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Oliver Luckett, co-founder and chief executive of theAudience, at the company's Los Angeles office.Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — TheAudience, a social media publishing company and marketing agency with backers that include the William Morris Endeavor talent agency, said on Tuesday that it had sold itself to Al Ahli Holding Group, a Dubai-based conglomerate striving to play a bigger role in the global entertainment business.

Terms were not disclosed. TheAudience, which connects brands like McDonald’s and American Express with YouTube and Instagram stars, will continue to be run by Oliver Luckett, who co-founded the firm in 2011 after leaving the Walt Disney Company.

“I signed a new five-year deal,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Mr. Luckett has now started and sold three technology companies. Disney bought his last start-up, DigiSynd, which focused on managing brands on Facebook.

Al Ahli has interests in construction, real estate, plastics, live events, Gold’s Gym, comic books and luxury movie collectibles; it also hopes to build several international theme parks with partners like 21st Century Fox, although a $1 billion theme park announced with Marvel Entertainment in 2007 never came to fruition.

TheAudience, according to a statement by Mohammed Khammas, Al Ahli’s chief executive, will become “the connective tissue” across all of those enterprises.

Mr. Luckett said that means theAudience will act as a type of franchise manager for various Al Ahli businesses in the social media realm. More important, according to Mr. Luckett, theAudience will have “substantial” financing from Al Ahli to build the careers of digital artists and underground music stars like Hitchhiker, best known for a bizarre video released last year.

“We don’t want to be managers per se, but we want to fund artists and back them like a studio would,” Mr. Luckett said.

William Morris Endeavor owned about a quarter of theAudience; other investors included Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook executive, and Guggenheim Media.

Mr. Luckett said that Mr. Khammas called him out of the blue about nine weeks ago and the deal was concluded in about half that time.

TheAudience, which has about 75 employees, will continue to be based in Los Angeles. It was founded to help traditional movie and television stars monetize their Facebook and Twitter followings, but it shifted its focus after studios balked at paying actors and actresses an extra fee to promote their projects online.