answer

Let's start with the receipts. Because this isn't conspiracy talk… this is public record.

Daily Wire announced back in March 2022 that it would spend a minimum of $100 million over three years to launch its own kids entertainment company. They framed it as the conservative answer to "woke" Disney. Bold mission. Big number. Huge fanfare. (Axios)

And then?

By April 2025, Daily Wire shut Bentkey down entirely and laid off the whole staff - with reports that over $100 million was dumped into Bentkey and nearly another $100 million into a Pendragon adaptation that still hasn't released. (Niche Gamer)

That's not a typo. We're talking close to $200 million… gone.

And it's still unfolding. On May 1, 2026, Daily Wire confirmed another round of mass layoffs, with trackers estimating around 100 roles eliminated - roughly half the remaining workforce. Cumulative job losses now top 60% of total headcount over 13 months. (Britannia Daily, Inkl)

So when Marcus sat across from me and said he'd "predicted the downfall of every major conservative streaming platform in the past five years"… he wasn't bragging.

He was just telling the truth.

The question is… how did he see it coming when a hundred million dollars and a room full of MBAs couldn't?

The Consumer vs. The Purchaser - The Mistake That Killed Bentkey

Here's the thing that broke my brain a little when Marcus laid it out.

Conservative companies keep confusing two completely different people.

The consumer… and the purchaser.

And in kids entertainment? Those are NEVER the same person.

Think about it. The parent buys the subscription. But the parent isn't the one watching. The kid is.

The parent is the CFO - they sign off on the dollars. But the kid? The kid's the champion. The enthusiastic buyer. The one begging to renew.

Bentkey built everything for the parent.

"Parents are going to love this show for their kids."

And Marcus's response? "I don't care. What do the kids think about it?"

That's the whole ballgame right there.

Why "Parents Will Love This" Is a Death Sentence

Marcus told me this incredible story about how the McDonald's Happy Meal got invented.

Some franchise owner down in South America noticed kids were finishing their food early, getting bored, and causing chaos. So she started tossing toys in with the meals.

The kids settled down and played. The parents got to actually eat. And then the kids started DEMANDING to come back.

That's how the Happy Meal was born. And today? McDonald's is one of the biggest toy purchasers on the planet.

They didn't market to the parent. They captured the kid… and the parent followed the money.

Now look at what actually broke through in conservative culture. VeggieTales.

I still sing the Cheeseburger song. Why? Because it was funny. It was good. The faith stuff rode along underneath because the content earned the attention first.

My parents never sat down and watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with me. But they bought me every action figure and t-shirt because the show wasn't offensive to them and the content was genuinely good.

That's the model. Make something great. Capture the consumer. Let the purchaser come along.

Bentkey did the opposite.

They built a hammer in search of a nail. The mission was "make conservative content for kids"… instead of "make great content that happens to carry good values."

And $100 million later, here we are.

Markets Aren't Found… They're Built

Now here's where it gets really interesting for anyone trying to build a business.

Marcus told me he's pitched hundreds of investors over four years. And they all say the same three words.

"There's no market."

There's no market for masculine faith-driven entertainment. There's no market for young men. There's no market for indie filmmakers telling the stories Hollywood won't touch.

And Marcus's answer is the most important business lesson in this entire episode.

Markets can be created.

There was no market for electric cars before Tesla. There was no market for ride sharing before Uber and Lyft. There was no market for commercial flight before the Wright Brothers literally built the airplane.

You see the pattern, right?

Here's how Marcus framed the difference between left and right when it comes to building things.

The progressives are weirdly good at spending 10, 20 years building something with no current market… so they own it when the market finally arrives.

Conservatives? They wait for a trend, then rush in with a worse copycat version of something that already exists.

Parler. Gab. The "conservative Twitter" graveyard. Remember those?

That's not building a market. That's playing catch-up… and you never win playing catch-up.

The MTV Blueprint Conservative Streamers Refuse to Copy

Want to know who already solved this problem?

Cable television. Decades ago.

How did niche cable defeat the giant broadcast networks? They platformed unknown indie artists… and they served young men.

MTV. Comedy Central. Cartoon Network. Adult Swim. Nickelodeon.

Every one of those distinct brands went after a narrow, specific audience that was way more loyal and passionate than the broad mainstream.

The riches were in the niches… for the shows.

And here's the blind spot that should embarrass the entire conservative entertainment space.

All that cable success came from targeting 18-to-24-year-olds.

Nobody targets young men anymore.

The big players have given up on TikTok and YouTube and just… stopped trying. They've decided young people don't have the attention span to sit through a movie.

Which is insane. Because those same kids will binge a three-hour YouTube documentary without blinking.

So what really happened? The industry didn't lose the audience. They abandoned it. And then blamed the consumer to cover for the fact that they never risked the capital to build a market in the first place.

Conservative and faith-based content has been serving boomers and women for decades. Great. But that leaves the single biggest, hungriest, most underserved audience in entertainment just sitting there.

Young men. Wide open. Nobody fighting for them.

That's not a problem. That's a $100 million opportunity that Daily Wire spent $100 million NOT seeing.

The Masculine Christian Film Hiding in Plain Sight

This was my favorite part of the whole conversation.

Marcus wrote about this over at The Federalist… and it flips everything you think you know about "Christian movies."

He's talking about Project Hail Mary. The Ryan Gosling film.

Now here's the wild thing. He watched the entire movie without consciously clocking a single religious theme. And then he walked out of the theater and it all hit him at once.

The ship is named Hail Mary. The main character is named Grace. So the ship is literally… filled with Grace.

The opening shot has Grace waking up out of a coma looking like Jesus rising from the tomb - long beard, long hair, wrapped in white.

Death and resurrection. A man sacrificing himself to save creation. And the alien friend he meets? Named Rocky. Like the rock the church is built on.

You don't notice ANY of it while you're watching. And then afterward you go… holy cow.

THAT'S how Christian films are supposed to work.

Not as evangelistic altar calls built so a megachurch pastor buys 300 tickets and pretends the movie's a hit. That's the charity model. And it doesn't last.

Real storytelling carries the message underneath. It doesn't beat you over the head with it.

And right now? Almost nobody in faith-based entertainment is making genuinely masculine, genuinely well-crafted content. Which means the opportunity to disrupt that market is wide open.

Meet people where they're at. Give them a great story first. The message takes care of itself.

Why Rumble Still Can't Beat YouTube

Okay, let's get a little spicy.

Marcus had some thoughts on Rumble. And as someone who uploads every episode of this show to Rumble… I had to push back a little.

But he's not wrong.

Rumble's whole identity is "the free speech platform." Their CEO goes on X over and over saying it.

And Marcus's point is brutal but fair… we already know that. You've been the free speech platform for six years.

The question isn't your values. The question is - who's your Mr. Beast?

Who's the creator that can show up to Rumble with zero subscribers and grow to 100 million? Because right now, what do you actually get from Rumble besides politics?

I'll be honest. When my wife and I watch YouTube, it's almost never political.

It's Good Mythical Morning. It's tech reviews. It's creators we actually enjoy as people.

Rumble planted its flag so firmly in the political-and-talk-radio lane that there's nothing there for the natural, non-political consumer.

And that's a problem… because to compete with a platform that serves everybody, you eventually have to serve everybody too.

The riches are in the niches for a creator. But for a platform trying to go mainstream? Niching down too hard just walls you off from the audience you need to grow.

The $100 Million Mixer Mistake

Here's the other trap. The one Daily Wire fell into and Marcus has watched a dozen times.

You can't just buy big talent and expect their audience to follow.

Microsoft tried it with Mixer. They paid Ninja a reported $100 million to leave Twitch. Lasted about three months.

Mixer's dead. So forgettable that I genuinely forgot it existed until Marcus reminded me.

PewDiePie tried it with DLive. Same story. DLive made a huge deal, PewDiePie went live there for a month or two… then went right back to YouTube. DLive shut down.

Audiences don't migrate just because their favorite creator changes platforms.

So what actually works? Kick figured it out.

They didn't buy a megastar. They paid creators more, moderated less, and let an audience build organically. Now they've taken a massive chunk of Twitch's market share.

You build the following on the platform, with the platform. You don't airlift it in.

Daily Wire tried to airlift. Marcus is building organically.

One of those strategies is sitting on $100 million in losses.

Where Young Men Are Actually Watching Now

So where's all of this heading?

Marcus thinks the younger generations have basically stopped caring about celebrities. They don't care that Tom Cruise is attached to something. They'd rather discover an unknown.

He brought up the GameStop girl - some Gen Z woman who did one Best Buy commercial and became a full-blown internet phenomenon overnight.

Not a celebrity. Not a mega-influencer. Just a real person the audience decided to rally behind.

That's the future. Audiences want to fund the creators they actually know and love… not another faceless Warner Brothers release.

And this connects to something I talk about constantly - on this show and on my other podcast, CX Without the BS.

The thing AI can't replicate. Human connection.

When an AI says "I'm sorry about your experience"… no you're not. You don't know my problem. You can't empathize. You're reading a script.

That's exactly why people watch creators instead of studios now.

Take Ryan Trahan - one of my favorites. His St. Jude fundraiser series last year was better than most reality TV ever made, and he raised millions. My wife and I were invested in it.

Why?

Because it was HIM. We appreciate the person. The story. The realness.

As AI gets more prevalent and the faceless Netflix-type giants keep gobbling up studios… it's going to be on us to support real creators.

And if you're a creator yourself? It's on you to put yourself out there and get seen on platforms built to do exactly that.

The Real Lesson - Meet People Where They're At

So here's what I keep coming back to.

None of this is complicated. People love to overcomplicate it… but it's not.

How do you consume content in your own life? Build content - or products, or services - that meet people the way they actually want to be met.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Find what works and refine it until it's yours.

That's it. That's the whole strategy.

Daily Wire had $100 million and a head start. And they still managed to build for the wrong customer, copy a dying model, and ignore the one audience nobody else was fighting for.

Marcus had under a million bucks, four years of patience, and a simple refusal to be wrong about how humans actually behave.

Guess which one is still standing?

After four years of testing and watching and building and waiting, Marcus says Loor TV is finally ready to turn everything up to 11. They're raising capital to scale from a passion project into a national platform - with the data to prove the model works.

And honestly? I believe him. Because he's already been right about everything else.

So if you're a filmmaker, a creator, or an investor who's tired of watching conservative entertainment torch money on the same broken playbook… go check out what they're building.

Head over to loor.tv. There's a creator tab and an investor tab right on the homepage if you want to pitch or get involved.

Because there are people out there who want to see good, high-quality content from good, high-quality people. The market isn't missing. It's just been ignored.

And somebody's finally building for it.

Listen to the full conversation with Marcus Pittman on The Brian Nichols Show - new episodes every Thursday at 9PM ET. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Rumble, and everywhere you get your content.

And a huge thank you to today's sponsor, Cardio Miracle. It's the heart-health supplement I take every single day to feel my best. Head to cardiomiracle.com/TBNS and use code TBNS for 15% off your first order.

Got thoughts on this one? Hit me up at brian@briannicholsshow.com or tag me @BNicholsLiberty.