FRESH CLIPPINGS

Instagram Wants to be TV

Instagram announced that it is testing horizontal video and long-form episodic storytelling on Instagram for TV, its connected TV feature that is now expanding to Samsung devices after previously being limited to Amazon Fire and Google TV products.

Instagram’s VP of product Tessa Lyons called television the next frontier for the app, and it doesn’t mean it is reinventing itself. It is Instagram following its creators, who have already been using the platform to promote extended content they were sharing elsewhere. So in essence, it’s the platform catching up to behavior that was already happening as creators expand.

Jen Topping flagged something that ties all of this together. Meta is running an annual ad revenue rate of $50 billion on Reels alone, more than every company except Disney made on video advertising last year, and yes, that includes YouTube. The push into connected TV opens up a new surface for that advertising machine, and for producers sitting on shelves of content, an Instagram account is about to carry a different kind of weight, assuming the revenue sharing improves to match the ambition.

The Attention Map

Evan Shapiro published something pretty useful this week: the first attempt anyone has made to measure consumer attention across all screens simultaneously, collapsing television, mobile, and desktop into a single zero-sum budget. He calls it the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index, and the premise behind it is one the media industry has been avoiding for a while.

The measurement industry has always kept screens in separate silos. TV ratings live in one place, mobile handset data in another, browser logs somewhere else entirely. Publishers and advertisers each look at their own numbers and declare victory, while nobody is tracking how the same human being moves across all of those surfaces in the course of a single day. Shapiro’s argument is that this collective blindness is how you end up misallocating billions of dollars in advertising spend.

The data itself produces a result that will not surprise regular readers of this newsletter. Only Baby Boomers watch more video on televisions than on phones. Every other generation of Americans watches video on their phones two to three times more than on their TVs. In a survey of 3,000 US consumers, 59% said they use their phone to watch video more than any other device. Just 28% named TV as their primary screen.

The platforms chasing the living room screen are chasing a real shift in viewing behavior, but the phone remains the dominant surface for everyone under 55 by a significant margin. Any distribution strategy that treats these as separate conversations is, as Shapiro puts it, wasting half its money.

Hollywood's Most Gilded Gate Has Been Breached

The New York Times ran a piece this week about creators having arrived at the center of Hollywood, i.e. CAA. It’s something we’ve been talking about for well over a year now here at Open Gardens, but it’s not at the center of the cultural conversation.

The scene that opens the article says it all. In March, Dhar Mann, a YouTube creator with over 170 million social media followers, sat down for a 90-minute all-hands strategy session at CAA with agents from scripted television, film, consumer products, reality TV, publishing, and brand marketing all in the room. Mann noted that the only way you used to see that many CAA agents gathered in one place was for an A-list director or actor. That’s where all the resources used to go.

We’ve been tracking that shift, but it has accelerated sharply. CAA recruited Brent Weinstein, widely considered the godfather of digital talent representation, to restructure its creator business about a year ago. New clients include the Stokes Twins, Ben Azelart, and Rebecca Zamolo. The agency is making its first major showing at Cannes Lions, the advertising gathering that has become one of the most important dealmaking events for the creator economy. And as we covered a few weeks ago, CAA and TPG formed Compound Creative Holdings, a $250 million fund to acquire and operate creator-led businesses outright.

CAA’s chief executive Bryan Lourd put it plainly: the numbers are undeniable in terms of the audiences creators are reaching and what the economics are starting to become. He went so far as to compare Dhar Mann’s operation in three Burbank warehouses to what Charlie Chaplin’s studio looked like in the early 1900s.

GARDEN VIEW

A panel moderated by Ryan Seacrest on how brands can move beyond reacting to culture and start shaping it, identifying the right moments to show up, executing with speed and authenticity, and building relevance through partnerships across sports, entertainment, and the creator ecosystem.

The lessons here apply just as much to scripted storytelling as they do to brand strategy. Knowing when and how to enter a cultural conversation, and doing it with a genuine point of view rather than a trend-chasing instinct, is something every producer needs to know.

HARVEST QUOTE

"For the next few years at least, you're still gonna think about where the audience is, and the audience is still gonna show up thinking, 'I go to YouTube for explainer content, I go to Instagram for more aesthetic content, or TikTok for fun scrolling.'"

— Lia Haberman, newsletter creator, speaking on a panel about platform differentiation

A useful reminder amid all the convergence talk. Platforms are blurring at the infrastructure level, but audiences still arrive with distinct intentions depending on where they open the app. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok may all be chasing the living room and the long-form format, but the person sitting down to watch still carries a different expectation for each one.

Editorial Note: Garden Harvest is off next week for the Fourth of July holiday. See you the week after.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Uber Eats steps into branded microdrama, we look at what unscripted reality can teach the format, and we finally make good on last week’s promise: tracing the line from the birth of television to the rise of vertical storytelling.

But first–

I’m wrapping up Cannes Lions with a lot to think about.

Wednesday’s panel was a real highlight. Thank you to everyone who came out, listened, and joined the conversation.

I’m heading home with plenty of new ideas about where this space is going, and I’m looking forward to unpacking them all in next week’s Vertical Bloom.

But for now, let’s get into it.

Blink49 and Uber Eats Build a Branded Vertical Mystery

Murder at the Mansion shows how established studios and major brands can use vertical storytelling to develop original IP together, with the sponsor built into the entertainment rather than placed around it.

Blackmagic Design Spotlights the Workflow Behind PLAYBACK

Blackmagic Design’s behind-the-scenes look shows how increasingly ambitious vertical productions can use connected camera and post-production tools to deliver cinematic scale on compressed schedules.

Instagram Takes Episodic Storytelling to the TV Screen

Instagram’s test of longform creator content, episodic series, and live programming on televisions signals that social platforms are no longer staying inside the feed, but bringing digitally native talent and storytelling directly into the living room.

Campus Confidential: Miami

Platform: Peacock (mobile app) / Bravo

Logline: In sun-soaked Miami, an elite group of students navigate friendships, romance, Greek life, and social media scandals… proving that behind every yacht party and perfect post lies a much messier reality.

Genre: Unscripted / Reality microdrama

Anyone who’s been on TikTok in the last two years knows that sorority content has its own gravitational pull. Rush recaps, drop day reactions, pledge reveals: The internet is clearly clamoring for this world, and Campus Confidential: Miami arrives knowing exactly that.

What works here is the format matching the material almost perfectly. Talking heads, the bread and butter of reality TV, translate to 9:16 better than almost any other shot type. You’re close, you’re in someone’s face, and the frame doesn’t feel compromised. The on-screen texts and social media overlays that might feel grafted-on when watched on a television feel completely natural watching on a phone.

Unscripted digital has been working for a long time, and traditional reality TV has actually absorbed a lot of the grammar of online content far more fluidly than scripted digital has.

I Think I’ve Seen This Film Before

Editor’s Note: Last week, we promised to go back to the birth of television. We tend to remember TV after it won, forgetting how much resistance, dismissal, and uncertainty surrounded it as a new format. This week, we look at that struggle and the path television took toward legitimacy, drawing a line to the pushback verticals and scripted digital face today. This is more than a trip down memory lane, it’s a reminder that the journey we are watching now has a history that it rhymes with.

That first quote is what the industry said about soap operas in 1932.

The second is from 1961, about television.

The third from 2026, about microdramas.

Irna Phillips’ Painted Dreams, widely considered the first soap opera, debuted on Chicago’s WGN on October 20, 1930. It ran in 15-minute installments, five days a week, built for housewives. The age-old story is that they were named “soap operas” because Procter & Gamble was the primary advertiser.

Short, frequent, emotionally direct, and shaped around an audience’s routine. Sound familiar?

Radio let broadcasters and advertisers test serialized storytelling before carrying it into television. Scripted digital is doing something similar now, with pilot mandates, giving studios, brands, and creators room to test before making a larger bet.

By 1937, 90% of their entire advertising budget went to daytime radio, and by 1939 they were producing 21 soap operas. Daytime soaps went on to generate $1.25 billion in annual advertising revenue across U.S. networks by 1984. P&G is now the biggest advertiser in the world. The soap opera is where they built that foundation.

Their core audience then: housewives. Women at home. A demographic the rest of the industry didn’t take seriously.

The core audience now: across Omdia, Media Partners Asia, and Real Reel, every major industry study lands in the same place. The core microdrama audience is women aged 25–55, with the paying demographic skewing toward affluent, urban women 30–60. On YouTube specifically, women 35–54 represent over 36% of microdrama streams despite accounting for just 19% of general viewing in those age groups.

In December 2025, P&G announced The Golden Pear Affair, 55-episode microdrama produced by P&G Studios. The company that invented the soap opera to reach women at home is now producing microdramas to reach women on their phones.

By 1953, Hollywood was panicking. And by Hollywood, we mean the movie theaters and cinema studios. These were companies whose entire business model depended on people paying to sit in a dark room together. They were watching that model bleed out in real time, because a small black-and-white box had shown up in living rooms across America.

Their response was to make movies more cinematic than ever. CinemaScope stretched the frame to 2.35:1. VistaVision added vertical resolution. 3D put the picture in your face. Technicolor made everything vivid and lush. All of it designed to give audiences something the little box couldn’t replicate.

The condescension was overt. Television was low quality. Television was cheap. Television was for people who couldn’t be bothered to get off the couch. The studios were loud about this attitude. A few decades later, they had to swallow it whole.

Some studios are learning from that lesson. In October 2025, Fox Entertainment took an equity stake in Holywater and committed to 200+ vertical titles over two years, including recutting Season 3 of Farmer Wants a Wife into 101 episodes for a “mobile-first binge experiment.”

“Innovation in digital storytelling is shaping the future of entertainment.” Rob Wade, CEO of Fox Entertainment

This is the same move as studios selling their back catalogs to TV networks in the 1950s.

And here’s what the studios missed the first time: the technology always catches up. The black-and-white box got color. Then HD. Then 4K. You can fight the format. You cannot fight the inevitability of better technology.

By 1960, 87% of American homes had a television set. Families were watching six hours a day. The format the cinema industry had dismissed as a lesser medium had become the dominant one. Not because it won a war of words, but because the audience simply chose it.

The GI Bill (1944) gave millions of veterans low-interest home loans with no down payment required. By 1945 there was a shortage of five million homes nationwide. Between 1947 and 1953, 83% of all U.S. population growth occurred in suburban places, miles from the movie palaces families had once walked to. For many of those families, television wasn’t the convenient option: it was the solution. Once enough families had one, gravity did the rest.

That logic has a 2026 version. Post-pandemic inflation hit entertainment spending hard. A movie for two is $40 before concessions. Ninety-one percent of American adults own a smartphone. Deloitte found that 39% of consumers had canceled at least one paid streaming service within six months. The phone is already in everyone’s pocket and the first ten episodes of most microdramas are free before any paywall kicks in. Entirely free scripted digital (Brooklyn Coffee Shop, The Group Chat) already have real audiences. When entertainment is accessible, audiences come.

This is not ancient history. It is a pattern.

The Dismissal Is Always the Tell

In May 1961, by which point 55 million television sets were in American homes, FCC Chairman Newton Minow stood before the National Association of Broadcasters and called television a “vast wasteland.” There were 55 million television sets in American homes at that moment. The format was already winning, but the institution declared it culturally lesser anyway.

In January 2026, TechCrunch predicted that microdramas would generate billions while announcing that they “kind of suck.” Omdia estimates the global market reached $11 billion in 2025. The criticism may fairly describe some of a rapidly expanding market. The format is already winning. The institution is declaring it lesser anyway.

This is the tell. The dismissal doesn’t arrive when a format is struggling. It arrives at peak institutional discomfort.

The Format Always Raises Its Own Ceiling

Skeptics of television pointed to the quality of the content. Fair point, for a while. Then HBO launched in 1972: paid television, ostensibly better than free TV, but still TV. Nobody quite knew what it was yet or how to talk about it. Vertical is in a similar period of business model ambiguity, experimenting with coin unlocks, ad-supported, subscriptions, free-with-discovery.

Then, on January 10, 1999, The Sopranos premiered.

Fewer than four million viewers watched night one. Within three seasons, that number was 13.4 million for a season premiere. The 2005 syndication deal: nearly $200 million (the highest ever paid for a cable drama at the time). People still watch The Sopranos for the first time every week, twenty-five years later.

HBO’s tagline during this period was “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” They were trying to escape the stigma of their own medium. And The Sopranos made that escape permanent. Television didn’t improve because critics changed their minds. It improved because a format accessible to enormous audiences eventually attracted the people who knew how to use it.

The Legitimacy Avalanche Has Already Started

February 1, 2013: Netflix drops all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once. David Fincher directing. A-list cast attached. CBS chief Les Moonves called Ted Sarandos personally: “Do you know how television works? You give them one at a time.”

Netflix’s stock went from under $60 to over $400 that year. House of Cards became the first streaming original to receive Emmy nominations. Legitimacy, overnight.

We are watching that happen again.

Issa Rae, creator of Insecure, one of the most commercially credible names in American television, partnered with TikTok to produce Screen Time as a vertical series. 75 million views in the first week. 150 million in the first month. Fox Entertainment has taken an equity stake in Holywater, committing to 200+ vertical video titles. Major talent is moving into this format. This is what it looks like right before the credibility avalanche.

This Time, the Window Is Shorter

Television’s legitimacy took thirty years to arrive. Cable took another twenty. Netflix’s moment took six years from launch to House of Cards.

In China alone, microdrama revenue grew from about $500 million in 2021 to $7 billion in 2024.

Three years.

This is not linear progression. Each cycle is compressing. Technology no longer moves at the pace of industries. The window between early and too late is narrowing faster than any previous chapter of this story.

The cinema studios that dismissed television in 1953 eventually adapted. But the ones who moved first rewrote the industry. The networks that dismissed cable eventually caught up, but HBO’s head start was undeniable.

The audience doesn’t wait for permission. It never has. The phone is already in every pocket. The content is already finding its viewers. The legitimate names are already arriving.

History doesn’t repeat. But it sure does love to rhyme.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

Give us a sub if you don’t want to miss anything! See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Brooke Averick

Instagram: 345K Followers

Youtube: 9.3K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 1M Followers

Who Is Brooke Averick?

Brooke Averick built a career out of sounding exactly like herself.

She first broke through online as LadyEfron, making videos out of private embarrassment: childhood diaries, romantic spirals, pop-culture fixation, anxiety, delusion, and jokes that felt pulled from a group chat after one good rewrite. The feed was not just bits. It was the first place her comic voice had room to stretch.

Averick co-hosts Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast with Connor Wood, where the friendship gives the show its shape. Pop culture, dating, social anxiety, being online too much, saying the wrong thing, recovering from saying the wrong thing, then saying something worse. The podcast gave her comedy more room without cleaning it up.

She also launched Obsessed with Brooke Averick, a solo podcast about fandom, fixation, and the pleasure of caring too much. Averick does not talk about pop culture from a distance. She talks from inside the crush, inside the spiral, inside the moment when obsession becomes funny instead of embarrassing.

Her debut novel, Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It, follows a nearly 30-year-old woman dealing with intimacy anxiety while trying to lose her virginity. The premise fits the material Averick has been circling for years: desire, humiliation, romance, friendship, self-awareness, and the private narration people use while making their lives harder.

Netflix is adapting the novel as a feature, with Averick attached as an executive producer. That jump makes sense because the book does not feel like a creator side project. It feels like the longer version of a comic perspective her audience already understood.

Averick did not just build an audience around being funny online. She built a voice that could leave the feed and still sound like her.

@ladyefronFeel free to use any

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Three Things We Love About Brooke Averick

The voice travels: TikTok, podcasting, solo audio, fiction, and film development all carry the same anxious, romantic, too-specific comic texture.

The book makes sense: Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It is not a random creator novel. It comes from the territory Averick already owns: intimacy anxiety, romantic delusion, friendship, and embarrassment.

She knows obsession from the inside: Fandom, crushes, spirals, private logic, caring too much. Averick keeps finding comedy in the places people usually try to hide.

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I can’t tell you how many agents, managers, execs, and producers have called me in the last few months asking some version of the same question:

Who should I sign?

Who wants to make a movie?

Who has a real audience?

Not surprising.

The horror-youtube triumvirate (you know who) all landed in roughly the same six-month window, and suddenly the whole industry had a collective epiphany about creators, community, and the power of launching content when people already care.

On one hand, that epiphany was overdue. The signals have been there for years. Creators have been building real communities, moving audiences, selling products, filling venues, launching formats, and proving over and over again that follower count is not the same thing as fandom.

The industry just wasn’t paying attention.

On the other hand, the six-month cluster was a fluke. Three creator-led breakouts arriving that close together makes it feel like there are hundreds more sitting out there, fully formed, waiting to be unleashed.

Not so fast… Worth chasing? Absolutely.

But finding the next one is still a needle-in-a-haystack business. It’s not that different from trying to pluck the next great filmmaker out of Sundance, SXSW, or Cannes. Different playing field. Same odds. There is still only a Ronaldo or Messi every once in a very long while.

I’ve spent the last few years as a producer working with creators to develop shows, movies, and other media properties. And yes, part of the equation is spotting whether a creator can actually step into a bigger arena.

Watch any interview with Kane Parsons and you see it immediately. He’s so smart, clear, and articulate that he reminds you of the precociousness of Orson Welles or Steven Soderbergh making their first films in their mid-20s.

The best producers and execs already know how to spot that.

That’s a skill.

But there’s another question that gets less attention and may matter just as much:

How do you actually value their community?

How do you know if it’s portable?

How do you know if the followers will show up for something new, or if they’re just along for the algorithmic ride?

That’s what I wanted to explore.

Through this Substack, I’ve built a network of people in the creator economy who are way smarter than me. So I asked a few of them directly. Here’s the team of Avengers I assembled to explore this topic:

Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios.

Alice Ma, co-founder of Mad Realities.

Bia Granja, the godmother of the Brazilian creator economy.

RJ Larese, President of talent management company Sixteenth USA.

Jim Louderback, OG of the creator economy.

Zack Honarvar, manager of some of the biggest creators, including Yes Theory and Airrack, and a serial entrepreneur.

Tim Shey, chair of creator-backed media company Electrify.

Didrik Svendsen, co-founder of Trudy. He’s perhaps the least known of the bunch, but no less interesting. Trudy is a platform built on data from more than 230,000 brand-creator campaigns, probably the most rigorous analytical approach to creator evaluation I’ve come across.

And this is what they said.

The Instrument That Doesn’t Exist

How do you tell which creator communities travel? The industry has the rhetoric down.

“Depth beats width.”

“Real fandom, not vanity metrics.”

“Community over audience.”

All true. Also mostly useless when wielded like blunt instruments.

Because when the deal memo gets written, the number everyone still reaches for is followers.

This isn’t a new problem. People have been trying to reduce influence to a score forever. One of the early attempts was Klout, which tried to assign people a single influence score from 0 to 100 across hundreds of millions of social profiles. Brands handed out perks to high scorers. Employers even asked for Klout scores in job interviews.

Then the social landscape fragmented. Klout shut down. And the fantasy of one clean number went with it.

The problem wasn’t that scoring influence was a stupid idea. It was that the dimensions that matter most don’t compress that neatly.

Sean Atkins put it bluntly: “I’ve been playing this game for a long time and have not yet seen a tool or analytic model that can get this right.”

No one I talked to disagreed.

After all the conversations, the answer didn’t boil down to a score.

It boiled down to six dimensions.

None of them are definitive on their own. None of them require a dashboard. And three strong dimensions plus three weak ones does not equal 50%.

It means you’re looking at a specific kind of community with a specific commercial profile.

The point isn’t to grade the community.

The point is to understand what kind of animal you’re dealing with.

Welcome to the The Six Dimensions Test

1. Identity — Does membership say something about who you are?

I keep coming back to something Atkins said, because it’s so simple it almost sounds too obvious.

“At its peak CSI was on every TV in every country on every day. It was the most popular TV franchise in the world. See anyone with a CSI hat? For most of its life, The Simpsons has been below the top 50 TV shows. But you see that merch everywhere.”

CSI had more viewers. The Simpsons has identity. That distinction — between a show people watched and a show people belong to — is the whole thing.

The fans who have named themselves — Swifties, ARMY, Beliebers, Deadheads — have already answered this dimension. The fans of a show whose name you forget by Tuesday haven’t.

Alice Ma has the structural explanation: “The most successful communities cater to an opinionated subculture first, then spin out from that core fandom into greater scale.” Identity forms before scale. You can’t retrofit it onto something that’s already gone wide.

The tell: do they have a name for themselves?

2. Lateral Connection — Do members know each other exists?

An audience connects in one direction — toward the creator. A community connects in every direction. That horizontal layer is what separates the two.

Alice Ma goes right to the language: “The internet is so federated, each subculture is like its own little language. Encoded in that language are things about worldview, emotion, what are the top items most stressful and most joyful.”

The language develops before anyone formally builds a community around it — and it keeps going after the creator goes quiet.

Bia Granja calls it “inner culture”: “Recurring memes, slang, rituals, references, slogans, or ‘I know the name of your dog’ behavior. This usually points to fandom infrastructure.”

RJ Larese goes straight to the comments: “Are people defending the Creator in the comments like it’s their full-time job? Are they quoting them, talking to each other, showing up over and over again?”

Didrik Svendsen has found the simplest proxy I’ve come across: “The greatest creators use a lot more ‘we’ than they use ‘I.’ Count the we’s versus the I’s, do the percentage. If that percentage is high or low, that tells you more about that creator’s ability to move their audience than any other metric or bullshit thing people will throw your way.”

The tell: is there activity that doesn’t require the creator to start it?

3. Creation — Do they make things?

The highest form of engagement isn’t watching. It’s making.

Fanfic. Edits. Fan cams. A visual vocabulary that didn’t exist before the community invented it. When fans start producing artifacts — things that weren’t there before the community made them — the property has crossed from being consumed to being inhabited.

Bia Granja putting it simply: “Communities that remix are usually much deeper than communities that only consume.”

Alice Ma’s team at Mad Realities built their own internal system, Mad Metrics, specifically because no commercial tool was catching this signal. A homemade analytics stack is itself a data point about where the industry gaps are.

Fun fact I just learned researching this article -- Fifty Shades started as Twilight fanfiction. The Love Hypothesis started as Star Wars fanfiction and hit the New York Times bestseller list.

The tell: is there a visual language or vocabulary fans built that the creator didn’t give them?

4. Portability — Does the audience travel?

I think this is the easiest signal to measure and the most obvious. But how much portability does it take to make a community valuable? I keep thinking about this with a community we’ve been building around a digital show.

Alice Ma’s honest base rate: “Most creator communities won’t travel. I want to say 99%.”

The 1% that do have something in common. Atkins, on how he finds them before making the big bet: “You don’t ‘know’ until you do some testing like do a merch drop or have a small meetup. Other indicators are newsletters, uptake of your business in new areas as you expand.” Small bets before big bets.

RJ Larese uses a proxy no platform has automated: “I’ll even ask creators how often they get approached in public and where people know them from. That’s valuable signal because it helps you understand how invested the audience actually is.”

Zack Honarvar: “Markiplier’s $50M box office performance with basically no traditional marketing showcases that his channel isn’t just empty numbers but real community and following.”

And the mechanic underneath that, from Didrik Svendsen, who calls it the IKEA effect: “If you feel like you’ve part built it and co-built it, you end up loving the table more because you’ve put blood and sweat into it.” Markiplier didn’t release a movie to his community. He built one with them. They didn’t show up to watch it. They showed up to see it finished.

(Author’s digression – in my 20s when I lived on Ikea furniture I actually detested their stuff after I wrangled it into a wobbly mess. But the analogy works…)

The tell: when they last moved formats, who came with them?

5. Conversion — What’s the gap between free attention and paid behavior?

Two creators with identical follower counts can have wildly different commercial profiles. Size is the wrong variable. The question is how much economic activity the community will actually take on.

Jim Louderback trusts one signal more than most dashboards: “If someone says ‘Sign up for Squarespace, use my code for 25% off for the first year, my code is MRKitten’ — then you get a sense of how many sales were driven by the cool katt.”

Code-based affiliate signups trace actual behavior. They’re one of the few public signals that close the gap between attention and purchase.

Zack Honarvar, from the brand side: “When we’re pitching one of our creators to a brand, we’re selling the power of endorsement and the emotional connection that comes with it. It’s about recognition and trust, the same thing that used to justify paying an NBA player or artist millions to be in a commercial. The CPM doesn’t capture that depth of relationship or the quality of attention our creators command.”

Bia Granja on why some communities convert and others don’t: “Creators whose audiences travel well are providing some kind of service to the community.”

Disposable entertainment needs massive scale to convert. An identity-based community converts at smaller numbers because the relationship is functional, not passive.

The tell: revenue per active follower, not follower count.

6. Persistence — What survives creator silence?

The last one, and probably the most predictive of everything else. If the creator goes dark for six months — by choice, by burnout, by injury, by whatever — what does the community do?

Jim Louderback on how he actually checks: “Go to a creator appearing at an event. Do they drive meet-and-greets. Watch when the fan and the creator meet. Is it just a perfunctory thing or is there a real connection with each and every fan. There’s a difference.”

RJ Larese on what it looks like from the outside: “Are fans excited, emotional, waiting around just to say hi? Or are people casually walking by because they vaguely recognize them? There’s a huge difference.”

Sports communities are the benchmark. Browns fans don’t leave when the team is bad. Liverpool supporters don’t disappear between seasons. The relationship isn’t to the content — it’s to each other and to the thing the content represents. Most creator-driven communities aren’t there yet. The ones that are have a completely different financial profile.

The tell: six months dark — what’s left?

How to Actually Use This

Three contexts where this matters.

Before signing. Run the test on any creator you’re considering before the deal is done. Three strong dimensions might be enough — depending on which three.

Identity and lateral connection together are more predictive than identity and conversion.

The combinations matter.

And take Atkins’ advice: before the big bet, run a small test. A merch drop. A meetup. Something that generates real signal before you commit.

On what you already own. Before you spend a dollar trying to build community around a new property, run the test on your existing slate.

A senior digital exec at a legacy TV and Film studio told me recently that when he started his job he was told to build community around their flagship action franchise — a series of movies with spinoffs and a TV streaming extension. Huge IP. But you could see in the behavior – people didn’t show up for the spin offs or the TV show. There were no Halloween costumes. People just wanted to see the main franchise movie with its iconic star.

Meanwhile, on the same lot, there was another property where the fans had given themselves a name, written (and still write ten years later) tons of fan ficiton, built their own conventions, and were waiting for any reason to come back. And its essence had mutated into microdramas where it had launched a kind of subgenre inspired by those movies because no one was attending to them.

The property had laid dormant for 10 years. And the studio had no clue.

They ran the wrong test. They were measuring recent box office success on a franchise not looking at the behavior of its consumers outside of its principle revenue stream.

The dimensions come online in a rough order:

--identity first

--lateral connection second

--creation third

--portability and conversion as you scale

--persistence last and only with patience.

Most teams skip to conversion and wonder why nothing sticks.

Reach or Residence

Zack Honarvar thinks the market is already dividing: “The premium creator market will end up bifurcating from the programmatic one. They’re fundamentally different businesses serving different buyers.”

The Six Dimensions Test is for the premium side — where the asset isn’t reach but relationship, and the question isn’t impressions but whether the audience actually believes in what the creator is doing.

Tim Shey adds something I loved: “I would think less about evaluating each creator’s community as an isolated thing, and more about the wider community that each of them comes from, and appeals to.”

Michelle Phan’s fans didn’t just show up for her — they recruited. They spread the word to beauty communities that this was someone worth paying attention to. A community that recruits is worth more than a community that gathers.

When I push everyone I talked to on whether any tool can actually capture all of this, I get the same answer.

Atkins has been making these calls for decades and hasn’t found the algorithm.

Alice Ma built her own system and still says she leads with creativity, not data.

Jim Louderback’s most reliable signal is still showing up in person and watching what happens when a fan meets their creator face to face.

Bia Granja feels a lot of this still comes down to pattern recognition from the gut.

The dimensions that matter most — the ones that predict whether a community will show up when it counts — don’t live on any dashboard. They live in the room, in the comment sections, in whether a creator says “we” or “I.”

The Six Dimensions Test isn’t a score. It’s what the people who’ve been doing this longest reach for when the dashboards don’t tell them what they need to know.

Try it out. I just applied it to a digital property we have. The results were telling. More on this soon…

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Editorial note: A shortened version today due to the holiday weekend in the U.S.

FRESH CLIPPINGS

What the Roku deal means for creators

Fox Corp announced a $22 billion deal to acquire Roku this week, and the initial read from most of the industry was straightforward: a distribution play. Tubi plus the Roku Channel equals the largest free TV platform in the U.S., reaching around 100 million streaming homes and sitting in more than half of all broadband households.

That read is not wrong at all. But it undersells what Fox is building on the convergence thesis.

Sean Atkins explains that when Fox sold its entertainment assets to Disney years ago, it gave up the content infrastructure that would have made it a serious streaming competitor. What it kept was sports, news, and Tubi, a lean operation built around free ad-supported content rather than expensive original programming. The Roku acquisition does not change that strategy at all. It extends it, and gives Fox a platform capable of something Netflix and the other streamers have not yet figured out how to do cleanly: integrate creators, podcasts, and free TV into a single connected experience at genuine scale.

For creators specifically, the implications are worth thinking through. Fox has already been making aggressive moves in the creator space, i.e. Fox Creator Studios, Baywatch casting choices, Tubi’s partnerships with digital talent. Roku gives all of that a distribution backbone.

It will be interesting to track this, because as Puck’s Julia Alexander argues, this is the kind of move that changes the conversation about who the most logical partner for creators with premium content actually is. Sure, Roku isn’t necessarily competing against YouTube for creators’ exclusivity, but if Fox executes well, it will now has the infrastructure to compete via a marketing platform for those creators, a distribution channel to drive audiences to certain shows, and a vehicle to advertise along each part of the user’s journey.

The new United Artists

The comparison David Freeman keeps coming back to when describing Graviteur Studios is United Artists, founded in 1919 by Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith. They didn’t start it because they wanted to make movies. They started it because they wanted control of their work, their distribution, and their economic future. That was a radical idea in 1919, but in today’s environment it’s becoming inevitable.

Graviteur is a new production venture launched by Dolphin Entertainment CEO Bill O’Dowd and Kynetic Media Ventures CEO David Freeman, targeting modestly budgeted projects in the $1 million to $10 million range and built explicitly around creator-led filmmaking. The focus is genre, horror, YA, anime, comedy, romance, and sci-fi, with the belief that the next great generation of filmmakers is already building audiences on YouTube and the internet before they have made a single studio film.

The momentum of the last few weeks makes this announcement extremely timely, yet it’s the ownership model that’s worth focusing on.

Graviteur is designed to give creators and talent true back-end ownership and alignment, mirroring the control they already have over their content on social platforms. That is a direct response to one of the creator economy’s persistent frustrations with traditional Hollywood, which typically offers creators distribution and some contingent compensation, but effectively buys the IP from under them for future exploitation.

The speed-to-market argument is equally important. Freeman is explicit that Graviteur is not going to operate on a legacy timeline, announcing a project three weeks before release and hoping a marketing push carries an audience to the theater.

The model is to bring the audience in from day one, through development, scriptwriting, and production, so that by the time the film is ready to release, the community has been part of it the whole way through. These audiences are not used to waiting years for new IP, he notes. They expect a different pace entirely.

The infrastructure behind Graviteur is also interesting. Dolphin Entertainment brings 30 years of independent film financing, international distribution, and a full marketing ecosystem through its network of PR, promotions, and digital firms. For creators who have the audience but not the industry relationships, that is a meaningful offer.

Once again, convergence at work.

That’s all for today. Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, major brands turn verticals into a shopping engine, creator-led scripted IP makes strides, and the man who saw podcasts early thinks about the future of verticals.

But first–

I’m writing this from a brasserie in Paris, searching for a few more words…

And tomorrow we’ll be making our way towards Cannes Lions. The Festival of Creativity. I get the feeling from those that went last year that it’s going to be quite the event. The creator economy continues to evolve.

On Wednesday I’ll be sharing the stage with some recent collaborators and reflecting on where this vertical space has been, and where it’s headed.

But as I myself head toward Cannes I can’t help but continue contextualizing all of this in the broader evolution of entertainment, of the creator economy, of digital media, but also that of technology and culture. It’s all careening together towards something we’ve never seen. The words to describe this undiscovered future are the words I’m seeking here next to the côte de bœuf and the tiled ceilings.

What I’ll share on stage is ostensibly about vertical storytelling. The ideas behind it are much bigger. The future it points to even larger than that.

Maybe I should find all of this uncertainty unsettling. Instead, I find it energizing. Because while I cannot describe the hard contours of the shape our collective future in entertainment is yet to take, I have more certainty than ever that within it will be the beating heart of story, and the ever-present texture of the human experience.

And some dank memes too.

Tonight though, I’m going to keep searching for the last words I need for this presentation at Cannes Lions. If all goes well, I’ll share the talk itself here next week.

If you’re in Cannes, join me Wednesday at 3:30 on the Creator Stage, and if you’re not there, I’ll share it here not too long after.

I hope some people think I’m right, I hope some people think I’m wrong, I hope we all end up talking about it fiercely on the Croisette.

But for now, let’s get into it.

Fox Plans to Keep Tubi and The Roku Channel Separate

Fox has bet big on verticals via some key investments, and this signals it’s move into streaming. As more verticals preserve the horizontal frame we’re interested to see how Tubi becomes a player, and where Roku fits in.

Target and Bravo Turn Fandom Into a Shoppable Digital Series

Shop What Happens points to a future where vertical and mobile-first entertainment are not just marketing extensions, but commerce engines built around fandom, talent, and real-time purchase behavior.

Silk White Builds a Hollywood-Free Hit Machine

Silk White’s success outside the traditional studio system is another reminder that underserved audiences, low-cost production, and FAST platforms can create real businesses without waiting for Hollywood permission.

Graviteur Studios Bets on Creator-Led Scripted IP

The team behind this venture represent some longstanding minds within the digital space, and this bet around scripted IP is another signal towards the market’s confidence in digitally-native scripted formats.

To Her Beat

Platform: Chera TV

Logline: Set against sweat-soaked studios, neon-lit warehouses, and early-2000s dance culture, To Her Beat is a coming-of-age love story about finding your voice, choosing your people, and dancing like your life depends on it.

Genre: Coming-of-age romance / dance drama

To Her Beat announces itself differently from the first frame. The color grade is particularly distinct compared to what you’re used to seeing in vertical: no overlit faces engineered to pop on an auto-playing feed. It’s moodier than that, more textured. Paired with a needledrop opening track, the show reads as something that has a strong point of view.

The writing leans naturalistic, and the cast handles it deftly. This medium is typically loud about the overtones but these deliveries were much richer in subtext.

There’s craft in the camera and post work too. A shot inside a fridge and jump cuts that lean into the digital grammar of the format paired with cinematic tracking shots that nod toward contemporary TV. The sound design feels equally deliberate. There are sequences carried entirely on SFX and dialogue.

In a format where music is often used as a constant emotional prop to hold retention, that’s a risk. But the most interesting gamble is the dance sequences. Conventional wisdom in vertical says stay tight, keep cutting, don’t linger: the format rewards speed and escalation. To Her Beat has moments of breath early to establish the motif of full dance sequences. I for one enjoyed them.

Chera TV built its identity around the idea that the vertical format deserves the same creative rigor as anything else. To Her Beat is a wonderful one-two step in that direction.

What the Vertical Media Summit Told Us

Editor’s note: Hernan Lopez recently published a piece in his Streaminomics newsletter summarizing insights from the Vertical Media Summit: a closed-door gathering of senior leaders across the industry. Scott was in attendance but we’re only sharing info that’s available in the free, public edition of this recap. Hernan notes that clients receive a version with deeper analysis and proprietary Owl & Co research one day in advance. If you work for an Owl & Co client, or would like to become one, reply to Hernan directly.

Vertical is real because people are arguing about it like it is real.

“Vertical storytelling is a phase”

“The quality isn’t there”

“Real audiences aren’t watching.”

There is a version of this conversation that keeps coming back. The tone is usually skeptical, sometimes dismissive and the arguments aren’t new. But the fact that it keeps needing to be made is, we’d argue, exactly the point.

Hernan Lopez has heard this before. He’s the founder of Wondery, which he built into the world’s largest independent podcast publisher before Amazon acquired it. He was one of the earliest voices making the case that podcasting was a serious storytelling medium, long before the industry agreed. He was right about that. He is now paying close attention to vertical.

His piece on the Vertical Media Summit frames the pushback not as a warning sign, but as a familiar one. A format that keeps threatening something keeps generating resistance. The persistence of that resistance is its own form of proof. Vertical has been generating that for a while now. Dismissal can sound an awful lot like disruption if you listen close enough.

It’s also worth noting who was in the room. Netflix. Amazon. HBO. Companies that rewrote the rules of their respective industries because they saw a shift coming and moved toward it early. They’ve done this before. That they are actively interrogating vertical now is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.

Their presence does not prove exactly where vertical is headed. But it does make one thing harder to dismiss: the format is no longer sitting outside the serious media conversation. So the more useful move is to stop arguing over whether vertical matters and start looking closely at where the category is actually taking shape.

We’ll connect more of those dots next week. A short history of television’s first years, how the industry positioned it against cinema, and why the arc from movie theater to living room to pocket feels less like coincidence and more like inevitability.

But here’s what to pay attention to in the meantime:

The first thing to watch is the nomenclature. The vocabulary of this medium is still being written. Microdramas get most of the attention because they’re the format most comparable to traditional TV. But they’re one rib of a much larger umbrella. Hernan points out what we’ve been feeling for a while: vertical is as broad a category as television itself and the grammar and definitions are still being found and defined.

Something we’ve been calling a format might turn out to be a genre. Something we called a genre might be a secret third thing. (We once referred to Playback internally as a vertical motion picture because that’s what it felt like to us.) There is already a push to retire “microdrama” in favor of “microseries,” or simply “vertical.” Not all of them are dramas.The language is still catching up to the work.

The second thing to watch is viewing context because it both literally and figuratively frames the content. He offers a useful system: four distinct contexts for where people are watching vertical.

• Vertical native apps: Dedicated platforms built specifically for this format. Think ReelShort, DramaBox, CandyJar.

• Media super apps: Large platforms where vertical lives alongside everything else. Think TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts.

• Streamers, free and premium: Traditional streaming platforms now licensing or producing vertical content. Think Peacock, Netflix.

• News: Vertical-formatted journalism and nonfiction content. The most underreported category in the conversation.

Where people watch tells you just as much about the vibe of the content (and the viewers themselves!) as genre does. Each vehicle is building it’s own subset of audience expectations.

Then there’s AI filmmaking. The third thing to watch is that vertical is the clearest test case for it right now. There are essentially no fully AI-generated feature films or traditional series in wide commercial release. In vertical, the picture is completely different. AI-generated microseries already exist and already have audiences. (Though maybe not the same as the audiences that watch man-made microseries. Check out this edition of the bloom for our thoughts on that).

The reason is structural: when your budget is tight and your turnaround is fast, AI isn’t a luxury, it’s a production reality. The gap between what you can make with and without it is enormous at smaller budgets. It can change what a show is capable of being, not just how efficiently you make it. On a currently typical vertical series (small-budget with tight timelines), it can change the scope, speed, visual ambition, and even the genres that become producible.

The final thing to watch is timing. The big question of course is if and when to enter this space. Hernan names some instructive fads (3D movies, the metaverse, virtual reality) to illustrate how difficult it is to distinguish a trend from a technology looking for a use case. It’s hard to tell what the tipping point is. But, like with any good disrupter, those who are waiting to see it before they believe it will likely be too late.

Scott has said something to our team more than once since attending the summit, which was echoed to me when I read Mary Ann Halford’s closing remarks: the energy in that room was specific. Something more visceral than cautious optimism. A room full of people who have watched cycles come and go, genuinely excited about where this format is headed.

The energy around vertical right now does not prove the future. But it does show that serious people are no longer laughing it off. They are paying attention, testing the edges, and trying to understand the rules as they’re writing them.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Daragh Twomey

Instagram: 48.7K Followers

Youtube: 2K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 638.4K Followers

Who Is Daragh Twomey?

Daragh Twomey is a Cork-based writer, director, actor, and videographer making Irish sketch comedy at internet speed.

He posts under Yer Maan on YouTube, but the project is bigger than the handle. Twomey writes, performs, directs, shoots, and edits his own work, which gives the sketches a handmade rhythm without making them feel small. His public bio calls him a writer, director, actor, videographer, and “overall silly man.” That last part explains plenty.

Twomey started making sketch comedy in 2017 after graduating from Munster Technological University with a BA in Multimedia. His site traces the habit even further back to LEGO stop-motion films in 2007, which fits the work now. Quick premise, fast escalation, clean edit, no wasted movement. The old DIY instinct is still there.

His sketches pull from absurdism, slapstick, and everyday situations that get out of hand. A normal moment takes one wrong turn, then another, and suddenly everyone is behaving like the world has already ended.

The work has a specific Irish social rhythm. Not postcard Irish. Embarrassment, impatience, politeness, and discomfort keep turning into performance. Twomey is good at characters trying to stay normal while clearly losing the room.

Twomey also works beyond the sketch feed. He started DT Wedding Films, co-founded Rua Productions, and has worked across freelance video, music videos, photography, and podcasting. The sketches move fast, but they are not careless.

His first short film, Easy Money, is in post-production and intended for the festival circuit. The sketch account feels like the place where he has been getting the reps. Writing, acting, shooting, editing, posting, learning what people respond to, then doing it again.

Daragh Twomey has been building his own comedy education in public for years, one sketch, cut, character, and bad social decision at a time.

Three Things We Love About Daragh Twomey

He controls the whole sketch: Writing, acting, directing, shooting, editing. The jokes move the way they do because Twomey is steering the premise from idea to upload.

The comedy has Cork in its bones: The sketches carry a specific Irish social rhythm: politeness turning into panic, small talk becoming warfare, and people trying to save face while making everything worse.

The sketch work is feeding the film work: Twomey is moving toward short films with Easy Money. The social comedy is not separate from that path. It is where he has been getting the reps.

@daragh2meTell us where u hid the bodies! Reupload w/ CC #sketch #sketchcomedy #comedy #actor #meme #fyp #interview #cops #mystery #2021 #work #funny #questions

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Everyone is talking about a recent run of creator-made horror movies that just crushed at the box office. Naturally, every person with a Substack or Beehiiv is now beating the subject to death with such abandon that we might call it, rather than blogging, a flogging.

But there’s one angle worth exploring still — these three creators were not trained through the legacy system. None of them went to film school. And that tells you a lot about what’s happening now. Because film schools and their relevance are a perfect metaphor for the larger conversation: legacy and creator systems colliding, converging, changing each other, becoming inseparable. It’s what makes it interesting to anyone paying attention — whether you’re rooted in the old system or building the new one.

Last August as I was looking at the implications of all this and couldn’t ignore the questions about the relevance of film school. I teach a class at Columbia University and also studied there and love and cherish it. And I’ve taught and guest lectured at a handful of other institutions over the years.

So I wrote a substack about it.

The gist was this: Film schools are built on a broken model. They trained talent for a system that no longer exists, and now they’re watching the creator economy build its own training grounds without ever needing them. The feeder pathways they once staffed have disappeared. But I wasn’t arguing they should close — I was arguing they still matter. But they need treat the creator economy (and AI) as foundational curriculum, not electives. They must start building real partnerships with the world that’s actually operating instead of mourning the one that’s gone. And I even suggested that every student should build a youtube channel. Duck and cover!!!

The substack generated a lot of controversy. I got emails from old professors, I heard about others ranting and railing against it despite the fact that I also espoused the virtues of learning the fundamentals.

Watching three self-taught filmmakers crush at the box office and my desire to write about it brought back memories of all the backlash. But there was one reaction in particular that I felt compelled to re-read in the wake of these recent events.

It came from Rebecca Green a well-respected producer and now Director of Producing at the AFI Conservatory. She writes a blog called Dear Producer and in it, she took a very strong position against my article.

Her thesis was essentially this: She agrees schools need to innovate, but she pushes back on the core premise. Film schools don’t need to chase the creator economy. The real mistake is reducing art education to job training and monetization metrics. What I was missing in my article is that students come to film school to master self-expression and learn to create — not to launch YouTube channels. The purpose of art education is developing complete human beings with critical thinking and empathy, and if schools optimize for resume virtues instead of eulogy virtues, they’ve already lost what makes them matter.

I didn’t push back too hard at the time but only invited her to a deeper discussion to which she never replied.

But as I spoke to more and more professors and deans about these issues, the more that I felt that a lot of people in these institutions were thinking what Rebecca was saying out loud. And furthermore, it’s what a lot of legacy execs and producers feel as well about the industry writ large. And now at this pivotal moment, where an awakening has happened about the relationship between these two forces and their convergence, I’m providing my rebuttal to Rebecca.

I agree with her that part of the obligation is to build the craft and provide the inspiration and guidance that allows for better self-expression. Many kids who go to film school want to make the kinds of films and TV shows that impacted them when they were young. Some want to be artists with a capital A. Learning the fundamentals and creating an environment where they can develop these skills is a fantastic service to provide.

But I don’t think we can ignore how the world is changing — and how that’s changing storytelling itself. Film schools need to provide craft AND the literacy to move through this new landscape. Because the best self-expression in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t reach the people who need to see it.

I think if you are gonna be 50k, 100k, 200k in debt, your film school should be educating you how to make a living when you graduate not just teaching you self-expression. There is nothing that says that all film schools need to play by the same rules. AFI is perhaps the best film school in the nation pound for pound and perhaps it can stay pure in its intention. But in my experience of teaching students, for the vast majority while one voice in their head wants only to be the artist, the other is asking sincerely how he or she can actually make a living. And so, I feel pretty certain, do a majority from the students graduating from one of the 500+ schools or programs across the nation.

So here’s where Rebecca and I most diverge—

The YouTube channel requirement:

She wrote in her piece: “While I said in my job interview that no student should graduate film school without understanding how to monetize YouTube, I don’t believe you need to launch your own channel to learn how the platform works or innovative ways to connect with audiences.”

My rebuttal:

She is perhaps unwittingly contradicting herself. If she truly believes that each student needs to learn how to monetize YouTube, then ask anyone who works in the creator economy how you do that — and they will tell you there is only one way: actually doing it. Like making a movie, you learn way more from doing than reading about it. The methods are constantly changing and it takes building muscles to understand it. You improve by iterating, by posting, by getting feedback, by adjusting. No one, not one creator I’ve ever spoken to (and over the last two years I’ve spoken to a lot), learned to monetize watching videos or sitting in a classroom. Not one.

Who Needs Another YouTube Channel?

She wrote: “And the last thing the world needs is more YouTube channels. [This] reminds me of when Facebook was the cool kid on the block and someone declared it necessary for every filmmaker to have at least 10,000 followers in order to be successful.”

My rebuttal:

How many more student short films do we need? I’ve watched hundreds, if not more. I’ve taught the making of short films, I’ve sat on juries, I’ve voted on shorts for the Academy. About one in a thousand actually moves or entertains me.

The point isn’t the finished product. It’s the exercise.

Most short films are forgettable for the same reason most Hollywood movies are forgettable. Once in a while something exquisite or hilarious or moving is made, gets noticed, and opens doors. Once in a long while.

And so it goes with YouTube. It is not some alien corruption of cinema. It is another training ground, only with a harsher teacher: an algorithm that measures, in public and in real time, whether anyone actually wants to keep watching. And like it or not, that teacher is no longer confined to YouTube. It is changing how audiences interact with all content: what they expect, how quickly they judge, when they lean in, and when they bail.

When The Daniels won the Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” one of them said something on the Academy stage that got lost amongst the pandemonium — “The world is changing so rapidly and I fear our stories are not keeping pace, and sometimes it’s a little scary knowing that movies move at the rate of years and the world on the internet moves at the rate of seconds.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the relevant point here is this: you cannot make work for this moment without understanding where culture is actually being shaped. The internet doesn’t just distribute stories — it shapes how they’re told. How we think. What we find moving. You can’t separate those things. And the Daniels — they couldn’t get arrested in TV or film and ended up becoming creators (and making youtube videos!!!!) And by their own admission, EEAAO was inspired and shaped by internet culture and the things they learned making content online.

So why make a YouTube channel in film school? More like, why wouldn’t you? You can always ignore what you learn, but you can’t implement something you’ve ignored.

To Sell a Movie You Can’t Talk about the Movie

And it’s not just the YouTube channel as content that matters. No one is going to find your film and watch it if you don’t reach your audience on social media channels. That’s where people decide what to watch. It used to be young audiences. Now older ones too.

In a recent substack I wrote called “To Sell a Product You Can’t Mention the Product” I broke down the A24 marketing strategy behind Marty Supreme. The point was they weren’t so much marketing but extending the story of the movie across the different surfaces of the internet. So to get people to watch your movies, you’ll increasingly do better by learning how to reach audiences on the internet, just as Markiplier, Curry Barker, and Kane Parsons have all done in very different ways. Each used a combination of community relationships, cultural awareness, and audience understanding to build demand for their work. This was never a buden, it was just an extension of what they’ve been trained to do.

But is it so revolutionary?

When I first started making movies, one of the heads of theatrical distribution at a major studio told me: “While some movies fail despite a director’s involvement in marketing, I’ve never seen a movie work where the director wasn’t heavily involved.”

Even the most artistically ambitious films today rely on filmmakers helping shape how audiences discover and connect with their work. And by the above logic, if directors must be involved in their marketing campaigns for their films to succeed, then they better learn how to make content for social media.

Marketing has already made the shift. Stories live across screens and platforms now, not in 30-second spots. Film schools should teach that. Make it mandatory or make it an elective — but put it on the curriculum. Creators didn’t have the luxury of choice here. They learned to move stories across surfaces because they had to eat. When film students become filmmakers, they’ll face the same reality. The only question is whether schools prepare them for it or let them figure it out the hard way. (OK, lets be honest, filmmakers have always needed to know how to pull an audience, its just now the rules are different).

And I actually believe that there will be more and more filmmakers, artists, who call themselves creators and see the canvas of storytelling spread across screens and platforms as some kind of living, breathing organism.

Filmmakers as Creators?

Rebecca wrote: “I have yet to meet a film student who is attending school to become a ‘creator’.”

My rebuttal:

I have. Many. But first I’ll start with this story--

I guest lectured at a respected film school in Texas and asked 30 undergrads how many want to be creators. None raised their hands. Then I asked how many watched a movie or TV show in the previous week. I’m not making this up--not more than three of them raised their hand.

And finally I asked how many had watched content on social platforms that day.

Every. Hand. Went. Up.

My response to them — why would you not want to make the content you are actually consuming?

I have more direct stories as well. Students of mine who are very actively interested in becoming creators and filmmakers because they consume both equally. They see the connection. Not all, some. And then there are all the ones like those in the school in Texas who aren’t even paying attention to their own consumption.

Maybe there is a 1%, the purists, who can afford to focus only on their movie.

But let’s talk about the 99%, which I include myself in.

I’ve made probably produced a half dozen prestige films out of a couple of dozen movies. In order to afford to make those movies and still get my kids through decent schools and pay my mortgage, I’ve produced unscripted shows, scripted TV, animation, docu-series, and plenty of remakes and rom coms. Truthfully I’m proud of many of those as well. But I could never make those prestige movies if I didn’t do the others. I couldn’t afford it. And I’m not special. Most producers have a similar story. Directors and writers too.

Today’s filmmakers are going to pay the bills making YouTube videos like Ridley Scott made commercials or John Sayles wrote and re-wrote blockbusters for Hollywood. Some might like the freedom they have so much that they never actually make a traditional film. But some will see it as a means to an end. Many will just see different screens and formats as different forms of expression. The medium changes but the work doesn’t stop.

I spent my 20s as a screenwriter and while I loved it, it seemed too impractical a path for me. I saw the great ones and I was never going to be one of them. I went to film school to learn producing because I felt it would give me creative satisfaction while also providing me a solid way to make a living. And its mostly worked out. I even got to write a few things along the way.

I come from a place of pragmatism.

Build a career, don’t just make a movie. That’s part of my point about how film schools need to change. Even before the great convergence I saw so many talented filmmakers spend five years after film school getting one movie made and then realizing it would take just as long to make the next. So they went back to whatever job they had before they went to film school in the first place. And for the next 20 years, they’d be paying off their loans. And then there were the 60 / 70 / 80% of the class that couldn’t even get that first movie made…. Im sure AFI’s batting average is high but a bet a healthy number of graduates never build a sustainable career. And the traditional path will only get worse as the industry shrinks.

As I write the next chapter of my own business, 3Pas Studios, we have been leaning more heavily into the creator economy. One project has brought in more revenue in eight months than a feature film based on a script I fell in love with 11 years ago and only just got made.

So yes, if I have to build more creator businesses to afford the movies I love, I will. That is not selling out. That’s just being a producer.

And, clutch your pearls, I actually enjoyed making the creator content too.

Words and Ideas Can Change The World But Only if They Are… Movies?

I admire Rebecca’s resolve. I really do. There is something deeply moving about reminding artists that words and ideas still matter, especially at a moment when the industry feels like it is coming apart.

Where I differ is in the frame.

I don’t think the inflection point is the enemy of great art. I don’t think change is the thing we have to protect art from. More often, change is the thing that forces art to find new forms, new audiences, new languages, and new ways of mattering.

For a long time, I wanted to believe otherwise. It was convenient to believe that the kind of work I knew how to make, the kind of work that paid my bills and gave me my identity, carried some higher cultural value than the work being made on newer platforms. It was comforting to think a movie meant more than a YouTube video because it looked more like the thing I had spent my life learning how to make.

But that comfort was also a trap.

Accepting change meant accepting that I had to learn a new operating system. Not because the old one was worthless. It wasn’t. I still love it. But because audiences were already living somewhere else, speaking a slightly different language, building meaning in places many of us had trained ourselves not to take seriously.

My bubble was burst several years ago. While I was studying at Berkeley’s Haas school a professor told me that Hollywood was a walled garden and its walls had been breached and we were all “fucked.”

That’s when I started writing Open Gardens and forced myself to watch creators without judgment. And I have found some really interesting voices, some artists, some craftsman, some entertainers… and I’ve seen an awful lot of shit. Sounds like about the same experience of watching the thousands of movies made every year around the world.

That’s when I realized how easy it is to assume we knew better. That’s exactly what leads to blindness. To missing what’s actually happening in the culture.

The hope is in the convergence.

It is not legacy versus creators. It is the fundamentals of storytelling meeting the fluency of the creator economy. Craft meeting speed. Infrastructure meeting audience intimacy. Capital meeting community. Each side has something the other needs.

Look at the three movies everyone is talking about: Iron Lung, Obsessions, and Backrooms. None of them emerged from the creator economy in some pure, untouched form. Each relied on legacy in a different way, whether through infrastructure, craft, financing, distribution, production experience, or plain old Hollywood know-how.

The mix was different in each case. But the lesson was the same.

Creator instincts made them matter. Legacy muscle made them durable, financeable, producible, and real.

Technology has always disrupted and transformed storytelling. The printing press. Photography. Cinema. Radio. Television. Look how TV pushed cinema to create the widescreen and elaborate sound systems. Look how cinema changed the pacing of plays. Why is this any different? We are witnessing a transformation. We can be part of it. If we stay open. Its not the end of movies, it’s the beginning of something else…

Obviously Obvious

She called my piece “thoughtful but obvious.” Fair enough. It is obvious.

But obvious things still need to be said when entire institutions are behaving as if they are not true.

What interests me is the contradiction. She says film schools need to innovate, then resists teaching students the very skills that innovation now requires. That tension is worth examining, not because I want to win an argument, but because I’m watching students enter the industry with real talent and real fear, while being underprepared for a world that has already arrived.

I’ve never said film schools shouldn’t be a place to foster artists and self-expression. I’m saying they can’t pretend the world doesn’t exist outside the classroom door. Not when students are carrying six figures in debt. Self-expression is a luxury when you’re terrified about how you’ll survive. Effective art education has to account for that.

And just as vital, storytelling is changing. Like it always does. Art can exist anywhere, and the places we dismiss as commercial, unserious, or disposable are often where the next language of art is being born. Movies were once treated as a diversion too, until artists learned how to turn them into cinema.

And the convergence is real. It just happened three times in six months. Don’t focus on the movies focus on the patterns.

A 17-year-old kid today with a unique voice and point of view is probably not sitting in a dark room watching Kurosawa and Kubrick the way I did. Maybe some are, and God bless them. But many are living in a different media world, drawing inspiration from different places, different formats, different rhythms, and different communities.

That does not make their influences less serious. It just makes them different.

Art and genuine self-expression can come from anywhere. Ignoring that because it feels “obvious” is how institutions become beautifully preserved rooms: admirable, important, even noble, but increasingly disconnected from where the next generation is actually making meaning.

And noble rooms are hard places to make a living.

I wanted to talk to Rebecca, and I still do. Everyone is online, barking past each other, so I’m extending another invitation: let’s do a Substack Zoom and actually discuss this.

At the end of the day, we want the same thing: to see the next generation of storytellers prosper and inspire. We just disagree on how we get there.

That disagreement is worth having out loud.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Private Equity Has Entered the Chat

CAA and TPG’s Integrated Media Company announced this week the formation of Compound Creative Holdings, a $250 million holding company built to acquire, operate, and grow a portfolio of creator-led businesses. Although this might seem like just another creator economy investment, the implications of TPG getting involved are worth thinking through.

The rollup strategy is well understood in private equity. You identify a fragmented market with strong individual businesses, acquire several of them under one roof, and create value through operational infrastructure, shared resources, and commercial synergies that none of the individual businesses could build alone. PE has done this in tons of industries, and it seems that the creator economy is next.

What makes this particularly interesting is what the portfolio actually becomes if executed well. Each creator business is its own franchise with its own audience, its own IP, and its own revenue streams. Bring enough of them together under shared infrastructure and what you have is not just a holding company. You have a real studio, diversified across creators, with the kind of audience breadth and content volume that a traditional studios have spent decades and billions building.

The agency model angle is also worth noting as it represents a significant change in operations. CAA built one of the most powerful businesses in entertainment by representing talent, yet this move from representing to owning and operating changes the incentive structure. An agency makes money when its clients do deals, but a holding company makes money when the businesses it owns grow.

Tucker Brown, who is leading Compound, framed it in a familiar way for those of us tracking the space: creators are no longer just talent, they are enterprise builders operating with the scale and sophistication of established media companies.

The capital architecture is now catching up to that reality, and if Compound can execute the rollup without destroying what makes individual creator businesses worth acquiring in the first place, this could be the beginning of something big.

More Deals

Accenture Song, the world’s largest tech-powered creative group, is acquiring the Whalar Agency from Whalar Group in what is being described as the largest creator economy transaction to date.

The deal moves the creator agency model into a fundamentally different category. Accenture Song is not a brand or a media company. It is a global consulting and technology operation that works at the enterprise level with some of the largest companies in the world. Plugging Whalar’s creator infrastructure into that network means creator partnerships are no longer being sold into marketing budgets. They are being sold into enterprise budgets themselves, sitting alongside strategy consulting, product development, and customer experience work.

In one-off brand campaigns, where a creator posts about a product for a fee and the relationship ends, has been the dominant model for creator monetization for years. But what this deal points toward is something more durable. Creators as long-term strategic partners for brands, involved not just in promotion but in how products are conceived, how customer relationships are built, and how culture is shaped around a company over time.

Now replace “company” with “film studio” or “production company” and things start to click (especially after the past few weeks at the box office).

Another Creator Box Office Hit

While the industry has been fixated on Obsession and Backrooms as the defining data points for creator-to-theatrical success, a quieter result deserves equal attention. The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act opened to $36.6 million globally across its opening weekend, playing in more than 5,700 cinemas across the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico.

This is an independent animated YouTube series created by Gooseworx and produced by Glitch Productions, a self-funded studio out of Sydney. The show debuted on YouTube in October 2023, surpassed one billion views online, and built a genuinely global fanbase entirely outside the traditional studio system. The theatrical release combined the series’ eighth episode with a previously unreleased hour-long finale, giving audiences a reason to show up that went beyond simply watching something they could have seen at home.

The numbers across individual markets are nuts. Over $20 million in the US alone across four days, ranking third among new releases. First on opening day in the UK, France, Spain, and Poland. Second on opening day in Australia and New Zealand. More than 585,000 admissions in Mexico. France hit those numbers from just 500 screenings due to local windowing restrictions, which makes the per-screen average even more impressive.

GARDEN VIEW

With creator-to-theatrical now firmly in the conversation, this feels like a good moment to actually understand how the money behind feature film financing actually works at the indie level.

Film producer and professor Mynette Louie breaks down the financial waterfall using Obsession as a case study, walking through who profits the most, who profits the least, and what the current state of indie film distribution actually looks like for the people making the films.

HARVEST QUOTE

“A motorway has enormous traffic. That does not make it a shopping centre.”

— Jamie Branson, Founder & CEO of ViewTV

YouTube is one of the greatest audience aggregation platforms ever built, but audience reach and content monetization are not the same thing.

Jamie explains that most successful creators are not actually surviving on platform ad revenue. They are surviving on sponsorships, merchandise, live events, and brand deals, with YouTube functioning as the lead generator rather than the business itself. If individual creators with lean operations and minimal overhead still cannot make the platform economics work on their own, studios with hundred-times-greater cost structures should be asking a harder question before treating YouTube as a primary revenue model.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Netflix makes vertical moves, Us vs Pizza Guys vs Vampires, and we go on a deep dive into why digitally native scripted formats are finally taking off.

But first–

I’ve been thinking a lot about Disneyland lately.

As our team continues to work across YouTube, vertical storytelling, and more traditional corners of entertainment, I’ve found myself paying closer attention to the way audiences move between platforms.

Whether we’re helping a vertical app expand its YouTube presence (more on this soon), creating original scripted content for the various platforms (Horizontal and Vertical), or sitting in meetings with both legacy media and digitally native creators, I keep hearing conversations framed around funnels.

How do we get people in? How do we move them through? How do we maximize value? Working at the intersection of art and commerce, I understand the impulse.

But I wonder if a better metaphor is a theme park.

When I think about the revolution happening around vertical content, I’ve never seen it as a revolution around a single format. I’ve always seen it as part of the much larger digital scripted boom that has been building for years.

Every format represents a different storytelling experience. What if microseries are one attraction in the park? What if YouTube longform is another? What if serialized formats like Brooklyn Coffee Shop and The Ick are another?

And what about the formats that haven’t been invented yet? The ones quietly finding audiences in corners of the internet right now. The storytellers getting excited because something no one has ever seen before just crossed 10,000 views for the first time.

The most exciting part of this moment isn’t any individual format. It’s the ecosystem. Because the best theme parks don’t just create attractions.

They create communities.

Communities that gather in Discord servers and Reddit threads. Communities that share stories with friends and eagerly await what’s coming next.

As storytellers operating at the intersection of art and commerce, I hope we spend a little less time thinking about funnels and a little more time thinking about theme parks.

Not just how we attract audiences.

But how we create places they love, and look forward to revisiting time and time again.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Netflix Orders Minimum Wage From American High Shorts Team

Netflix has ordered Minimum Wage, a 28-episode workplace comedy based on the viral American High Shorts universe. Netflix is pulling from an existing digital audience and folding that rhythm into its own ecosystem. This feels like a clear sign that major streamers are starting to absorb digital’s pacing, audience behavior, and talent pipelines.

Idilio Raises $5.5M Seed Round with Katzenberg’s help

Katzenberg has repeatedly put capital behind new storytelling formats, from Quibi’s $1B NewTV raise in 2018 to more recent WndrCo bets in AI video and entertainment technology. Idilio suggests he is still circling the same question: what does mobile-first entertainment become when the market is finally ready for it?

The Kansas City Chiefs Launch a Microdrama

The Kansas City Chiefs are launching El Offseason, a nine-episode Spanish-language scripted comedy that blends sketch comedy with telenovela storytelling. The series follows fictional team employees whose offseason spirals into romance, rivalry, and chaos once football stops. The Chiefs are targeting fans across Mexico, Spain, and the U.S., with Mexico and Spain sitting inside the team’s NFL Global Markets Program rights. By blending sketch comedy with telenovela storytelling, the team is giving Spanish-speaking audiences an easy entertainment-first entry point into Chiefs fandom.

VertiCast Launches For Vertical Casting

VertiCast, a casting app built specifically for vertical microseries, has launched on iPhone, with Android expected to follow. The app lets actors create profiles with vertical clips while producers and casting teams swipe, shortlist, and message talent directly. Casting is so important, curious how this effects the process…

Pizza Guys vs Vampires

Platform: inverted.film

Logline: On their first night delivering pizzas, two coworkers stumble into a vampire conspiracy and have to fight their way through one very strange shift.

Genre: Action-Comedy / Horror-Comedy / Buddy Comedy

Pizza Guys vs Vampires is a refreshing watch because it feels built for vertical without feeling trapped by vertical. The series gets into the action quickly, using punchy edits, quick pushes, and strong visual rhythm to keep the pace of a traditional microseries, while still bringing an indie genre sensibility that feels specific and intentional.

The writing is also a major strength. It feels human, current, and clearly written in the language it was filmed in, with a self-referential sense of humor that gives the show a little Scott Pilgrim-style camp without breaking the story. What stands out most is how much thought went into the form itself: split screens are used to fill the 9:16 frame, the comedy keeps moving, and the costumes, makeup, and SFX all support the action-horror tone instead of feeling ornamental.

That balance may come from Dominic Russo’s role as director, producer, and story credit on the series. As a co-creator and executive producer of Workaholics, which grew out of online comedy before becoming a Comedy Central series, Russo clearly understands both traditional filmmaking and the keys of digital.

The takeaway is simple: vertical can handle real genre experimentation when the creative team knows how to honor the format without lowering the creative ceiling.

Why Is Scripted Digital Working Now?

Editor’s note: We’ve been cooking on this coverage for a while, and Franziska Harms went deep. Sometimes I think to trim things at this length, but honestly it’s so thorough I think it’s worth the read. Still, TLDR;

For years, scripted digital had a reputation problem.

It was either treated like a silly guilty pleasure hobby, a marketing add-on, or a place where traditional talent went when the “real” thing did not work out. Quibi is the obvious cautionary tale: big money, big names, mobile-first ambition, and a shutdown only months after launch. But Quibi’s failure did not prove audiences did not want short-form scripted. It proved that Hollywood could not simply shrink television, put it on a phone, and assume the audience would follow.

Part of what changed was the audience. Audiences are more fluent in digital storytelling than they used to be. The habits that once felt specific to very online viewers have spread across a much wider population, as phones, social platforms, and short-form video have become part of everyday media consumption. For younger audiences especially, that language is not an adjustment. It is often the storytelling environment they already know best.

The pace of digital storytelling no longer feels overwhelming to most viewers. It feels normal. The same retention language that once seemed native only to YouTube, TikTok, and creator content is now part of the broader viewing grammar. Quick pushes, rapid setup, compressed conflict, clear hooks, and emotional payoff are not tricks anymore. They are expectations. The appetite for content that moves at digital speed has caught up to the platforms it lives on.

Technology has also become more universal. More people have now grown up inside internet culture, then those simply adjacent to it. In the U.S., Pew found that 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 96% use the internet daily, while nearly half say they are online almost constantly. TU estimated that 5.5 billion people were online in 2024, representing 68% of the world’s population, while its 2025 edition says almost three-quarters of the world is now online. Compare that to about 10 years ago: global internet use went from nearly 3B people in 2014, about 40% of the world, to 74% today.

The rhythms, references, editing patterns, and emotional shorthand of digital are no longer niche. They are mainstream. That changes what scripted work can feel like on a phone. A microseries does not have to apologize for being fast for example. It just has to be good at being fast.

The bigger shift is cultural. Digital is now mature enough to be taken seriously as both a business and a creative ecosystem. The numbers became impossible to ignore first. The creator economy is now projected to approach half a trillion dollars by 2027, and YouTube alone says its creative ecosystem contributed more than $55 billion to U.S. GDP in 2024 while supporting the equivalent of 490,000 full-time jobs. At a certain point, what looked like a side door became a real industry.

But money is only part of the story.

Digital has also earned status with the next generation. In 2019, a LEGO/Harris Poll survey found that children in the U.S. and U.K. were three times more likely to say they wanted to be YouTubers than astronauts. More recent Gen Alpha reporting points in the same direction, with YouTuber and TikTok creator sitting near the top of dream-job lists. That matters. For a long time, digital was framed as the place you went if you could not break into film or television. For younger audiences and younger creators,and therefore modern culture, it is increasingly the cooler place to start.

That does not mean the path is easy. Most creators still do not make a full-time living online, and acting remains a brutally unstable profession. But the internet has changed the odds of being seen. The barrier to entry is low, which means the range of quality is enormous. Anyone can upload. Anyone can try. That can make the space noisy, but it also makes it democratic. In the largest sea of fish, standing out becomes the skill. For filmmakers, performers, writers, editors, and producers, that has opened a more realistic early-career path than waiting for permission from the traditional gatekeepers.

It has also changed what a “break” can look like. Issa Rae built from Awkward Black Girl into Insecure. Quinta Brunson went from self-produced internet comedy and BuzzFeed videos to Abbott Elementary. Rachel Sennott used online comedy as part of her path into Shiva Baby and Bottoms. Workaholics grew out of a web-comedy ecosystem before becoming a Comedy Central series. These are not exceptions that disprove the system. They are signals that the system itself has changed.

This may be why scripted digital is starting to work in a way it did not before. Audiences seem more fluent in the pace and structure of digital storytelling. The tools to enter the space are more accessible than they have ever been. The business has become large enough to take seriously. And culturally, digital may be reaching a point where it no longer has to borrow all of its legitimacy from film and television.

Television went through a version of this. For years, film was treated as the serious medium, while television was seen as smaller, faster, and less artistic. That hierarchy did not collapse overnight. It changed because the work got better, the audience grew, and the industry slowly learned how to judge television on its own terms.

Digital may now be moving through a similar transition. Microseries seem to be working when audiences experience digital pace not as a downgrade, but as its own storytelling language. And the creators who understand that language are not simply getting lucky. At their best, they are using craft, instinct, performance, editing, and audience understanding in ways the traditional industry is beginning to recognize more seriously.

That should be exciting, not threatening. Legacy film and television still bring extraordinary discipline, taste, talent, and infrastructure to the table. Digital brings speed, feedback, access, and a deep understanding of how audiences behave now. The opportunity may not be choosing one over the other. It may be finding out what happens when both sides take each other seriously.

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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: lizardmeninc

Instagram: 1.2K Followers

Youtube: 130K Followers

Who Is lizardmeninc?

Lizardmeninc is a 21-year-old VFX artist making analog horror that feels like someone opened the wrong file on an old computer and could not close it.

His main project is Obelisk, a series of short horror films built from grainy footage, empty rooms, strange figures, fake instructional material, and the sense that the screen knows more than it should. The videos do not chase constant jump scares. They let you sit with a hallway, a distorted voice, or a room that feels ordinary until it starts to feel hostile.

A lot of analog horror uses the same VHS scratches, emergency alerts, and warped faces. Obelisk uses those tools too, but the best videos feel more directed than decorated. The camera searches. The rooms have shape. The scares come from where your eye lands and what you slowly realize is wrong.

You can feel the VFX brain behind it. Obelisk is not just a scary voice placed over old footage. The figures have weight. The spaces feel built. Even when the image breaks down, the staging feels intentional. The texture works because something underneath it has been carefully arranged.

The channel also shows how young horror filmmakers are building audiences now. A creator can release a series on YouTube, let fans pull it apart, and watch the story spread through reaction videos, Reddit threads, wiki pages, and horror communities. Obelisk fits that behavior. It gives viewers enough to follow, but not enough to relax.

Names repeat. Images return. A house becomes more than a house. A figure becomes more than a scare. The story feels less explained than discovered.

Lizardmeninc is worth watching because Obelisk still feels personal inside a crowded genre. It has the roughness of internet horror, but also the instincts of someone thinking in shots, spaces, rhythm, and reveals..

Three Things We Love About lizardmeninc

The rooms feel watched: Obelisk gets tension out of empty spaces. A hallway, a dark corner, a closed door, or a blank room can feel wrong before anything actually moves.

The VFX has restraint: The effects are not thrown at the viewer. They bend the image just enough to make the world feel unstable, like the footage is hiding something in plain sight.

The story makes viewers work: Obelisk does not explain everything up front. It drops names, images, rooms, and strange little details that make fans want to rewind, compare, and argue over what they just saw.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

The New Director Mindset

With Obsession and Backrooms dominating the conversation, most of the industry discussion has focused on the larger implications for film, specifically the sudden realization that YouTube-native directors can make movies.

What has been mostly overlooked, though, is the mindset that this new generation of directors brings to filmmaking itself, because it’s genuinely different from anything that came before.

Blumhouse founder Jason Blum spoke about this at the Produced By conference. His argument was simple: YouTube creators are so obsessed with and connected to their audience that it fundamentally changes how they approach the filmmaking process. His example lands well. For a traditional director coming out of film school, test screenings have often been a painful exercise, something to survive rather than embrace. YouTube filmmakers treat them as a data source. Blum described them sitting in the front row, cameras out, recording audience reactions in real time.

They want to know. They have always wanted to know.

Mike DeLuca, co-head of Warner Brothers, made the same point from a different angle. These filmmakers have been in a continuous dialogue with their audience from the very beginning of their careers. Their subscribers have had direct input into every iteration of their work for years. By the time they get to a studio feature, DeLuca said, they have already had a billion test screenings.

To be clear, neither Blum nor DeLuca suggested these directors simply give audiences whatever they want with no artistic vision of their own. They simply have learned, over years of genuine audience feedback and iteration, how to make something that connects with their fans.

So what does this mean for those of us in legacy media?

It is honestly not that complicated. Trust them.

They speak to their audience every day in ways most studio executives or producers never have. It requires setting aside the instinct to manage and control, but if the honest goal is the best possible result, getting out of the way and letting people who already know their audience lead is probably the most useful thing to do.

Studios Are Adapting in Real Time…

Something interesting came out of the Enders Conference in London this week. Gerhard Zeiler, President of International at Warner Bros. Discovery, made a statement that would have been almost unthinkable from a major studio executive a few years ago: we need to get rid of an exclusivity mindset.

Zeiler was direct about what that means in practice. WBD will always protect its six-month theatrical exclusivity window, and flagship shows like Euphoria aren’t going anywhere. But beyond that core premium layer, he argued that a lot of what WBD produces should be going to other platforms, specifically naming YouTube and short-form content as areas of real opportunity. “We can’t afford not to have that,” he said.

The framing he used is the important part. He didn’t describe YouTube as a necessary evil or a distribution compromise. He described it as an audience opportunity and a revenue opportunity sitting right in front of them.

That is a significant shift from one of the largest content companies in the world. The exclusivity mindset Zeiler is pushing back against has been the dominant logic for years, built on the idea that keeping content locked to a single platform drives subscriptions and protects value. What he is acknowledging is that the same logic also locks you out of audiences who have moved elsewhere and aren’t coming back just because you have a good show.

… And So Are Film Labs

Sundance, the institute that built its reputation as the gatekeeper of American independent film, has partnered with TikTok to launch a micro-series writing program through Sundance Collab, its digital learning platform.

The four-week live course focuses on scriptwriting for serialized short-form content, designed to give creators the tools and industry guidance to develop story-driven micro-series for digital audiences. It is free, global, and built specifically around a format that most traditional film education has either ignored or treated as a lesser version of the real thing.

Sundance Collab director Patty West describes the micro-series format as producing exactly the kind of creative pressure that generates the most original work, and explicitly pushes back on the idea that short-form is a consolation prize. The goal, she says, is for creators to see it as its own distinct craft, wide open for new voices to define.

This is good news. Such a powerful storytelling institution getting its hands on short-form should only improve the craft and make the storytellers it exists to support feel more welcome than ever.

GARDEN VIEW

This is normally a video section, but this was too good to pass up. We all need some humor these days.

HARVEST QUOTE

“We were, as Hollywood, looking down on creators.”

— Emmy-winning and Sundance Film Festival-winning producer Tommy Oliver in a conversation with Lucas Shaw.

But this cuts both ways…

Lucas writes that YouTube creators have looked down upon legacy media as well, thinking that they don’t need traditional studios. That they can do it all on their own (some can, i.e. Markiplier — but they’re few and far between).

So while creators have built businesses and followings online on their own, that doesn’t mean they don’t need any help on this end. In order to release a blockbuster movie and make hundreds of millions at the box office, it helps to get support from people who’ve done it before.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week: America gets its first major microdrama festival, we consider Issa Rae’s Screen Time, and we ask the community how AI is actually affecting them.

But first–

I just got back from Hernan Lopez’ really well done Vertical Media Summit and was pleasantly surprised by both the energy and the faces I saw there, familiar and new. There was something in the conversations, on stage and off, that felt different. A new shade of sophistication around this moment.

I want to spend a little more time reflecting on the experience, and we may talk about it more next week, but as I spoke to people throughout the day I came to a realization:

The tense of it all wasn’t “if.”

It was “how.”

How big does this become? How does the quality improve? How do we build sustainable businesses around it?

We are undoubtedly in the midst of something significant. Audiences want movies at the speed of TikTok, delivered on the device they carry everywhere, in a form factor that fits the moments between the moments of our lives. When I look at the success of Backrooms and Obsession, I see filmmakers breaking through who sharpened their tools on the whetstone of digital.

I see the same voices emerging in vertical.

This is all part of the continued convergence of digital into our lives. An early format emerging from a fundamental shift in infrastructure that shortens the distance between audience and creator.

In his keynote, Hernan made a point worth amplifying. When television entered American homes, soap operas emerged as one of the medium’s defining early formats. It would have been nearly impossible at that moment to predict that the same box would eventually deliver The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, live sports, presidential debates, and some of the most influential storytelling ever created.

Every generation gets a medium that feels unserious before it becomes unavoidable.

These are still early days. But as I’ve journeyed through this industry, I’ve always tried my best to read the energy of the rooms I’ve been in, and yesterday the energy was saying something powerful and something certain.

Not “if.”

“How.”

I’m excited to see where it takes us next.

Alright, let’s get into it.

America’s First Microdrama Festival Is Coming to New York

Former Tribeca COO Pete Torres and former TikTok Head of Creator Initiatives Rita Vinnik are launching Alza Festival in New York this fall, billed as America’s first festival dedicated to premium microdrama and mobile-first storytelling. We love to see evolving critical legitimacy in the space. (Deadline)

Sunset Studios and Knockout Shorts Build Microdrama Standing Sets

Sunset Las Palmas is making the production pipeline more vertical-friendly, launching an 8,000-square-foot soundstage with standing sets including a courtroom, apartment, bar, restaurant, hospital, and office. More LA infrastructure, please. (Variety)

CandyJar Parent Launches AI-Generated Action Microdrama App Ironblood

Inkitt, the company behind CandyJar, is launching Ironblood, a new microdrama app focused on AI-generated action, sci-fi, and superhero series, with plans to release 30 new titles per month. We’re wondering how this plays into their larger approach on the celebrity side. (C21media)

Versant Media invests in GammaTime

The amount is undisclosed, but the company that owns Syfy and USA has made a move into the space and it will be interesting to see what they do here. We hear we’re going to see a lot more action on the investment side as the year progresses. (Hollywood Reporter)

Screen Time

Platform: TikTok / PineDrama

Genre: Thriller / Relationship Drama / Mystery

Screen Time works for two reasons.

First, it proves psychological thriller is a natural fit for vertical. The genre already runs on urgency, reveals, tension, reversals, and cliffhangers. Those are the same mechanics that make a viewer tap into the next episode. The hook is immediate: a double-date movie night is interrupted when a mysterious figure hijacks the TV and forces the couples to reveal their secrets or risk exposure. By the end of episode one, the stakes are already moving.

Second, it was made by someone with the right mix of traditional and digital fluency. Issa Rae came from the web series world with Awkward Black Girl, built a major Hollywood career, and now returns to short-form with both toolkits. She understands online pacing, audience behavior, and the “key of digital,” but also cinematic grammar, encouraging grounded performance, and story structure.

Screen Time works because the genre fit was strong, and the execution was informed by someone who understands both the internet and the industry. It also represents the full-throated entrance of Tik Tok into the Microdrama space, a major shift that we’ll continue to watch.

The numbers underline the significance here: nearly 75 million views in its first week and more than 150 million views since. If you’re not one of those, I recommend watching it on TikTok or PineDrama today. We like it. Some folks say it’s well done but repetitive. What did you think?

AI Is Splitting the Industry. Is It Splitting the Audience Too?

The conversation around AI in vertical can get very loud, very fast. But when you talk to people actually working in and around the space, the picture is less clear.

Some people are already feeling a major shift. Others are not seeing it yet. Some viewers are curious. Others are simply uninterested.

That may be the more useful story. This week, we’re not trying to decide if AI is good or bad, we’re wondering what effect it’s actually having on the here and now, and we’ve asked a few folks to weigh in. (By the way, if you have any opinions on the vertical world, please share them with us if you feel so inclined.)

AI is not landing in vertical as one single disruption. It is creating a set of parallel questions around talent, production, budget, and audience behavior.

Irv Gelb, a talent manager to some of the biggest actors in the space, told us he has “not seen a meaningful difference” in auditions for talent. From his vantage point, the shift has not yet reached the working actor pipeline in a measurable way.

But we hear different reports from different people. One talent rep told us they’ve seen a big drop in auditions for their actors. One seasoned producer who asked to not be identified told us it’s not about volume, but about material they actually want to make. “It feels like slop is creeping in, but not everywhere.”

And is the anxiety we’re hearing about coming solely from AI, or is it part of a larger perception issue as the sector realigns due to new players, including Tik Tok, entering the space? Matt Shepley, Talent Manager at Select notes “This is a relativistic problem. The micro drama space trained everyone to move fast - and they did. The vertical industry just jumped to warp speed while that was happening. When you’re already in motion, acceleration is nearly invisible.”

That split is worth paying attention to. Depending on where you sit in the industry, AI may either feel like something that is already taking over, or something that is still mostly happening at the edges.

The audience may be just as divided.

Meagan Johnson of Real Reel Drama, a prominent voice in the vertical fan community who watches roughly 30 verticals a month, told us she suspects that “the audience for AI-generated content may be totally different from the traditional microdrama audience.” She has been in the fandom for years, long before AI microdramas entered the conversation, and her read is pretty simple: the people she talks to are not necessarily organizing a boycott. They are mostly just not interested. It is not the kind of content they come to these apps for.

The conversation around AI often assumes everything is competing for the same viewer. But maybe that is not true.

This TNW piece says the market appears to be bifurcating: “AI-generated content serves a different market segment from live-action micro-dramas, and that the highest-revenue titles still tend to be those with human actors, original scripts, and production values that distinguish them…”

Every new technology experiences a massive boom when being adopted, but things level out. Feels like we are in that, and the future is writing itself every day.

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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Delicious Rock

Instagram: 281K Followers

Youtube: 272K Followers

Tik Tok: 166.4K Followers

Who Is Delicious Rock?

Delicious Rock is a Thai rock-cover project where the band cooks the meal while playing the song.

One musician sings at the stove while another plays drums behind him. A wok flares up during a System of a Down or Linkin Park cover, and the video suddenly has two performances happening at once. The song has to hold while the food tries to survive.

The cover is not separated from the kitchen. The cooking is not a visual gag placed on top of the music. They are locked together. If the pan gets too hot, the video gets better. If the singer has to keep stirring through a chorus, the song gets funnier without being treated like a joke.

The account appears publicly as TORWAI / Delicious Rock, and the Thailand setting gives the videos a texture most cover channels do not have. This is not a clean studio cover with perfect lighting and a wall of guitars in the background. It feels more like a band practice that wandered into a kitchen and refused to stop playing.

The covers are recognizable enough to pull people in quickly. Linkin Park, System of a Down, Limp Bizkit, Spiritbox, Saosin. Songs with built-in energy, big choruses, and enough drama to survive being played next to open flame. The dish changes and the song changes, but the question remains: can they keep playing while the room starts behaving like part of the band?

Most online covers are judged on the performance alone. Delicious Rock gives the viewer another clock to watch. The snare hits, the oil jumps, the vocal comes in, the wok smokes, and nobody gets to pretend this is a controlled environment.

The videos have heat, motion, mess, timing, and risk. You can see the food moving. You can see the drummer locked in. You can see the singer working through the song while trying not to ruin dinner.

A familiar song, a live kitchen, a drummer, a flare-up. The danger, the joke, and the craft all show up in the same frame.

It is rock performance with a second instrument: the stove.

Three Things We Love About Delicious Rock

The kitchen changes the cover: The song is still the spine, but the cooking gives the performance a second pressure point. The viewer is listening for the chorus and watching the pan at the same time.

The videos feel physical: Heat, smoke, chopping, stirring, drums, vocals. Delicious Rock gives music content a sense of weight and movement that clean studio covers usually lose.

The visual hook is instant: A familiar song, a live kitchen, a drummer, and a flare-up give the viewer everything they need in one frame. You do not need to know the band, the dish, or the language to understand why the video is worth watching.

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When the acceptance to Press Publish LA came through I booked my flights right away.

Ben raved about the NY version enough that I wasn’t about to skip LA. The conference was on the Fox Studios lot, same soundstage where The Public Enemy shot in 1937 and where It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia just wrapped its final season.

Nearly 700 creators, operators, and industry folks showed up, some flown in from Amsterdam, Switzerland, Hong Kong. Tim Katz from YouTube, Markiplier, Tom Segura, Billy Parks who runs Fox Creator Studios, Johnny Harris fresh off an Emmy win, Michelle Khare, and the operators behind MrBeast, Mark Rober’s Crunch Labs, and Smosh. The room represented $1.3 billion in combined subscribers across 17 countries.

You could feel it the moment you walked on the lot. This is where Hollywood had built its walled garden for ninety years. Now it’s where creators come to talk about owning their own work. As Ben likes to say: ‘the walls have been breached’.

Nobody on the panels was still arguing about whether the convergence is real.

They were past that. Deep into the actual mechanics: who owns the IP, how does craft scale from a video to a feature, what it takes to build a company around an audience. The real questions. Half the value was in the conversations that happened between sessions anyway.

Here are five things I took away.

1. “We’re not editing your videos, we’re not giving you notes. You own it, you do what you want. You don’t have those gatekeepers in the same way.”

— Tim Katz, VP Americas, YouTube | Session: The Future of YouTube + Surprise Guest

Katz opened the day and drew the line every other panel kept circling back to. The difference between YouTube and Hollywood isn’t the living room, the production values, or the brand dollars. It’s the IP. Creators keep it. YouTube takes a revshare and that’s the whole deal. It hasn’t changed even as the slate announced at Brandcast, Michelle Khare’s Challenge Accepted, Kareem Rahma’s Keep the Meter Running, starts to look like network programming.

Every creator in that room has heard the Hollywood pitch. We’ll fund it, we’ll make it, we’ll own it, you’ll get a fee and a back-end that never shows up. Katz was offering the opposite. The living room is now YouTube’s biggest surface in the U.S. and its fastest growing. The shows can cost as much as anything on broadcast. The IP still belongs to whoever made it.

He paired it with the advertiser side, which is what made the slate possible in the first place. “We just kept hearing from advertisers that we need to get closer to creators. We know this is the new Hollywood, this is where creativity is happening, this is where cultural relevancy is happening.” And the ask was specifically for the old structure. “We want to see this in the same way that TV historically has worked, where you’re buying a season of a show.” So you’ve got premium format and predictable buying, the things TV always sold, except now the person who made the show still owns it. I can’t think of another point where all three of those were true at the same time.

Own the IP and every distribution decision is a strategic one. Don’t, and you’re a vendor with a credit.

2. “I enter YouTube coming from a doubtful place and I’m addicted to overcoming that doubt.”

— Markiplier | Session: The Future of YouTube + Surprise Guest

Markiplier was the surprise guest, and he could have spent the whole time on the Iron Lung numbers. The single-location horror feature made over $50M in 4,200-plus theaters on a budget under $5M, and it dropped on YouTube as a transactional buy the day of the summit. Remarkable on its own. But he kept pulling the conversation back to craft, which is the part worth sitting with.

He doesn’t think a feature is far off from a YouTube video. “I don’t think that there’s all that much difference from a technical perspective of making a movie versus a YouTube video. It’s just the scale with which it is done, and the margin of error with which your skills have to be good enough to succeed at.” He wrote it, directed it, financed it, starred in it. Controlled the frame the same way he does on his channel. Webcam in a hotel room. Jump-cut self-critique. Audience trust standing in for production design. Colin called it self-reliance on stage and the word stuck.

Johnny Harris hit the same note in his own session, “Reimagining the Travel Show,” less than 24 hours after winning his Emmy in New York. “YouTube is a volume game.” He spent years getting reliable for his audience before pivoting to his new show The Human Element, which needed more planning and more development time. “I started to put more time in development. I think this show is a more intentional vision that underpins it.” The years of volume are what bought him the room to slow down and make something bigger, and the audience he’d built doing it didn’t go anywhere when he did.

The creators making this jump, to features or shows or franchises, aren’t switching careers. They’re scaling the one they already run. Same skills, same audience, just at a budget and a stakes level that punishes mistakes a lot harder.

3. “We’re literally in a golden age right now. If you have ambitions to be doing movies or television — it’s never been more accessible and possible than right now. This is the best time in history for somebody that doesn’t have a traditional entertainment path to end up with something like that.”

— Tom Segura | Session: What Hollywood Actually Wants From Creators, with Billy Parks, Head of Fox Creator Studios

That was Segura’s closing charge to the room. The infrastructure that used to gatekeep entertainment, the studios and agents and distribution and capital, isn’t the only path anymore. The alternatives are real enough now to build a career on, not just a viral moment.

Segura would know. He walked his own arc on stage. Stand-up in 2002. A podcast in 2010 because Joe Rogan kept pestering him. Live touring podcasts at $10 a ticket that sold 45,000 seats during the pandemic. A pay-per-view platform built out of necessity when touring shut down. Three short films shot in 11 days that became a 35-minute pilot. That pilot sold to Netflix and became Bad Thoughts, now in season two and currently #5 in the country. A vodka brand. A bakery. And now a multi-project deal with Fox Creator Studios. The day of the summit, FCS announced the partnership exclusively with The Publish Press: a stand-up showcase, a horror animated series, a live-action comedy, with FCS and Segura’s YMH Studios splitting ownership and the projects living on YMH’s platforms instead of Fox channels. The whole thing went from introductory dinners in March to a signed deal in six weeks.

Billy Parks, who runs Fox Creator Studios, described the posture in terms you almost never hear from a legacy studio. “We’re hyper-focused on working with IP, working with formats where we can say, here’s capital, make it on your channels, you drive the creative, you produce it. We’re not hiring producers and making it for you. You’re not shooting on our stages.” That’s a studio offering up its capital and its distribution and a hundred years of knowing how to monetize a thing, and then getting out of the way on the part it used to control most, the ownership and the production itself.

Segura talked about momentum like it was the whole ballgame. “Momentum is an undervalued piece of creativity. When I have an idea, it’s pretty fragile if I wait too long. There’s an energy to ideas, and when you find yourself in a group of people that all feel the momentum, it’s on you and the group to keep it going. If you let it fade, the idea fades as well.” That’s why the Fox deal matters. It moves at the speed the idea needs. Iron Lung doesn’t get made in 1995. Bad Thoughts doesn’t sell to Netflix without a pay-per-view platform that didn’t exist back then. A webcam and an audience can now make things the old timeline would have killed in development.

His closing advice tied it together. “Don’t shut down any avenue. Figure out your goals. Sometimes people listen to what someone else is doing and think that that’s the goal. That might not be what you want to do.” When you finally have options, the trap is chasing somebody else’s version of success because the path looks familiar.

4. “Formatting is world-building.”

— Michelle Khare, Host and Creator of Challenge Accepted | Session: Pushing YouTube’s Limits

This was the best craft conversation of the day, and it gets at the question the rest of the convergence talk keeps dodging. What actually separates a creator video from a creator show?

Khare walked through the format development on her seven marathons on seven continents series, which went through several cuts before she landed on three parts. The single 90-minute version lost the storylines about her fellow runners, which were the emotional core. A seven-part version ran too loose. Three parts held the tension. She wasn’t decorating the thing after the fact. The number of parts, where the breaks fell, what each episode had to carry, that was the storytelling, as much as anything that happened inside the runs.

None of this fits on a deck. Tim Katz can announce a slate. Billy Parks can write a check. YouTube can build a multi-season playlist tool. None of that tells you how long the show should be, how many episodes it needs, where the cliffhangers land, what the emotional architecture is. Those calls belong to the creator. And the ones figuring it out are doing it by trial, testing a 90-minute cut against three parts against seven, watching what the audience actually holds, rebuilding from there.

Markiplier made the same point from a different angle. “It’s harder to lose something that you care a lot about. And so we have to make people care about it.” He was talking about Unus Annus, the channel he and Ethan Nestor built for one year and deleted in front of 1.7 million people watching live. Same principle. Format is how an audience comes to care in the first place. Khare’s three-part cut works because the structure itself does the emotional work.

YouTube is offering season-level distribution. Brands are buying season-level commitments. Studios are putting up capital for season-level IP. The money and the reach are basically solved at this point. What isn’t solved is the thing Khare was describing, the actual decision of what the show is and how it’s built, and the creators who win the next chapter are going to be the ones who treat that the way a director treats a shot.

5. “I can’t teach someone to care about the work that they’re doing, but I can teach YouTube.”

— Kara McCloud, Director of Recruiting, MrBeast | Session: Meet the Operators Scaling the World’s Top Channels

McCloud was employee #12 at MrBeast. By the morning of Press Publish, Beast Industries had over 780 people. Her session, with Smosh CEO Alessandra Catanese and Crunch Labs Chief Content Officer Scott Lewers, moderated by Kim Larson, who heads YouTube’s Creator and Gaming team, was the most useful hour of the day. It was the only one that took the next question seriously. What happens after the creator becomes a company?

The answers were unglamorous and clarifying. McCloud A/B-tests hires the same way the team A/B-tests packaging. “There’s no other place you can go to that gets people ready for YouTube… I did whatever a good packaging person did. I A/B tested.” Her real point is that mindset is the constraint, not skill. “I can’t teach someone to care about the brand and about the work that they’re doing, but we can teach YouTube.” Beast has built what is basically the first talent incubator the creator economy has had, with alumni like Anthpo and Ernesto Perez. Crunch Labs runs most new hires through an hourly contractor period first. Smosh built a strict 9-to-6 with a 5:50 Slack message that tells people to go home. All three landed on the same diagnosis. Legacy media is departmentalized, camera here, post there, creative somewhere else, and that structure doesn’t survive creator-economy speed.

McCloud’s fix. “We need to get to the pyramids of Egypt. So everybody kind of needs to know what’s gonna go on. We put everybody in the same room.” Producers, camera, creators, post, all in the same room. Catanese hires for personality diversity at Smosh using a survey called Culture Index. Lewers’s team at Crunch Labs screens for pitching ability, because the delivery matters as much as the idea.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Most of the talk around creator-to-company assumes the hard part is the content. Make more of it. Make it bigger. Make movies. The operators in that room were saying the opposite. The content was never really the problem. The company is. You can’t scale the work until the org underneath it can actually carry the weight, and getting there means doing the unsexy stuff, figuring out what you’re hiring for, saying it out loud, and not just hiring your cousin because he’s around.

The Takeaways Behind The Takeaways

Call it leverage, not takeover: The cleanest story, the one I was tempted to write on the flight home, is that the whole thing has flipped. Hollywood comes to the creator now instead of the other way around. I don’t fully buy it. And I’d be suspicious of anyone who spent one day in a room full of creator-economy operators and walked out sure the old model was finished. Of course it looked flipped from inside that room. What I’ll actually stand behind is smaller and more durable. Creators have a real second path now, and a credible alternative changes the terms whether or not anyone takes it. The Fox deal with Segura isn’t Hollywood surrendering. It’s Hollywood competing for something it used to be able to assume. The studios still treating creators like supplicants are the ones who haven’t noticed the floor moved under the negotiation.

The audience is the asset, and everyone in that room knew it: Every operator kept landing on the same idea in different words. Markiplier: one person’s time is the most valuable thing we have. Segura: the audience is the boss, of all of us. Katz: they want relevancy and that connection. McCloud: I can teach YouTube but I can’t teach mindset. A studio deal can’t hand you that relationship, and no amount of capital builds it for you. It’s the one thing that doesn’t show up anywhere on a balance sheet. Every creator at Press Publish has built their whole business around protecting it. Every studio was trying to figure out how to get at it without breaking it.

For a long time the hard part of all this was the content itself, and somewhere along the way that stopped being true: The bottleneck moved to the company. That’s what surprised me most. I went out expecting a conversation about formats and platforms and budgets. I left with a notebook full of org-design lessons. The creators winning right now aren’t winning because they cracked YouTube. They cracked YouTube ten years ago. They’re winning because they figured out hiring, culture, work-life balance, partner selection, format, and pace. The next decade of this business won’t be decided on the platform. It’ll be decided in the back office, and on the cutting room floor, where Michelle Khare is deciding whether a story is three parts or seven.

What I took home is simple. The people winning didn’t wait for permission. They built something real and let the industry come to them. And the stuff that used to be the hard part, raising the money, getting distribution, finding an audience, is mostly handled now in a way it just wasn’t a few years ago. What’s left is the part that was always going to be hard, which is knowing what your story actually is and making it well enough that people show up and stay. That’s the whole game now, and I left more optimistic about it than I’ve been in a long time.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

What Teens Actually Think About Movies

In light of this week’s deep dive article about recent creator to theatrical successes, this felt like a good moment to zoom out and look at how young people actually think about movies right now.

If you’re a reader of Matt Belloni’s What I’m Hearing newsletter, then you’re probably familiar with his annual (and very unscientific) survey of LA teens to get a sense of the movie theater world.

Well, in response to it, Kevin Goetz, the CEO of Screen Engine, recently performed an actual study of 200 teenagers aged 17 and 18 from across the country, and the findings are worth sitting with for anyone thinking seriously about the future of theatrical entertainment.

A few things stand out:

• Franchise fatigue is real, but not in the way studios might hope to dismiss it. Established IP remains the primary draw to theaters, with the highest anticipation this summer around Toy Story 5 and Minions and Monsters. But these kids are increasingly vocal about burnout. They viewed Marvel’s reduced output as a positive development for quality control, for example, and live-action remakes landed particularly badly. One respondent put it plainly: “Hollywood is hurting if that’s the best that they can do.”

• The distrust of Hollywood as an institution runs deep. These kids specifically rejected what they described as studio corporate greed, oversaturation, and cynical content decisions. The idea that a Hollywood movie carries some kind of glamorous connotation simply does not register with this generation, which is a BIG shift to how Hollywood was generally perceived before. As we all know, ,reators don’t feel like institutions (at least not yet…). They feel like people, which is exactly the kind of trust that studios are figuring out how to manufacture.

• Stars matter less than the industry would like to believe. So many conversations still revolve around attaching talent to unlock financing, but content and concept consistently outranked star power in deciding whether to see a film for these young people. Oversaturation here as well was cited as an active deterrent, actually, with several respondents naming specific actors (Chris Hemsworth, Pedro Pascal) they now avoid because of how frequently they appear in movies. Directors, with the exception of Nolan and Tarantino, did not register at all.

The landscape is changing, and if Hollywood's perception among young people is shifting, that's not a death sentence. It's a brief. These kids love going to the movies, and theatrical, against all odds, is doing well. The Screen Engine study makes clear that the job for those of us in legacy media is simply to give them something worth showing up for.

Convergence Gets Its Own Conference

Press Publish LA is going on right now in LA (more on that below), which is a convergence conference between creators and Hollywood hosted by Colin & Samir. Now, there’s a conference being set up by the legacy side as well.

In one of the clearest points of convergence yet, the Hollywood Reporter and Access Media are launching UP NEXT: The Creator IP Market in Los Angeles. It’s being billed as the first event of its kind designed to bring digital creators, studios, streamers, broadcasters, talent agencies, brands, and buyers into the same room for dealmaking and programming.

The framing from THR’s editor-in-chief is worth quoting directly: digital innovators continue to fuel studio talent pipelines, drive brand marketing strategies, and redefine who becomes a star. That is not the language of a trade publication dipping a cautious toe into a new trend. It is an acknowledgment that the creator economy is now central to how Hollywood actually operates.

The language from Access Media president Ferne Cohen goes even further. She describes some of the most valuable and culturally relevant IP in the world as now emerging from creator-led communities, and frames the event as a serious business marketplace rather than a networking reception with panels attached.

UP NEXT is acknowledging the convergence, but also building dedicated infrastructure around it. The fact that The Hollywood Reporter, the trade that has covered the traditional entertainment industry for decades, is co-hosting it, says something about how far this has come.

Roku Makes a Big Bet on Creators

Roku is launching a dedicated creator destination on its platform and adding a slate of new FAST channels from creators including Prof G Podcast, iShowSpeed, Jesser, and the Stokes Twins. The reasoning from Roku’s head of content Lisa Holme is worth paying attention to:

We can deliver an audience you are not already reaching on YouTube. Search traffic for creator content on Roku has been climbing, meaning people are actively looking for this programming on their televisions and not always finding it. Roku’s argument is that the living room audience and the YouTube audience are not always the same people, and that a creator with 10 million subscribers on YouTube still has untapped reach on connected TV.

That is a compelling case as Roku is essentially positioning itself as the place where that blur between YouTube and TV content becomes a feature rather than a problem, aggregating creator content alongside Peacock, HBO Max, and other partners into a single browseable destination.

The advertiser signal is also worth noting. Holme specifically called out growing demand not just from audiences but from brands, which suggests the creator FAST channel economics are starting to work in ways that make the investment worthwhile for the platform.

Roku may not have YouTube’s scale, but it has something YouTube is still building toward: a clean, TV-first experience with deep integrations across every major streaming app. For creators thinking about distribution beyond their primary platform, that is a real offer.

GARDEN VIEW

This is an awesome doc about Colin & Samir building the Press Publish conference in New York.

Timely, since the LA edition is occurring as we speak, and fellow gardener is on the ground. He’ll have a great rundown to share soon.

HARVEST QUOTE

“I want to let the internet decide rather than a room full of executives.”

— Wesley Wang, creator and writer-director known for the viral short nothing, except everything when talking about his new production company, Wesley Wang Media.

No explanation necessary.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

This week: Peacock jumps in, The All American Rejects make a Microdrama, and we consider the (vertical) impact of the upcoming US election.

But first, welcome to a new chapter of The Vertical Bloom.

I’m Scott Brown, founder and CEO of Second Rodeo Productions. My team and I are excited to be bringing you news, insights, and observations about this vertical moment we find ourselves in, with an eye always on its context within the larger boom of digitally native scripted content.

I’ve spent the better part of my career working at the intersection of creators, brands, studios, and emerging formats. I’ve done everything from launching Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s YouTube channel, to crashing a train with MrBeast, to helping bring legacy talent like Larry King into the digital era. But the space I can’t stop talking about right now is vertical storytelling.

Throughout my career I’ve watched initiatives like Youtube Originals, Quibi, or even Sony Crackle come and go, each proclaiming that digitally-native scripted content was here as a robust and lasting sector. Each time the data and the audience proved those claims wrong.

But this moment is different. It’s real. And it comes in a new aspect ratio.

Through Second Rodeo, we’ve had the chance to test that thesis directly. (You can read more here if you’d like.) And through the more than two years we’ve been building we’ve discovered so much, and met an amazing group of people having an incredible conversation about the future of entertainment, of storytelling, of the exploding possibilities of commerce and art.

That’s what I’m excited to share and explore here every week.

Not just the headlines. Not just the platforms. But the bigger question underneath all of it:

What does it mean when a new MEDIUM enters our lives, carried with us everywhere?

I believe vertical is still early. I believe it is more than a trend. And I believe the people who understand its evolving language now will help shape where entertainment goes next.

So, welcome back to The Vertical Bloom.

Let’s get into it.

Peacock Licenses ReelShort Microdramas
NBCUniversal is bringing 10 ReelShort titles to Peacock’s mobile app ahead of its own planned Bravo original verticals.

YouTube Shorts Moves Into the Living Room
YouTube viewers are now watching more than 2 billion hours of Shorts on TVs each month, a reminder that mobile-first formats are no longer staying on mobile-only screens.

Dr Pepper Turns Product Marketing Into Microdrama
Dr Pepper’s four-part TikTok series It’s A Pepper Fling turns the return of Creamy Coconut into a cliffhanger-driven summer romance, showing how brands are utilizing vertical drama grammar for campaign storytelling.

SUPERFAN

Platform: CandyJar

Genre: Comedy / Slasher / Music-Driven Meta-Comedy

This CandyJarTV series is a smart, funny swing for the vertical space: part slasher setup, part band comedy, part fan-service play. Built around The All-American Rejects’ own history, it riffs on their music, legacy, and current image in a way that feels fun for longtime fans but still accessible to casual viewers.

The superfan-kidnapping premise also works as a clever marketing engine, teasing new music inside the story and giving people a reason to keep watching. What makes it especially strong is how naturally it connects to the band’s real world, from the house party concept to the self-aware jokes about who they are now versus who they were in the early album days.

The rollout is also smart. By putting the first episodes on the band’s TikTok, CandyJarTV reaches fans where they already are. Some episodes also start with a quick moment from a band member, giving fans a familiar face before the story begins. That makes the show feel more personal and easier to enter.

The US Election is about to make Vertical Marketing much more expensive.

Part of what we try to do here is bring up things that we’re hearing people talk about. This week we’re tracking the upcoming impact of the election on microdrama apps.

As microdrama platforms scale through paid acquisition, the 2026 election cycle may create a major marketing challenge: the same social, mobile, CTV, and video inventory used to acquire viewers could become dramatically more expensive.

Paid acquisition is currently the primary growth engine for microdrama apps. Sensor Tower found that 68% of U.S. ad spend from major microdrama platforms went to social networks in the first nine months of 2025, while over 80% of DramaWave’s early downloads came from paid advertising.

At the same time, political ad spending is exploding. AdImpact projects $10.8B in political ad spend for the 2025–2026 cycle, Madison and Wall estimate roughly $6.9B in digital spend this cycle. These ads are sold at auction. That’s a lot of money driving up cost.

That matters because political campaigns are increasingly buying on Meta, YouTube, Instagram Reels, CTV, and programmatic video. the exact inventory microdrama apps depend on. Election cycles historically drive CPM inflation and inventory shortages, with some of the sharpest increases occurring in the final 30–45 days before Election Day.

What is this temporary surge in pricing going to do to the space? Will it create an opening for ad-supported platforms like Tik Tok/Pinedrama? Will it shine a brighter light on shows with built in followings via IP or notable names? Will it lead to more apps shutting down? We’ll be watching Q4 closely.

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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

Expect more people from the creative and business trenches of this sector coming in for their own thoughts and opinions.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Petty Parrot

Instagram: 45K Followers

Youtube: 5.95K Followers

Tik Tok: 380K Followers

Who Is Petty Parrot?

Petty Parrot makes animated shorts for people who like their cartoons stupid, mean, and over in twenty seconds.

The public bio keeps it simple with “silly animated shorts & dumb humour,” which is a pretty accurate description of the account. Petty Parrot is not trying to build a lore-heavy animated universe or present itself as the next adult-animation franchise. It is making quick little cartoons out of bad moods, petty reactions, social embarrassment, and people who cannot let something go.

The style helps because the drawings are clean, weird, and readable at a glance. The characters have big eyes, hard stares, open mouths, and a way of landing in the exact second between understanding the situation and making it worse. The animation does not ask for patience. It hits fast, leaves fast, and usually gets more out of the face than the line.

That is where Petty Parrot separates itself from a lot of short-form animation. The account is not leaning only on randomness. The shorts have timing, and not in the polished-studio sense. It is closer to comic-strip timing, where the setup, face, beat, and collapse all happen before the viewer has time to think about scrolling away.

The creator behind it keeps a relatively low public profile. There is no big About page, no long interview trail, and no heavy personal mythology around the project. What is visible is the work and the small commerce layer around it: stickers, prints, merch, Ko-fi, and Etsy. That fits the account because the drawings already behave like reactions people would want to own. A face from a Petty Parrot short makes sense as a sticker because the expression is usually the whole joke.

That gives the project a little more shape than a funny animation account. Petty Parrot is building a small visual language around a specific internet feeling: the moment someone becomes unreasonable and kind of enjoys it.

The format is light, but the identity is clear across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, merch, and prints. None of it requires a grand explanation. The bird is petty, the jokes are dumb, and the faces carry the attitude when the timing works.

Three Things We Love About Petty Parrot

The expressions are the engine: Petty Parrot does not need much setup because the faces do so much of the work. The stare, the pause, the overreaction, the little look of betrayal when something stupid happens. The drawing usually gets to the joke before the dialogue does.

The scale is exactly right: The shorts do not try to become episodes. A petty misunderstanding, a bad reaction, or a dumb little social spiral is enough when the timing is sharp.

It has a repeatable emotional grammar: The account keeps returning to the same tiny human failures: pride, suspicion, embarrassment, impatience, the need to be right, the inability to let a stupid moment die. That is what makes the cartoons feel connected without needing lore.

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Every producer, studio and distribution exec, every indie filmmaker staring at Monday morning numbers will be obsessing over the 30% INCREASE Obsession posted in its second weekend.

Horror movies hardly ever go that direction (like NEVER). The genre’s natural expression is to front-load opening weekend and drop 50% in frame two — a 30% DECREASE would be a home run.

And while everyone is going to spend the week piecing together what Focus, Blumhouse, Curry Barker and his producing partner James Harris did to get there, the more interesting story is how this success differs from another recent creator-to-theatrical win — Markiplier’s Iron Lung. Two wins, two opposite paths.

But let’s first hit the broad strokes on how Obsession came together — how a $650,000 movie ended up on 2,615 screens in the first place. The backstory, Blinkist-style:

Curry Barker moved to LA at 18, started making YouTube videos, uploaded an $800 found-footage movie for free, it went viral, and connected him to producer James Harris, who told him to write a script. He did. They made the movie for $650K. It went to TIFF and got bought in a bidding war for $15 million. You can read the full story on The Wrap or a million other places.

Retention Is the New Grammar

To say that the language of retention in social media is going to impact the language of movies and TV will make many film school professors clutch their pearls. How dare you insinuate that the cheap pursuit of views will pollute the fragile art of cinema!

Yeah well, remember when editing went digital? How did that change the language of storytelling?

Exactly.

Because audiences don’t live in a vacuum.

And the more they live online the more they demand change from traditional storytelling. Adapt or die. For younger creators it’s not even adaption. It’s just the language they speak.

Barker has a line about his own training is telling: “It’s the same kind of muscles,” he told The Wrap. “To make a scare and make a laugh are very similar.” He’s talking about why sketch comedians keep ending up directing horror — Peele, Cregger, now him.

But the muscle isn’t comedy-to-horror. It’s audience-retention literacy. Knowing, in real time, how engaged the viewer is. Barker put it more bluntly:

“There’s a certain editing that you kind of do when you’re doing those [sketches]... you get these instincts of like, ‘okay, we’ve lost [them],’ which is really helpful in film…”

I suggested in an Open Gardens post last year that film schools should require students to open a YouTube channel. (Many a pearl was clutched.)

Retention isn’t just a marketing function. It’s a storytelling function for younger audiences raised on social.

You can see it right in the trailer — Obsession is a horror version of Fatal Attraction calibrated to Gen Z. The fear isn’t being stalked by a stranger. It’s being loved too intensely by someone you already let in. That’s a specific generational anxiety, and Barker is fluent in it.

Reminds me of one of the OG (as in three years ago) creator-to-filmmaker success stories: RackaRacka, the Australian YouTube duo behind chaotic creepy-comedy shorts, pivoted to horror with Talk to Me in 2023 and watched it become a major theatrical hit for A24.

And now Barker is pulling the same move from the same kind of channel. He also seems to be a fan: one of his early viral hits was a Talk to Me parody.

Followers Don’t Buy Tickets

But the muscle doesn’t fill 2,615 theaters.

Barker’s YouTube channel, that’s a bad idea, has 1.1M subscribers — a real audience, but not a theatrical one. And not a sticky portable community that’s in deep dialogue with its creators.

But you don’t have to be fluent in creator culture to know it would be hard to convert 1.1 million followers into real numbers on a wide release whether that community is portable or not.

So at the end of last year, barely six months before the movie hit theaters, Focus brought in Blumhouse for their brand power and their marketing knowhow.

Focus’ Vice Chair Jason Cassidy explained the rationale to Fast Company:

“Blum has that reach into the broader horror audience, which absolutely enabled us to extend our tentacles with this one.”

Blumhouse’s logo on a poster is shorthand the horror audience already speaks — this is a real horror movie, worth your Friday night.

Barker couldn’t generate that signal from a sketch channel and one 62-minute horror movie that went viral on YouTube. Focus couldn’t generate it from a marketing budget.

Blumhouse could, because they’d spent twenty years building that depth.

Sell Without Selling

But this isn’t an instead move. It’s an also.

At the same time Focus brought in Blumhouse for reach, they recognized that Barker had instincts they couldn’t buy at any of the legacy agencies. He knew how to sell the movie the way his generation actually buys movies — by not selling it.

Cassidy again, to Fast Company:

“He’s so native to his digital world and he knows his voice and his community, and we absolutely wanted to tap into that. This is a group that has been online their whole life and likes to participate in stuff, and that’s vital to the experience of this.”

What they built together looks nothing like a horror campaign.

There’s a 30-second retro commercial for the One Wish Willow toy that plays like an actual ad from another era — no movie title, no release date, no Focus Features logo. Just a jingle and a product.

It hit 4.4 million views in a month.

They put One Wish Willow vending machines in Los Angeles selling the actual toy.

The physical pop-up store sold out in under 24 hours.

Fans recorded themselves cracking the toy open and posting their wishes on TikTok.

Seventy thousand people signed up to receive voice notes from the character Nikki on their personal phones.

And the activation that captured the whole strategy in a single moment: Inde Navarrette, the actress who plays Nikki, interacting live with mall shoppers from an advertising screen — locking eyes, whispering, going from sweet to obsessive — triggering jump scares that shoppers immediately filmed and posted to Instagram.

The campaign became the content.

Cassidy on the philosophy: “It’s immersed in giving them something to own, but also putting them right in the story in a way that feels just very authentic to that experience.”

In other words as I wrote about just a few weeks ago: to sell a product, don’t mention the product.

None of it sells you a ticket. It builds the emotional connection that drives you to the movie to get the full experience.

When Community is the Audience: The Markiplier Effect

This is where the contrast with Markiplier comes in — because the easy read of this past month is that creator-to-theatrical is one trend, one model, one playbook.

It isn’t.

Markiplier has 38 million YouTube subscribers.

His audience asked him to make a movie out of Iron Lung, a horror game they’d watched him play. He got the rights. He built the film in public. He kept his community inside the process the whole way through.

And when Iron Lung opened, it did it with effectively no traditional marketing campaign — and pulled numbers in the same neighborhood as Obsession, on a much smaller ad budget.

Two creator-to-theatrical wins within six months, both real, both worth studying.

But they’re not the same case.

Markiplier’s community was the audience. He didn’t need Blumhouse’s brand because his own brand already meant “real horror, worth your Friday night” to 38 million people. He didn’t need a traditional movie marketing campaign because the development of the movie was the campaign — every update was content, every content beat was a marketing beat. The community he’d spent a decade building was both the development pipeline and the box office.

Barker’s case is the opposite.

His community is the language, not the audience. The 1.1M people who watch That’s a Bad Idea taught him how to speak to a generation, but they were never going to fill 2,615 theaters on opening weekend. And he hadn’t been building the movie online with them.

So Focus and Blumhouse built the rest of the architecture around his fluency — Blumhouse for the reach, Focus and Barker for the surfaces. Two halves of an equation Markiplier didn’t have to solve because his half was already big enough.

Markiplier was self-sufficient.

In the Open Gardens thesis that the creator economy needs legacy to fully converge, he’s the outlier — he relied on legacy for almost nothing. The theatrical infrastructure to put the movie on screens, some below-the-line crew perhaps (unsubstantiated), and that’s about it.

Everything else, including the audience itself, he already owned.

Focus and Barker went the other direction.

They recognized that the creator side had something the legacy side couldn’t manufacture — the fluency to connect with Gen Z and millennials on the surfaces those audiences already live on. And the legacy side had things the creator side couldn’t manufacture either — brand authority, institutional knowledge around marketing horror…

So they married the two.

That’s the convergence the Open Gardens thesis has been pointing at since the beginning. Markiplier didn’t need it. Barker did. Both are real outcomes.

As I just said in a presentation not long ago—

The new model is that there is no model.

Everything product you sell, every campaign you launch must be bespoke.

And as the industry gets more and more obsessed with the creator-as-filmmaker story, the smart operators will be the ones who understand that every time out of the gate is going to take a different structure to get the best results possible.

Markiplier and Barker had very different communities.

The delta between them was easy to measure — one was portable, the other wasn’t even big enough to ask the question. But where I’ve seen a lot of failure lately is the harder case: follower counts that look big on paper but don’t actually convert. The best operators will know the difference.

Which is the only question that matters when you’re trying to turn community into commerce. Forget how big. Does it travel?

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

YouTube’s Victory Lap

Streaming is now an advertising game. So it’s no surprise that at its Brandcast presentation in New York last week, YouTube announced that brands can now buy ads directly against specific shows on the platform. Alex Cooper, Trevor Noah, Kareem Rahma, and others are the first wave of programming where this is available.

That is exactly how traditional television advertising has always worked, and after years of “no ads,” effectively every streamer has an ad tier (the more things change…). You buy a slot against a specific show, in a specific context, in front of a specific audience. YouTube just built the same infrastructure, but then soon after did something many people might have missed at Google’s I/O conference.

Puck’s Julia Alexander broke down the analysis in a newsletter this week:

Three billion monthly active users globally. Nearly 245 million adults in the United States, roughly 91 percent of the country’s adult population. About 9.5 times the global monthly active viewers of Prime Video’s ad tier. Twelve times those of Netflix’s ad tier. YouTube is projected to account for roughly a quarter of all connected TV ad sales this year, around $9 billion, on top of a podcast advertising market that surpassed $5 billion last year and where YouTube is increasingly dominant.

Considering that about 43 percent of primetime TV ad spend coming out of last year’s upfronts went to streaming, up from 30 percent in 2023, this is clearly a deliberate move to steal some of those dollars. By offering the same show-specific ad buying that legacy television has always used to court brand dollars, while sitting on an audience that dwarfs every other option in the room, the pitch to advertisers writes itself.

Julia ends her analysis with a simple but painfully accurate phrase: “Good luck to everyone else!”

The game truly has changed.

Or Has It?

Jim Louderback acknowledged Big Red’s success, but warned of moments in which a company declares a new era has historically been when things start going sideways. He has the receipts, from AOL-Time Warner to Zuck announcing the the metaverse and even changing the Facebook’s name. The pattern is not encouraging.

The structural concerns he raises are harder to dismiss than the historical analogies, though. Creator dependency is a real vulnerability. YouTube’s cost advantage over Netflix and Disney rests on top-tier creators producing on-platform, but Joe Rogan went to Spotify, Alex Cooper went to SiriusXM, and MrBeast inked a deal with Amazon Prime. If creators keep leaving for better deals elsewhere, the platform’s biggest asset stops being a moat.

The ad load trajectory is also killing viewing experience, creeping toward 15 minutes of commercials per hour. YouTube is adding unskippable pre-rolls, mid-stream interruptions, and in-stream shopping at a pace that is quietly eroding the intimacy that made the platform what it is.

And, of course, the slop problem, which we have covered here before, is compounding all of it. AI slop makes up 21% of videos served to new users, per Kapwing. As Jim says, this means mediocrity is seeping in.

Having said all that, it’s clear that YouTube is doing nearly everything right. It’s the most dominant player, but for the first time carrying the weight that comes with it.

Creator-Driven Movies Keep Winning

Elsewehere, the theatrical release of creator driven movies continues to be a point of success.

Curry Barker’s Obsession opened to $17 million this past weekend. The word of mouth is exceptional, including an A- CinemaScore, which is rare enough for a horror film to be worth noting.

What makes the story remarkable is the budget: $750,000.

Focus Features picked the film up at TIFF for $15 million, meaning the return on investment to the producers is almost favorable, to say the least. Barker is 26, and studios were circling him before the festival was over. He has since been hired by A24 to direct their Texas Chainsaw reboot.

Then there is The Amazing Digital Circus, which is a different kind of story but points at the same underlying shift. Glitch Productions’ dark, surreal animated series has accumulated 1.2 billion views across its first eight episodes on YouTube. Fathom Entertainment is releasing a theatrical compilation of the eighth episode and the previously unreleased series finale on June 4, and presales have already surpassed $7.5 million — a record for Fathom. The number of theaters carrying the release has more than doubled since tickets went on sale, from roughly 900 to over 2,100 North American locations.

Fathom’s CEO was direct about why they pursued it: they researched the show’s online audience and decided the numbers justified a theatrical bet. That is the monetization pyramid in practice. A fanbase built on YouTube, converted into ticket sales through a theatrical event, with a collectible popcorn bucket to close the loop.

Two very different films, two very different paths to the theater. But the same underlying logic: audiences built online can be real audiences, and when the content is good enough, they will show up.

GARDEN VIEW

The official trailer for Lyrical Lemonade TV is here. We wrote about it a few weeks back, they are building the institutional infrastructure of a new-age network and we’re excited to see where this project goes as it might create a blueprint for what’s to come.

HARVEST QUOTE

“Each episode will run approximately 12.5 minutes.”

— Joe Otterson, writing for Variety on the ‘Minimum Wage’ Netflix series order.

The number almost slips by without notice, but it shouldn't. Minimum Wage, the viral short-form series, is coming to Netflix, and it will not follow the traditional 30 or 60 minute episode format that streaming inherited from television.

Netflix ordering a series at that runtime is a signal that the platform is starting to meet short-form storytelling on its own terms rather than asking it to stretch into a format it might not be built for.

Have a great weekend…

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