Presented by YouTube. In 2007, YouTube had a radical idea that shouldn't have been so radical.

What if creators earned a real share of the value they create?

By sharing advertising revenue directly with creators, YouTube helped empower anyone to build a business,

generate income, and hire employees, establishing the creator economy. In 2024,

YouTube's creative ecosystem supported more than 490,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the U.S.,

according to research from Oxford Economics. Learn more about YouTube's impact at YouTube.com slash how YouTube works.

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our special edition podcast creator economy series.

Across this series, we'll be looking at the growing number of content creators and the impact

they have on the U.S. economy.

Thank you to YouTube for making this project possible, and please check out the full project

at punchbowl. News. Today, I'm joined by a very

special guest, Ben Brody, Punchville News tech reporter extraordinaire, and he profiled

Hercules Candy for this latest episode. Ben, thanks for joining me and tell the listeners

all about how this company, Hercules Candy, has benefited from their YouTube presence.

Yeah, absolutely.

This was a really fun one to do because throughout this series, we've been talking basically about new media, right?

We've been talking about, like, stunts on YouTube and the changing entertainment environment

and all this stuff. And this is a business that was founded in 1910. This is as offline, as

IRL as you can possibly be. They'd been around for, you know, 85, 90 years when they got on YouTube.

And that was back in about 2017.

And it just took them off like a rocket.

They were basically actually running the business from home in East Syracuse, New York.

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