Matt Kalish had long been frustrated by the lack of growth in creator media on channels like Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. The DraftKings co-founder and long-time leader of the company’s North American business saw creator content struggle to grow as part of the media mix for many large brands, even as traditional media audiences diminished and eyeballs moved to online platforms, he told AdExchanger.
These struggles led him to invest in FaZe Clan, a creator-based commercialization network. On Tuesday, Kalish announced the launch of a creator monetization business called HardScope, which is the parent company of FaZe.
FaZe is a livestream gaming team. As in, literally dudes who live together while broadcasting and producing content and monetizing on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, not to mention merchandise and actual gaming prize money.
About 10 years ago, the team became an official business, and it listed on the Nasdaq in 2021. But FaZe was taken private in 2023 and last year was revamped under the new management and a new business model.
There is still a FaZe Clan group that is an owned asset. But the company, HardScope, will also commercialize a whole array of products and services for creators in other verticals, Kalish said, including creators in food, music and gambling spheres. Those categories are the next-closest concentric circles for FaZe, “which is typically looking at younger Gen Z, diverse male audiences.”
Unlike FaZe, though, the creators being added to HardScope’s roster of talent (and customers) won’t be overtly affiliated with HardScope, which is just the technology used by creators. Nor will there be a “FaZe Cooking Clan,” for example.
HardScope is meant to be an “elegant onboarding” for talent in adjacent verticals, who wouldn’t care about the association with FaZe but would very much like to emulate its distribution success, Kalish said. The product suite includes production tools, distribution and monetization and commercialization features, such as ecommerce integrations.
As the business operation backend for FaZe Clan, this same technology worked well but was hard to expand because it was so tightly interwoven with the FaZe team and association with gaming and assorted dramas (like involvement in a 2021-2022 pump-and-dump crypto scam). Kalish said the creator business platform has been separated so it can be more effectively sold in other verticals. Also, he noted, the baton has since been passed to a new generation of FaZe team and company management.
HardScope product suite will include tools created by the FaZe organization, like a video-clipping tech used by gamers to take long streams down to quick, thumb-stopping posts for a TikTok or Instagram feed.
“Short form is the TV Guide of 2026,” he said, referring to how these quick social clips draw viewers to what can be an hours-long livestream, or a Twitch or YouTube archive. “This kind of reach mechanic” now accounts for three-quarters of FaZe Clan’s video impressions, he said.
Bringing that clipping product to market and having the ability to extend distribution through paid media will be an important draw for creators, Kalish said.
There are many creators who produce great live or long-form content but receive relatively few viewers because they don’t understand the methods of distribution and amplification on those platforms, Kalish said.
Advertisers make the same mistake, too, he said. A brand will evaluate a sponsored video or bit of content based on the number of people who viewed the stream.
“What they’re not looking at is, how does that content get discovered by your audience?” he said. “How do you amplify and reach way more with that investment in the original content?”
