Ex-Navy SEAL MrBallen’s first viral video hit while he was at a water park with his kids. Now he has 11.4 million subscribers and a SiriusXM deal

After all, John Allen, the former Navy SEAL behind the MrBallen empire, now has 11.4 million YouTube subscribers and last year signed a major deal with SiriusXM that’s reported to be worth as much as $70 million. The MrBallen Podcast has regularly held a spot in the top 11 of Edison Research’s quarterly ranking of U.S. podcasts, and he landed on Forbes’ 2026 Top Creators list with estimated earnings of $24 million.

But Allen somewhat fell into this success by accident. 

He enlisted in the Navy and joined SEAL Team 2 in 2012, but in 2014 he was badly wounded by an enemy grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan. That ultimately led to his medical retirement in 2017. While the pension that came with that was meaningful, he told Fortune, he had a wife and two young kids at the time (he now has three)—and it “certainly wasn’t enough” to live on comfortably. He also wasn’t ready to retire in his early 30s. 

“It wasn’t like I will never figure it out, but it just sort of felt like ‘I wonder what’s going to happen next,’” he told Fortune. “I think I was also a little bit in shock because I set out to be a SEAL, and there’s so much prep. In many ways, my career within the military was off to such a great start.” 

He felt as if he was having an “identity crisis.” For the next couple of years, Allen tried his hand at different work, cofounding a charity that ran in-person networking events connecting veterans with employers. Then the pandemic halted travel and in-person gatherings, so the charity work slowed down.

“I, career-wise, was a little bit directionless,” he said.  “I suddenly didn’t have any work—like nothing.”

Becoming MrBallen

At the time, Allen was a devoted follower of Gary Vaynerchuk, the entrepreneur who preaches that everyone should be making content online. With no events to run, Allen decided to try social media. He went on the various platforms and started mimicking whatever was going viral at the time, including dance videos and what he describes as “all sorts of cringy content.” 

None of that gained traction, but he wasn’t disheartened by it, saying he’s perfectly content with embarrassing himself when trying something new, a trait he traces back to SEAL training.

By March 2020, he’d tried countless ideas and had all but given up on being a full-time content creator. But that month, on a family trip to indoor water park Great Wolf Lodge, he had his breakthrough. 

In all of his attempts to become a content creator, he had never tried making the type of content he actually enjoyed watching. What he did love watching were strange, dark, and mysterious stories. For example, he had always been fascinated by the Dyatlov Pass incident, in which nine hikers died under unexplained circumstances in the Soviet Union in 1959.

So Allen filmed himself telling a 60-second version of that story like he was telling a friend, posted it to TikTok, and went to the water park. When he came back a couple of hours later, he couldn’t even open his phone because there were so many notifications. The video had more than 5 million views, and viewers in the comments were asking for more. 

But “the excitement was really not like, ‘Oh boy, I found a business opportunity,’” Allen said. “It was more like, this is such a cool thing to be interested in something.”

So for the next 30 days, he posted three stories a day in the same format. As the world locked down and TikTok became the center of the culture, Allen, in his iconic flannel and a backwards hat, said his videos were being pushed hard by the platform, and within a few months he had millions of followers. By late 2020, Allen’s TikTok comments were full of requests for longer, deeper versions of his stories, so YouTube became a more viable option—and a way to make money. 

The move to YouTube didn’t start out promising. His first video about a supposedly haunted house in Spain flopped. Even after he plugged it on TikTok, few followers came over to YouTube. But days later, he posted his second video on the platform: a personal story about an unexplained experience he had at age 16 at a cabin in New Hampshire. The production was terrible, he said, with a mustard-yellow backdrop, a dog barking in the background, and bad audio. That one went 

“The lack of production, I think, in some ways gave the story itself more credibility,” he said. “It’s like, this is just a random f–king dude saying what happened to him, and despite the bad production, I’m still really drawn to the story.”

He passed 1 million subscribers by year’s end. An unexpected TikTok trend helped, too. Makeup content creators started using his audio on their get-ready-with-me videos, his voice telling a dark story while they did their eyeliner. Those clips kept going viral with viewers who had never heard of him and went looking for the source.

Through 2021, he was a team of one plus an editor, posting to YouTube three to five times a week and living off AdSense revenue. He signed with a manager at Night Media around that time, which brought in real brand deals for the first time. 

Before that, he’d taken a single sponsorship with NordVPN “for like 1,000 bucks or something,” he said. “And I thought that was a great negotiated deal for me.”

Then in 2022, he launched the MrBallen podcast, which he called the most deliberate business decision he ever made. His YouTube videos already functioned as a video podcast, so it was a natural next step. The plan was a weekly remastered episode from the YouTube archive plus a new story each week—on top of the work he was already doing. 

“It was like a staggering amount of work,” Allen said. “Even channeling my inner Navy SEAL work ethic, it was like, that’s not enough. I do not have enough time in the week to produce all this content.”

So he called his mom, a librarian in Quincy, Mass., where he grew up, and asked if she’d help write the show. She learned to write in his voice, and he hired a couple more writers and support staff. 

MrBallen’s big break and learning from mistakes

His big break came in 2022 when Amazon signed Ballen Studios to a three-year deal worth $62 million. The agreement licensed only the podcast, so YouTube and everything else stayed his. That massive deal brought more growth to Ballen Studios, and by 2023 Allen had about 10 people working for him. 

But then he made what he calls his biggest mistake. Rather than reinvesting in what was working, he used the money to build laterally, signing other creators and launching a network of shows under the Ballen Studios umbrella. The logic was that when the Amazon deal ended, a full network with a huge cumulative audience would command more in the next negotiation.

“What ended up happening over the course of a couple of years is being spread unbelievably too thin,” Allen said.

Photo courtesy MrBallen

The shows were good, he said, and his writers’ room was doing real work to build them. But his fans didn’t respond as he expected. Then, toward the end of the deal, Amazon’s podcast arm, Wondery, made clear it wasn’t going to pay a premium for the network. What it wanted was more MrBallen.

So Allen didn’t re-sign. Instead, he signed with SiriusXM, cut the audio network, and pared down the company back to its core. The Sirius deal, which took effect last November, gives the company exclusive ad sales rights across the podcast and his YouTube channel. Allen declined to confirm the deal’s value, although it’s reported to be as much as $70 million.

Ballen Studios now has about 30 employees, and Allen says they’re in a much more stable, focused place.

“We’re going to go back to the thing that made this thing work, which is MrBallen,” Allen said. “We’re going to grow MrBallen. We’re going to hire for MrBallen.”

What’s next for MrBallen

For now, Allen’s main focus is the core brand. Ballen Studios has published three graphic novels, all New York Times bestsellers, with the third, The Terror Within, out last month. Allen has also taken the stories to the stage, though a recent tour was canceled when sales lagged, which he blames on booking venues that were too big. Allen has also returned to philanthropy. The MrBallen Foundation, which supports victims of violent crime and the organizations that serve them, has raised more than $2 million.

Photo courtesy MrBallen

He’s candid that running a company was never the main draw for him.

“I’ve never once been like, ‘Boy, I want to be a CEO of a company,’” Allen said. “That is the most disinteresting thing to me you could ever imagine.”

What comes after is bigger. Allen said he’s in talks with potential partners about highly produced projects involving actors, at the level of Unsolved Mysteries, that could bring MrBallen to streaming. The timeline is about a year out, in part because an ongoing equity dispute with a former partner limits his ability to make long-term decisions.

“In a weird way, it’s opened up the chance to think really hard about what’s next,” he said.