I'm sure there some beneficial shareholder val
Maybe. But half a billion is a lot of money. Hasn't Disney been laying off in their digital business groups? I don't see Disney as a big advertiser honestly. Not compared to Budweiser, Ford, Geico, etc. Heck even scrubbing bubbles adverstises more than Disney. Those companies the make and distribute videos on YouTube don't get a big slice of the pie from YouTube either. There is something more to this acquisition I think but I am too ignorant even take a stab at guessing.
Disney is nothing more than the owner in this deal.
All operations at Maker Studios will continue as they have been under current management. It's basically the same as how the deals for Marvel and Star Wars were. I'm sure there will be some cross promotion here and there, maybe some of the talent from maker doing some commercials, tv, etc to promote something to a certain target demographic, but other than that, things continue as normal.
And they don't get a huge slice, but that's not where they make all of their money. They make their money in advertising from outside companies on videos. PewDiePie could have a video that has 2 million views or so. He'll make a decent amount of money just from that one video alone (Maker takes a % of course), but of course he does videos of himself playing video games.
He just did a video of himself playing
Dark Souls II the other day (a game just released), the video got 2.65M views. Among content creators, PewDiePie has the most subscribers on YouTube at 25.2 Million. That's where the real money comes in. The high subscriber rate means he can demand a pretty good amount of money to companies for him to use their games in his videos.
Again, Maker gets a % of all of this money. PewDiePie is just one person too. There are plenty of other big creators under the Maker umbrella with pretty big followings from Epic Rap Battles of History, Mike Thompkins, Snoop Lion, KassemG, LisaNova, all the way to CEO Shay Carl's ShayTards and WhenTheKidsGoToSleep. There's so much diversity among the group and in the end I think you'll see this type of relationship between Hollywood and YT is where things are going. DreamWorks recently bought
AwesomenessTV and Warner Bros also recently invested $18M into the video gamer You Tube channel
Machinima.