KINNIWhy We Built a Creator Agency
Everyone says MCNs are a dying industry. But what died was not the demand — it was the way the demand was being met. On the cost structure that AI has rewritten, we are rebuilding the creator agency from scratch.
Why We Built a Creator Agency
The creator agency business — commonly referred to as MCN (Multi-Channel Network) — is widely recognized as a declining industry. Sandbox Network and TreasureHunter, arguably Korea's two most prominent MCNs, have been posting tens of billions of won in annual losses. DIA TV, once the country's first and largest MCN, saw its parent company CJ ENM attempt to sell it off — only to find no buyer. Even industry insiders have long pronounced the model dead.
How did MCNs, once hailed as the future of the creator economy, end up here? The answer lies in a revenue structure that is fundamentally dependent on human labor. A single manager at an MCN can realistically handle three to five creators at most. To justify that manager's salary, every one of those creators needs to bring in a meaningful volume of brand deals. The natural consequence: MCNs concentrate their resources on top-tier creators with high per-deal rates.
But from the creator's perspective, giving up 30-50% of revenue simply to have someone handle the business side is a steep price. If the agency were providing artist-level development and offline management like a traditional entertainment company, perhaps. But handing over half your income for what amounts to online operations work? That stings. Meanwhile, the MCN's side of the equation isn't any better — even after taking 30-50% in fees, turning a profit remains difficult for the reasons above. Creators pay high fees and still feel underserved. MCNs collect high fees and still bleed money. Nobody did anything wrong, yet both sides lose. This is the fundamental nature of the MCN model.
The only ones who can escape this lose-lose structure are the largest creators. They have the resources to set up their own companies, hire staff, and attract brands without an MCN's sales efforts. In fact, mega-creators like Chimchakman, Syuka World, and Ppanibottle have recently terminated their MCN contracts one after another. They concluded that the cost of being with an MCN outweighed the value it provided. The profitable creators leave; the remaining roster can't cover the costs. The MCN death spiral is complete.
Meanwhile, micro and mid-tier creators — the ones the industry often overlooks — have been the most underserved by this structure. Their importance in the creator advertising market grows every year, yet assigning a dedicated manager to each of them simply doesn't pencil out for an MCN. At the same time, replying to brand emails, negotiating rates, reviewing contracts, and tracking payment schedules on their own is overwhelming when they barely have enough hours in the day to create content. The need for help is obvious, but there is nowhere to get it.
In other words, the reason MCNs became a dying industry is not that demand dried up or that the service quality was poor. The demand for creators to delegate their business operations has never disappeared — and as the creator economy grows and shifts toward short-form content, that demand is only increasing. What died was not the demand itself, but the way it was being fulfilled. A model built on human labor collapsed under the weight of human costs.
But we saw in AI the potential to restructure this industry entirely. Not only can AI now perform the business operations that MCNs used to handle at near-zero marginal cost, it can also do things that human managers physically cannot — tracking schedules, learning brand style preferences, estimating rates based on data. A single manager can now support not three or four creators, but over a hundred. Under the traditional MCN model, where all labor fell on humans, maintaining high service quality at low fees and serving micro-creators were structurally impossible. Now they are not.
So we built Kinni, an AI-native creator agency. Kinni charges a 10% fee. There are no exclusive contracts, no penalties, and every step of every negotiation is shared with the creator in real time. This isn't because we are running a charity — it's because the efficiency that AI created makes this structure viable.
Kinni is only the beginning. We will not remain a creator agency forever. We believe that the people who step into the world under their own name to express themselves and run their own businesses — the ones we currently call "creators" — are the prototype of the solo entrepreneurs who will become the dominant species of the future economy. Building the business infrastructure these people need is the same as building infrastructure for the solo entrepreneurs who will soon reshape every industry. Every solo entrepreneur, and eventually everyone, will follow the path of creators. Some point at us and say we jumped into a dying industry. This is exactly why we jumped in.
If you're curious about how the Korean agency market is evolving, read 7 Korean Creator Agencies Compared. For real data on brand proposal emails, check out 1,000 Brand Proposal Emails Analyzed.