On 13 March 2026, Rhett and Link released the 3,000th episode of Good Mythical Morning. The milestone is more useful as a measure of production than celebrity longevity.[1]
Mythical makes about 240 GMM episodes a year. Jacob Moncrief, then the company's chief operating officer, told Variety that the team block-shoots a month of episodes in one week. A daily show that appears casual on screen is supported by an unusually repeatable operating system.[2]
That system explains how Mythical grew from a programme hosted by two friends into a studio. A reliable schedule creates advertising inventory, recurring sponsorship opportunities and a large catalogue. It gives viewers a habit that can support paid membership, merchandise and live shows. It also frees the founders to develop work away from the GMM desk while a production team keeps the flagship moving.[5][2]
The catalogue now also supports a free continuous stream and an announced expansion to Netflix.[21][20]
Mythical's commercial importance comes from the layers built around the show and from the emergence of a second franchise hosted by someone other than Rhett and Link. GMM remains the engine. Mythical Kitchen, membership, live entertainment and wider distribution show how far that engine can travel.[5][16][2]
From engineers to a daily format
McLaughlin and Neal met as children in North Carolina, studied engineering and worked as engineers before becoming full-time entertainers. Their early internet work included songs and sketches. The commercial instinct appeared early. In 2007, they devised a sponsored video for an Ohio cornhole company and contacted the business themselves, years before influencer marketing had acquired its present infrastructure.[3][4][5]
They began posting to YouTube in 2006 and launched Good Mythical Morning in January 2012. The format was simple enough to repeat: the two hosts at a desk, moving through games, experiments, rankings and increasingly elaborate food tests. It offered a recognisable relationship and premise without requiring every episode to become a viral event. Rhett later told Business Insider that a 2015 YouTube shift toward longer watch time helped viewers discover and binge the existing GMM catalogue.[1][4][5][6]
The durable company decision was to build a production organisation around the hosts. Writers, producers and editors took responsibility for the daily machinery, allowing Rhett and Link to concentrate on performance and new projects. Stevie Wynne Levine became central to that transition, building the production and writing operation that turned founder output into a team process. By 2020, Rhett was describing delegation as essential to avoiding the burnout that often follows an individual creator's publishing schedule.[5]
Mythical also learned where additional production stopped helping. In 2017, YouTube funded an expanded version of GMM that stretched episodes to around 25 minutes and added musical performances, celebrity guests and a more conventional variety-show structure. Vice reported substantial audience anger about the change. The larger format did not become the permanent model. GMM returned to a more contained structure centred on the two hosts and the recurring segments viewers expected.[5][7]
That reversal established a useful operating principle. Mythical could professionalise everything behind the camera while keeping the experience in front of it familiar. Production capacity made the show sustainable. Format restraint preserved the audience habit.[5][7]
The production system and the business around it
Advertising and branded integrations supplied the original commercial base. In January 2020, then-chief operating officer Brian Flanagan told Business Insider that those two categories represented 55% of Mythical's revenue. The balance came from touring, ecommerce and merchandise, the Mythical Society membership business and publishing. That 2020 mix shows the economic design clearly: free programming gathered a large audience, while direct products allowed Mythical to earn more from its most committed viewers.[5]
The Mythical Society deepens the relationship through paid programming and community access. The store turns recurring show references and founder affinity into physical products, books and games. Tours and ticketed shows sell a shared audience experience. These businesses are connected by the same editorial calendar and personalities, so Mythical can promote them inside programming without building a separate consumer audience for each line.[2][5][22]
The best available company-wide financial marker came two years later. The New York Times reported that Mythical was profitable and on pace to generate about $40 million of revenue in 2022, citing two people familiar with the private company's results. The figure is neither a current result nor an audited filing. It establishes that the studio had developed into a substantial operating business by that date.[8]
The direct layer continued to matter in 2025, when Mythical sold 40,000 seats across its live touring. Viewing behaviour was also moving beyond desktop and mobile YouTube. Moncrief told Variety in April 2026 that more than half of Mythical's watch time came from living-room screens. Those figures help explain the current distribution push: Mythical has a touring audience willing to pay for the brand and a viewing audience already consuming internet programming like television.[2]
Food becomes Mythical's second franchise
Food was already one of GMM's most productive subjects. Mythical turned that recurring material into a separate operation when it developed Mythical Kitchen around Josh Scherer and a culinary team. The channel gave food experiments and recipes their own publishing identity, while Scherer became a lead personality rather than a supporting figure inside Rhett and Link's programme.[5][16]
Last Meals supplied the stronger proof that this expansion could create a franchise. The programme uses a guest's imagined final meal as the structure for a long interview, allowing Scherer to move from food comedy into a recognisable conversation format. It reached its 100th episode in March 2026. By July, Variety was describing it as a breakout show, and Netflix had selected both Mythical Kitchen and Last Meals for its announced Mythical package.[16][17][20]
The distinction matters because creator companies often diversify by putting the same founder into more formats. Mythical Kitchen developed a different host, production team and set of repeatable programmes inside the same studio. It remains connected to the flagship through food, shared infrastructure and cross-promotion, but its appeal does not require Rhett and Link to appear on screen.[5][16][22]
Mythical's own allocation decisions reinforce that position. In January 2026, Flanagan said the company's theme for the year was to capitalise on GMM and Mythical Kitchen as two potentially generational properties. That was a more focused ambition than accumulating channels. It identified two programming systems with enough depth to support new formats, live work, direct products and outside distribution.[15]
What Smosh, First We Feast and Sporked reveal about ownership
Mythical's most important ownership experiment began in February 2019, when it bought Smosh from the creditors of collapsed digital-media company Defy Media. Variety reported that Mythical paid less than $10 million. Smosh already had a separate cast, audience and identity, so the acquisition tested whether Mythical's production and commercial infrastructure could support a creator brand that did not revolve around Rhett and Link.[10]
Four years later, Smosh founders Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla bought back majority control. Under the June 2023 deal, Mythical retained a minority stake and an advisory role. Mythical said the transaction produced a significant multiple on its original invested capital, although it did not disclose the sale price, retained percentage or realised return. The four-year arc made Smosh Mythical's clearest completed ownership case: it operated an external creator brand through a difficult transition, then returned control to its founders while keeping a minority position under the 2023 agreement.[11]
The company has made smaller creator investments through a $5 million accelerator announced in 2021. By October 2023, the publicly identified investments were businesses led by Jarvis Johnson, Daniel Thrasher and The Sorry Girls. TechCrunch reported that month that the parent company was wholly owned by Rhett and Link and had raised no outside capital or debt. Mythical strategy executive Neel Yalamarthy separately described it as independently financed. The accelerator therefore represented Mythical deploying its own capital and operating experience into other creator businesses, rather than financing the parent.[9]
In December 2024, Mythical joined a consortium with First We Feast founder Chris Schonberger, host Sean Evans, Crooked Media and Soros Fund Management to buy First We Feast from BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed disclosed an $82.5 million cash price for the whole company. Mythical's contribution and ownership percentage were not disclosed, so the transaction gives it an investment in the company behind Hot Ones, not operating control of the property.[12][13]
Sporked followed the opposite path. Mythical launched the grocery-review publication in 2022 and sold it to Savage Ventures in December 2025 for an undisclosed amount. Flanagan said Savage's portfolio convinced Mythical that the buyer could make Sporked larger and more durable, while Mythical concentrated on its core programming franchises. The sale showed that an adjacent food property did not automatically belong inside Mythical simply because the subject matched GMM and Mythical Kitchen.[14][15]
The Netflix phase and leadership succession
The distribution expansion arrived during a leadership transition. Levine left Mythical after thirteen years, with GMM episode 3,000 marking her final episode as executive producer.[18][19] Flanagan departed at the end of June 2026 after nearly a decade at the company. On 13 July, Mythical promoted Moncrief from chief operating officer to president, giving him responsibility for content, commerce, partnerships and distribution while Rhett and Link remained the founders and creative centre.[17]
Moncrief inherited a business with two clear programming priorities and several ways to distribute them. Mythical 24/7 runs a free continuous stream built from the company's catalogue. The Netflix agreement adds a subscription platform but preserves day-and-date publication on YouTube. It is scheduled to begin with GMM's thirtieth season on 7 September 2026 and includes new and library episodes of GMM, Mythical Kitchen and Last Meals.[21][20]
The choice of shows describes Mythical's present strategy more clearly than a broad corporate portfolio would. GMM supplies frequency, archive depth and the founders' relationship with the audience. Mythical Kitchen and Last Meals supply a second host-led franchise. YouTube remains the release base, while live events, direct fan products, free streaming and Netflix give the same intellectual property more commercial surfaces.[2][20][22]
The next phase depends on whether that system travels without losing the quality that made it durable. Mythical has already seen a larger distribution budget push GMM toward an overproduced format that viewers resisted. The Netflix deal is structured differently because the same episodes remain available on YouTube. If the arrangement brings existing programmes to new viewers while leaving their production logic intact, Mythical will have extended a creator-native studio into television distribution without rebuilding it as a television company.[7][20]