Adam Faze's Gymnasium is building the new TV studio — on TikTok and Instagram instead of Netflix

Summary

Adam Faze's Gymnasium is operating as a short-form unscripted studio producing serialized content natively for TikTok and Instagram, with a deliberate strategy of bypassing traditional network distribution entirely. The thesis is straightforward: the audiences that once watched cable television are now on social platforms, and the show formats that would have aired on TV 20 years ago can be rebuilt there from scratch.

The company's proof of concept is Subway Takes, hosted by a creator named Kareem. The flagship show Keep the Meter Running, which followed New York City cab drivers to their favorite places, launched on a zero-follower TikTok account and hit 1.2 million views overnight, with 99% of those views concentrated in New York City. The show has since accumulated 400 million total views and roughly 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram.

The Monetization Model

Platform revenue sharing is structurally weak for short-form content creators. TikTok and Instagram have little incentive to pay producers generously because creators absorb the distribution benefit of going viral organically. Gymnasium's solution has been brand integration at the format level rather than interruptive advertising.

The renovation show Boy Room, built around exposing and renovating filthy men's apartments, attracted organic audience comments demanding a renovation angle. That led to a partnership with Amazon, which co-owns the spinoff Girl Room, launched in November 2025 in Los Angeles. The Amazon integration is structural — the renovation format cannot exist without a retail partner supplying product — making the sponsorship invisible as advertising.

From that template, Gymnasium has developed a broader pitch to Fortune 500 companies: treat your brand as a TV network and commission original shows that live within your brand's cultural universe. Faze frames it as a creative consultancy play, helping brands achieve what he calls "cultural dominance" through owned media rather than paid advertising.

Capital Efficiency and Competitive Position

Gymnasium has raised only $750,000, in a single seed round completed approximately three years ago. Investors include Jeremy Zimmer, former CEO of UTA, and Matthew Seagull at Attention Capital. The company has not raised additional capital since. The lean structure is intentional — Faze argues that large raises in this space historically force studios into unsustainable content volume targets.

Traditional unscripted television studios remain largely unable to compete because their operating model requires pitching to a network before production begins. Gymnasium goes directly to the feed, compresses the development cycle, and validates concepts through organic distribution before committing significant resources. Faze draws an explicit parallel to Silicon Valley's build-first, distribute-later ethos, noting Hollywood has lacked startup DNA for roughly a century.

The Talent Retention Problem

Faze acknowledges that creator leverage is structurally weighted toward the talent, not the studio. He points to the Barstool pattern — Dave Portnoy built Alex Cooper, Cooper left, Cooper then elevated Alex Earl, Earl departed — as a recurring dynamic across the industry. His current answer is to orient Gymnasium's long-term value around brand clients rather than individual creator relationships, arguing that brands are stickier counterparties than stars.

A secondary model involves incubating creators within branded content ecosystems. The framing is that a creator who becomes famous via a brand-funded show becomes a durable ambassador for that brand, regardless of whether they subsequently operate independently.

Live Streaming and the Platform Landscape

Faze is bullish on live streaming as the next dominant format, citing the emergent power of IShowSpeed as the clearest example. Gymnasium produced Speed's "Does America" tour, a 35-day continuous live stream in which Speed did not turn off his camera for the entire duration. The key insight Faze draws from Speed's model is the audience relationship: live streaming creates parasocial intimacy at a scale that pre-recorded content cannot replicate, and live content generates clip inventory that algorithmically hacks every downstream platform simultaneously.

On platform differentiation, Faze distinguishes TikTok as the closest current analog to short-form television — users open it with intent to watch content — versus Instagram Reels, which functions as an accidental discovery layer within a social utility app. YouTube Shorts he views as demographically narrow. Gymnasium has had individual shows fail completely on TikTok and Instagram while going viral on YouTube, and vice versa, suggesting platform-audience fit is non-trivial even for experienced producers.

AI and Format Durability

Faze is not threatened by AI in the unscripted format specifically. His argument is that audience trust in reality content depends on authenticity verification — if Boy Room or Girl Room were revealed to use AI-generated scenarios, the discovery would be treated as fraud, similar to cheating scandals in competitive sports. He views AI as a production tooling opportunity rather than a content replacement threat, while noting that humans' desire for shared, real-time cultural moments — evidenced by NFL viewership records — is unlikely to be displaced by generative media.

Gymnasium has had acquisition conversations but has not transacted. Faze's stated position is that the more interesting long-term path involves taking equity stakes in consumer brands in exchange for delivering large-scale audience growth through content, rather than an outright studio sale.