The Tyler Perry of Youtube
When I was 22, I moved to Colombia, South America. By the time I was 24, I was running my own TV show—though we didn’t call it show running back then. Before that, I’d only been in one writers’ room, working on De Pies a Cabeza, a Colombian family series about a neighborhood soccer coach and his young players. I ended up writing about 25 episodes of De Pies a Cabeza, which gave me just enough experience (in my naive head)—and just enough confidence—to try creating something of my own.
My show was called Fuego Verde. It wasn’t very good (I’m being kind). But I saw a gap: nobody was making shows for a male audience in Colombia. In the '90s, almost all scripted content targeted women. So I wrote an action-adventure series with a lot of comedy and heart. Budgets were around $60K an episode. My co-writer Tom Quinn and I used to call our VFX "special defects" because they were hilariously bad. We would watch the show together on Tuesday nights as 8:30pm stoned out of our gourds.
And yet, the show became one the biggest hits on Colombian TV. Ever. It hit a 45 Nielsen at one point (different times to say the least).
Why?
Because I didn’t know better. I was just a dumb gringo who liked The Fugitive and thought it’d be fun to make something like that in Colombia. No one else had done it. My naiveté was my greatest asset. And Colombian TV was my YouTube—they let me do whatever I wanted.
That’s why I love Kinigra Deon.
Like so many YouTubers, she stumbled into the business. It started as a hobby, turned into a job, and then she leaned in. Learned. Iterated. Now she’s one of the biggest scripted TV creators on the platform. She calls herself—and it’s fair—“the Tyler Perry of YouTube.”
And here’s what she’s built:
Her channel, @KinigraDeon, now has:
4.88 million subscribers
909 videos
1.8 billion+ total views
160 million hours watched in 2023 alone
70% of that viewing on TV screens, not phones
This isn’t niche. This isn’t small. This is scale.
She’s grown her subscriber base nearly 20% in the last year. According to ViewStat, she’s made somewhere between $776K and $2.1 million on YouTube in the last 12 months alone. That’s just YouTube—she’s also active on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok, which all throw off additional revenue. And none of that includes brand deals. Nor merch. Nor her DTC business.
She was just at the Spotter Upfront in NYC, pitching herself directly to brands. Word is, most of the real money in this game is coming from those deals now.
I reached out to her company to get more info. No response. Who wants to talk to a legacy TV and film producer? Eww. Gross.
KINIGRA DEON: THE FIRST VIDEO AND THE FIRST BRICK
Before the team. Before the exponentially growing audience. Before the studio workflow, before the brand deals—there was just Kinigra and her phone. Living in Alabama. She filmed her first video for Facebook. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t polished. But it made people laugh.
She said that in those early days, “I was everything. I was the editor, I was the videographer, I was acting.” That first video got enough attention that she made another. And another. No film school. No roadmap. Just iteration. And she saved everything—every draft, every cut, every mess-up—because she was building something.
Now her workflow is fully structured. Editors follow a system: clean assemblies, labeled scenes, color-coded timelines, adjustment layers to mark emotional beats. Structure, she says, saves time—and it also trains people.
Her post pipeline is a bootcamp. Her assistant handles scheduling. Writers (including family) send in scripts. Thirty to forty rotating actors keep the productions moving. If she’s out of town, the shoots don’t stop—she might send an improv prompt from the road. If a script isn’t done, the team figures it out.
This isn’t a one-woman YouTube channel anymore. It’s a production company.
And she leads like one. She lets people learn by doing. One time, an actor read lines off their phone on camera. She was furious. But the viewers didn’t notice. Her takeaway was simple: she because she doesn’t love it the audience definitely might.
That kind of humility runs through everything she does. She still steps in when needed. Still directs. Still writes. But she doesn’t act in everything anymore—only when a role speaks to her.
Her long game? A studio lot in Alabama. She told YouTube’s creator blog that Tyler Perry started with nothing, and now he has a massive studio with no limitations on what he can create. That’s what she wants to build on YouTube.
Many of the people who started working with her—editors, actors, writers—have gone on to create their own channels. She supports that. She told the Television Academy, “We have at least 50 different actors who also have become creators.”
One of her original editors now runs a post-production team of his own. Where traditional Hollywood might try to lock talent down with contracts, Kinigra sees growth in collaboration.
Her model doesn’t rely on control—it’s built on mutual uplift and opportunity.
SOME OF HER BIGGEST HITS
She’s often responding to the zeitgeist—whether it’s riffing on Barbie or spinning a fantasy twist on Wicked—and in that sense, she’s part Tyler Perry, part Roger Corman.
Like Perry, she’s building infrastructure, employing her own cast, crew, and creative team. But like Corman, she thrives on speed and relevance. When Star Wars hit theaters, Corman answered with Battle Beyond the Stars. When Alien blew up, he dropped Galaxy of Terror. He knew how to surf the cultural wave—and Kinigra does too. She moves quickly not just to meet the moment, but to reframe it for an audience that rarely sees themselves in the original. Her stories might echo the big IP—but the voice, the heart, the perspective? That’s all hers.
Barbie & Ken
Dolls come to life and deal with real-world drama.
Full-length movie version: 6.7M+ viewsVampire Siblings
A group of siblings tries to blend in while hiding their supernatural powers.
Over 10M views across five seasonsMy Secret Love Letters
A teenager’s private letters get exposed, setting off social chaos.
Movie version: 1.9M viewsThe Witch and the Frog
A green-skinned teen witch learns to own her identity and power.
Top episode: 851K viewsStudents Executed (Squid Games in High School)
A parody series blending survival games and school drama.
Top episodes: 1M+ views
She A/B tests titles. She launches shorts to test ideas. If a clip hits, it becomes a series. If that lands, she recuts it into a movie. Everything is iterative. Everything is built in motion.
THE AUDIENCE AND THE WHY
At first, she assumed she was making content for kids. But she soon realized parents were watching too—together, as a family. Her audience is broad, but especially strong among young Black viewers in the South. Still, she doesn’t build walls around it. Anyone who’s ever felt weird, loud, sensitive, or invisible will find something in her stories. That’s who she’s making this for.
She’s not building for the system. She’s building around it.
WHY HOLLYWOOD CAN’T DO THIS
Hollywood used to operate like a mentorship engine. Flawed, of course. Most of the people who got in were already connected or came from money. But at least there was a path. Young writers could get in a room, learn from pros, and move up.
Now? That system barely exists. Fewer shows. Fewer chances. Remote work killed a lot of the relationship-building. And the barrier to entry keeps rising. An African American studio exec once told me that working in Hollywood is a career for wealthy hobbyists.
That’s why YouTubers started carving their own lanes.
Kinigra isn’t trying to break in. She already built her own house.
She’s open to platform partnerships—if they make sense. She’s said she wants to create a mini-Netflix on YouTube, a platform where she owns the pipeline from idea to release. But she’s not chasing a deal. She has audience, IP, and infrastructure. If Hollywood wants in, they’re buying into her system.
She’s said it clearly: we can make a movie if we want. We can create a streaming platform if we want. She’s not waiting for permission.
SO… NETFLIX?
If Kinigra Deon ever brings her content to Netflix, it probably won’t be to keep doing what she’s already doing. It’ll be to do something bigger. A limited series. A feature. A world-expanding leap that reaches an even broader audience. And Netflix—more than any other platform—is well-positioned to partner on that kind of move. It’s the YouTube of subscriptions: global, algorithm-driven, culturally omnivorous.
But there are questions. Would she get the freedom she’s used to? Would they let her move at her pace, follow her instincts, trust her team? Tyler Perry got that kind of autonomy. Would she?
Maybe she needs to grow her audience more first. Or maybe she needs to make something bigger on her own before any platform can fully see the value. Or maybe—and this is worth sitting with—she doesn’t need a platform at all.
She’s already built her own.
THE BIG PICTURE
In 2023, 70% of her 160 million watch hours happened on TV screens. She’s raised her production value to meet that demand, but the creative ethos hasn’t changed.
She still believes that if you love the work, and you love making it, then just put it out there.
That’s what this whole thing comes back to. Naiveté—not as ignorance, but as freedom.
She didn’t start with a business plan. She started with a funny idea and a phone. By the time the industry showed up, she already had something worth protecting.
Just like I did in Colombia.
Just like every creator who dared to try before they knew how.
That’s how it works.
That’s how it grows.
Great article, Ben!
the implications as thrilling as the read