Victor Bengtsson, CEO of Sidemen Entertainment, and Adam Cohen, head of Sidemen Productions, took to the main MIP London stage to reveal how the YouTube-originated content company is scaling its reach.
The Sidemen collective is generating billions of views annually across long-form, short-form, social, and live formats.
Central to the Sidemen’s scale is a distribution network built across four distinct channels, each serving a different audience need and content purpose. The flagship is Sidemen Sundays, a weekly prime-time drop. “We’re trying to visualize what it means to come together and sit down.” MoreSidemen houses a variety of content. SidemenReacts captures more spontaneous content that sits closer to the unfiltered internet culture the brand grew from. Side+ operates as a proprietary subscription platform that allows the team to step outside YouTube’s content restrictions entirely.
“On YouTube, you can’t really curse without getting demonetized,” Bengtsson explained. “But on Side Plus, I can say whatever I want. So that channel gives us a real creative freedom that the YouTube meta doesn’t allow.”
What began as a small team has grown to more than 90 people.
A defining chapter in the Sidemen story was a charity football match. “The idea was to create a footballing event with no one who knows how to play football, and try to sell out Wembley,” Bengtsson said. The journey began modestly before the ambition escalated to the home of English football itself.
In spring 2025, the Sidemen sold out their charity match at Wembley—90,000 tickets—in three hours. The numbers that followed were impressive: 4 billion unique digital impressions from the event alone and 2.8 million concurrent live-stream viewers watching the match in real time. That success caught the attention of major media companies outside of the U.K.
The follow-up event only reinforced the point. Cohen described the sequel sell-out as the moment that confirmed this wasn’t a fluke.
“After selling out Wembley in three hours, the question was: what’s the reaction going to be? Was this a one-off, or is the community there for it?” he said. “The fact that they then actually sold out quicker than the previous year—making it one of the top three fastest-selling Wembley events ever—was just astounding. And that was part of the basis for what Sidemen Productions was brought in to do.”
Bengtsson’s route to running a 90-person entertainment company is, by his own admission, “the strangest one.” Born into a family of cattle farmers in southern Sweden, he sold meat before relocating to London. He found his footing in the video gaming industry at Fortnite. It was through gaming events that he first crossed paths with the Sidemen.
“I joined them five years ago and have built up this team of 90 people and launched around 50 different formats with them.”
Two years ago, Bengtsson made the decisive structural move, transitioning the Sidemen from a creative collective into a properly constituted company.
Cohen’s path was equally unconventional. After a stint at Transport For London (“it’s partly my fault the Tottenham Court Road took so long”), he worked as a private tutor for families around the world, writing scripts about his experiences. He eventually moved into development roles before asking himself a question that led him to Sidemen Productions: “Where is the future, and who is doing things differently?”
The formation of Sidemen Productions represents the most forward-looking chapter in the Sidemen story. The company was not conceived as a traditional production house, nor as a pure digital-native operation. It was designed explicitly to occupy the space between both worlds, drawing talent and expertise from each.
“Sidemen Productions was built to do things differently,” Cohen explained. “It was built to be a hybrid. It wasn’t built to take one model or the other—it was built to find the middle ground. To use the best people from both industries, bring them together with the desire to do something differently.”
The key philosophical distinction, he was keen to stress, is that the production company is built within the Sidemen ecosystem rather than alongside it. “We don’t want to build another traditional production company,” he said. “We want to build it around what the ecosystem of content creators does best—and bring some of those people from the traditional media world with us to facilitate that.”
The Sidemen ecosystem is now well beyond YouTube with its Netflix series Inside. “What is big brother for Gen Z?” Bengtsson said. “What’s reality TV for the people that are 19 to 25 right now? What do they look forward to? There were classic big hitters, Love Island, Big Brother. We said, how do we make one of these things? We had a campaign internally called ‘offensive on purpose.’ And the idea was to look at every single vertical in reality TV and ask how we make it offensive in terms of what they do. So if they need six months, we need 3. If they need 300, we need 10. The first season of Inside was pre-produced in 27 days, filmed for seven, edited in nine, and then released immediately, day by day as the edit was completed.”
With a timeline like that, mistakes are expected. Episode three had no sound 17 minutes in, but audiences embraced it nonetheless. “335,000 people showed up for the premiere. And when I say premiere on YouTube, I mean basically using the Premiere feature, which means that there’s a live chat that you can constantly talk to everyone else watching the show, and also the Sidemen could jump in and talk to the fans as they were watching the show as well. Ten days after the conclusion of the show, 55 million views had been accumulated for the season. And I didn’t really have time to consider what we’re going to do next because it ended up being that Netflix called us.”
Bengtsson continued, “The mission for us as a business has not been quite clear, but at least we know what we’re doing: creating relevant content for the generations that grew up online. There are four key pillars to this business, which is why we think we are positioned very, very differently from the standard production companies. Authenticity. pace, access, budget, Authenticity for us means that for 10 years, we have been consistently delivering content to an audience that might have been 17 years old then, but over 10 years now, we continue to do the same thing. And they do not look at the BBC and go, Oh my god, I love the BBC. They make such good shows. But they do look at the Sidemen and go, Oh, my God. These are the boys that I grew up with. I love what they make. We have millions of views on four different shows every week. We produce somewhere between 360 long-form content pieces a year. They go live on a collection of different channels.”
Cohen chimed in, noting, “That is genuinely the magic here. We’re making three eight-episode series for streamers this year, and the rest of the team makes a show for millions of people every week, and like they’re not scared of the idea of doing three shows for streamers.”
Budgets are “nimble” Bengtsson added. The content isn’t as “polished” as higher-budget shows from the “traditional” ecosystem, but they deliver the authenticity that Sidemen fans love.
At the heart of the company’s strategy is a mission to build the production company of the future, Cohen explained.
“The question in the industry is how are content creators different from talent?” Cohen said. “They are fundamentally different in that they’re used to owning, creating, driving, and leading their own content. So, when working with content creators, think about how you facilitate their ability to lead, their desire to do last-minute changes, and to follow their instincts; instincts that might not necessarily align with schedules and budgets and things like that, and how we allow them to be their best selves and do their best work.”
