That's the only way something like this survives financially unless they're planning to somehow monetize their social media following as a brand of cool videos. The issue there is making money off social media *as a company* is very difficult, I've been in that world where we were racking up billions of video views on facebook and had to figure out how to monetize it.

They're not going to recoup expenses on traditional income streams like media rights, ticket sales, and merchandise alone.

A typical "social media" based company that leverages other platforms and steals content to make money has to operate with almost no overhead (e.g. theChive) and do a robust eCommerce business to stay afloat. They currently pay $0 for their content that drives billions of views, now they're going to be paying 7 figures so the return will have to be outstanding.