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: Shroomates

Instagram: 1K Followers

Who Are Shroomates?

Shroomates is a scripted comedy series about twins trying to build a mushroom startup before the startup eats the family alive.

Ben and Jessie Russo are the siblings at the center of it. Ben thinks he is building the future. Jessie is trying to keep the future from overdrafting. He talks like the company was sent to him by the universe. She talks like she has already checked the bank account.

Brent Pella plays Ben. Pella is a stand-up, a Wild ’N Out alum, and a digital comedian who has spent years around exactly the kind of character Ben is: the wellness guy, the podcast guy, the festival guy, the man who mistakes confidence for a business plan. Ben does not feel like a random founder parody. He feels like one of Pella’s guys finally opened an LLC.

Nikki Howard plays Jessie. Howard is an actor, comedian, model, and digital creator with her own following, and her existing work with Pella on The Audacity gives the sibling dynamic a head start. Jessie is not just there to roll her eyes. She is the person who saw the disaster coming, warned everyone, and still ended up on the cap table.

The official premise is simple: two siblings launch a mushroom company and take themselves far too seriously along the way. The show understands how much comedy already lives inside that sentence. Psychedelic wellness. Startup language. Family labor. Product development. Spiritual branding. A mission statement written before anyone solves operations. None of it needs much exaggeration.

The company behind the series is Schedule35, a real mushroom brand. That is the part that makes Shroomates more than a funny account. Schedule35 did not just hire comedians to make ad sketches. It built a fictional version of its own world and let the comedians attack the exact culture the brand lives inside.

That is a much better move. Most brands want to be loved. Shroomates is willing to look ridiculous. The joke is not anti-mushroom. It is anti-founder bullshit. Anti-wellness cosplay. Anti-people who call every problem a journey because they do not want to admit they forgot to order labels.

The series also has a real creator stack around it. Pella and Howard are not random actors dropped into branded content. They are internet-native comedians with an existing rhythm together. They have made sketches, podcasts, festival-adjacent comedy, and character work that already overlaps with the Shroomates world. Schedule35 is borrowing more than their faces. It is borrowing their comic language.

That is why the casting works. Ben and Jessie do not feel like mascots for a company. They feel like characters who could actually have emerged from this corner of culture. The kind of people who know just enough about psychedelics, branding, and manifestation to become dangerous in a Google Doc.

The smartest piece is the structure. Shroomates gives Schedule35 a repeatable story engine. Every normal business problem becomes an episode. Hiring, naming, product testing, market research, moving home going viral and making chocolate. The brand does not need to interrupt the comedy because the comedy already comes from the business.

Three Things We Love About Shroomates

The brand is willing to be the joke: Most branded entertainment protects the company until the comedy has nowhere to go. Shroomates does the opposite. Schedule35 lets the show make fun of the exact world it lives in: wellness language, founder delusion, product panic, family labor, and people turning a business plan into a spiritual calling.

Ben and Jessie are a real comedy engine: Brent Pella and Nikki Howard give the series more than a premise. Ben is the guy who can turn a bad idea into a mission statement. Jessie is the one who knows it’s a bad idea and still somehow ends up on the cap table. That sibling dynamic gives the show somewhere to go beyond mushroom jokes.

It turns startup problems into episodes: Hiring someone, naming the company, doing market research, making chocolate, moving home, trying to go viral. Every normal business problem becomes a story problem. That is the repeatable engine most branded series never find.

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In 2022, John Hammond and Ari Cagan applied the legacy playbook to the creator economy.

They developed and produced a scripted vertical series called Cobell Energy — an office sitcom set inside a Texas oil company.

When it launched, Variety called it the first Hollywood-backed scripted vertical series ever made. They got Adam McKay to executive produce. They were funded by a sustainability nonprofit called Yellow Dot Judd Apatow reposted the first episode. It looked exactly like it was supposed to.

Didn’t move the needle.

The twist of setting an office sitcom inside a Texas oil company — cowboy boots, southern accents, the whole thing — created enough confusion in the first three seconds that audiences scrolled before they understood what they were watching.

“The second the audience starts to feel confused,” said Hammond, “they’re like, I don’t know what this is, next thing.” The concept registered. The spin was one beat too many.

The McKay attachment was supposed to do work it couldn’t do here.

“When you’re on your phone looking at content,” said Hammond, “you’re not thinking about who produced this or who’s behind it. You’re asking, is this entertaining to me? Do I understand this?” The people who read Variety are not the audience for Cobell Energy.

Hollywood has spent fifty years building an infrastructure of credibility around festivals, trades, EP attachments… all of it designed to communicate value to other people inside the industry.

None of that work translates at the point of contact with a phone screen, where the only question being asked is whether the next three seconds are worth giving up. The system was built for a different distribution model.

Hammond studied film and graphic design at the New School, ran an illegal comedy club out of his Brooklyn basement after graduating, and spent years developing a TV pilot nobody would buy.

Cagan taught himself production, built social-native series at Mad Realities, then started Gymnasium with a few others , in less than a year they sold a show to Amazon. John and Ari met through Kareem Rahma, recognized they read the landscape the same way, and APC came out of that.

After Cobell, the question changed. Not how to launch a show the right way, but what a format would look like if it was designed for zero context — where a stranger landing on it cold could understand what they were watching inside the first three seconds.

There’s an entire category of media companies now built around exactly that problem — studios without a face, formats that don’t depend on a single talent to carry them.

The Wrap recently profiled some that have reached scale: Dropout, Jubilee, NowThis. Mad Realities, which we’ve written about before, is another version of this.

What those companies share is that they’re past the hard part. The infrastructure is in place. The model holds. APC is earlier in that process, which is exactly why it’s worth paying attention to.

The Pivot

The first meeting John and Ari took after starting APC took was with Alex Berry. The show was called The Ick.

The premise lands immediately. Community-submitted dating horror stories, dramatized as scripted short films, each built around the precise moment attraction disappears.

A viewer landing on the content for first time immediately understands what they’re watching. No onboarding required, no prior episode to have seen. Without a known creator at the center, the format has to do the work of orientation on its own. This one does.

Seven months after launch: 500,000 followers, more than 15,000 story submissions, an average of 1.8 million viewers per episode, and breakout episodes reaching five to ten million. No advertising spend. No collab posts.

In April 2026, The Ick won the Webby for Best Content Series in Social and Games at the 30th Annual Webby Awards, with additional nominations in Scripted Video and Comedy Video. Industry recognition for a show that has never been promoted by a single celebrity.

Underneath the visible part — the weekly episode — there’s an infrastructure most social content operations don’t have and would have a hard time replicating.

These guys made three moves that are worth noting…

The Operating System

Decision 1: Invent the Category

The default move in short-form is to find what’s working and make a version of it.

It’s rational, and it’s also a losing game over time. “If something is not cutting edge, there’s no point in us doing it,” said Cagan. “You can make good money very quickly from slop, maybe you’ve got a McMansion from your man-on-the-street shows. But what does it matter? All you did was man-on-the-street shows.”

The instinct at APC is to find the thing nobody has tried yet and figure out whether it can hold. The advantage of inventing a category is that there are no incumbents.

A format built around something people already feel doesn’t need to be explained. Anyone who has ever felt their attraction switch off in a single moment understood the premise the second a scene started.

This comes with a real cost. Studios can kill projects in script stage and never spend the production money.

APC kills them in market, after the production money has been spent. You learn things you can’t learn in development. Cobell Energy was part of that tuition.

Decision 2: Trust the Work

“It’s all about the writing,” said Hammond. “Not about who we can put in there to make the show good.” The Ick has no recurring host, no personality at the center, no collab posts. When an episode performs, they know exactly why.

Kareem Rahma — one of the most successful comedians — someone Hammond and Cagan genuinely respect — has appeared in The Ick. They don’t collab post with him.

“It all comes down to audience, the algorithms whole job is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, which means they have to serve things you will love. We have a lot of talent on our series, and that talent often doesn’t have the same audience as ours.” said Hammond.

With no face carrying the show, the production has to do the trust-building that celebrity usually handles. The framing, the sound, the writing, the edit — that’s what earns a stranger’s attention when there’s no recognizable face to do it. “You can copy someone’s format in an afternoon,” said Cagan. “You can’t copy their standard.”

Hammond’s read on the broader medium is that you can count on one hand those actually elevating the form. When he came up, the conventional wisdom was that rough content performed better — shoot on an iPhone, keep things raw.

“I remember hearing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in an industry where everyone is telling you makes things worse,” said Hammond. “surprise, surprise, that was wrong.”

Decision 3: Turn the Audience Into Infrastructure

This one started as an accident.

Hammond, Cagan, and Berry were in development on The Ick, writing their own ick stories, telling people about the concept. Every time they did, the conversation broke open.

Cagan was at a friends Easter dinner when it crystallized — the host mentioned what Ari was making, the cousin had a story, then the uncle, then everyone at the table. “At that point we realized, okay, wait, this would be a really cool way to add another element, another layer to this thing,” said Cagan.

Stories come in through Submityourick.com — hundreds per day. The team filters for a clean narrative turn, the precise moment the ick lands, because without that turn there isn’t a scene to build. By the time it hits production, what’s being shot is a script, not someone’s testimony.

They shoot four to five episodes in a single day, once a month. That batch cadence creates a backlog of around twenty episodes at any given moment. They can hold an episode, sequence releases strategically, absorb a busy month without breaking the feed.

The release rhythm is consistent: episode on Sunday, submission callouts on Monday, runner-ups on Thursday. That structure is what compounds when you’re trying to build a brand.

The submissions are also the data layer underneath everything else. APC keeps a searchable database of every story ever received.

When Reformation came in for a Valentine’s Day campaign with a dump-him angle, APC searched the database for matching stories and scripted around them. When Verizon wanted a Wi-Fi angle, same process.

The integration feels organic to the audience because it actually is, and APC holds a hard line on what brands can ask for in return.

“We’re telling true stories and we can’t just be like, oh, this story you submitted, you actually say you love Exxon now,” said Hammond. “That would just be, what the fuck. You never said that.”

Fifteen thousand submissions in, the show will only stop working if the community stops feeding it. The audience has skin in the game in a way the algorithm can’t replicate. When your story gets picked, you see it on screen and you share it.

Someone who submitted a story watches differently than someone who stumbled onto the feed. These people showed up with something. That’s a relationship that doesn’t get built by ad spend. The audience didn’t just give APC stories. They gave APC infrastructure.

The Lemonade Stand

Cagan describes the short form show landscape with precision rather than modesty. “I don’t think this is a real business yet,” he said. “It’s kind of like a lemonade stand. Its great for a single creator or a few kids, but our aspiration is something much larger.”

That candor is useful. What makes it interesting is what APC is choosing to build toward in the meantime.

Hammond reaches for the HBO comparison. “The Ick right now is basically that thing for us. We do this show, it is not a profitable show, but all the things that come along with it are.” Succession wasn’t profitable on its own — it existed to signal what HBO meant, while the economics of their library ran underneath on subscriptions.

90% of revenue in their first year came from client projects, white label shows, advertising and consulting.

Mid-conversation, Hammond raised TBPN — the podcast that recently sold to OpenAI for roughly $200 million. TBPN wasn’t the biggest podcast in tech. What it was was a vehicle for reaching a very high-value audience that brands were willing to pay a premium to access. The ceiling wasn’t total audience size but audience value.

The playbook could be find the high-value audience and own that space, a smaller audience in the right niche is worth more than a larger one somewhere else. Cagan put it simply “We are in the billboard business, a billboard in Beverly Hills is worth more than one in Glendale. The brilliant thing about the internet is that all land costs the same.”

What They Built and What It Means

Start with a format that doesn’t exist yet. Not a better version of what’s working — an entirely new category with no incumbent. Design it so a stranger understands what they’re watching inside three seconds.

Hold a high production standard.

Find the submission loop. Whatever turns passive viewers into active participants. Let the participation become the data layer. Let the data layer become the brand integration logic. The community doesn’t just produce raw material. It produces infrastructure.

Decide early which audience you’re building for, and make that decision based on value, not size.

Build the audience and the craft first. The money follows what you’ve built, not the other way around.

“I would love to be known as the company that makes the best stuff on the internet,” said Hammond. “And I would even go as far as to say the internet includes Netflix.”Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS (Pun Not Intended)

Everybody Is Doing It Now

Clipping isn’t a new conversation, but recently it’s been in the limelight thanks to several factors. You may have seen or heard about certain stories, like the one of N3on spending over $1 million in just a month on an army of clippers to flood your feed and, similarly, Clavicular building an entire clipping machine to manufacture viral fame.

Creators have been doing this for a while, and as Jim Louderback says, “When it’s not just the cool kids doing dope stuff, it’s dead.”

Well, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The “uncool kids” (a.k.a. traditional companies) have joined in,

Netflix is redesigning its mobile app to introduce Clips, a vertical video feed built for discovery, i.e. sharing highlights from original Netflix programming. And it’s not just Netflix. Peacock, Disney, and pretty much everyone else are doing more or less the same thing.

It makes sense, too. As Josh D’Amaro put it, he wants to make sure their “IP shows up in relevant ways across social platforms.”

But… is gaining fame and/or relevance among younger audiences as easy as clipping existing content and pushing it out?

The Short Answer is No

It turns out that it’s more complicated than that.

Lazy clipping your long form content can’t be treated as a side project. It might generate awareness but it won’t necessarily lead to audiences migrating to long form viewing, forming community, and all the other good stuff everyone’s chasing. An exercise might help here: how many creators do you know from clips that show up on your feed but you’ve never seen their actual videos? For me, it’s a lot…

A clip needs to stand on its own.

And if you’re a legacy studio or streamer building out a vertical feed, why not experiment with new content on your own short-form platform? Why depend on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok when you can test new stories inside your own ecosystem and develop the ones that resonate into something bigger?

Or, like Disney, bring in creators to make interesting videos with their own POV about your existing IP? David Freeman had a great post on this very point.

For those of us in legacy media, short form storytelling can sometimes feel alien. But if we only treat it as an awareness builder rather than a storytelling format in its own right, audiences will feel the difference.

And even for creators, lazy clipping just got a lot harder. Instagram's Adam Mosseri announced the platform will be deprioritizing unoriginal content, which is a politely worded hit on the repost-without-transformation economy. A welcome move for original creators on the surface, though let's be honest: Instagram wants you paying them to boost content rather than external clipping armies.

Which Brings Us To Patreon

The company recently announced a meaningful shift in how its discovery algorithm works , and the logic behind it is worth paying attention to beyond the platform itself.

Rather than optimizing for watch time and passive consumption, Patreon is moving toward signals that reflect genuine connection: shared interests, engagement quality, and creator collaboration. Their new Quips feature introduces network-enabled discovery, letting readers find new creators through the communities already forming around the ones they follow.

The more interesting question it raises is about platform incentives, though. Most platforms (let’s be honest, it’s all of them) optimize for their own growth first, which usually means algorithmic choices that extract attention rather than build relationships. I wrote about this a while back.

But Patreon is doing the opposite. And perhaps it’s too idealistic of me, but isn’t optimizing for creator success actually the same thing as optimizing for platform health?

Whether Patreon can pull it off at scale remains to be seen. But I do wonder whether platforms in general (and here, I mean both creator economy and legacy platforms) will shift their philosophy to treat creators as true partners rather than content suppliers; and if this will produce better outcomes for everyone in the ecosystem.

Time will tell.

GARDEN VIEW

https://vimeo.com/event/5860307

It turns out that you can’t embed Vimeo videos on Substack, so you’ll have to click through on this one. Oh well..

Anyways, this Milken Institute panel titled The Next Act: Creativity, Disruption, and the Future of Entertainment is worth your time. Some of the sharpest names in the business talking through where the industry is actually heading.

HARVEST QUOTE

“I knew that at the end of the day, the one thing that really sets you apart is quality and storytelling, so from the offset I could have been cheap and used iPhones to shoot my shows, but I knew that using cinema quality cameras would make a difference when you’re watching things on a phone.”

— Kareem Rahma, the creator behind popular shows like Subway Takes and Keep the Meter Running speaking on The Town podcast.

It's refreshing to hear a creator talk this way. Rahma built two of the more distinctive shows in the creator space by starting with a genuine concept and committing to executing it at the highest level, rather than chasing the algorithm and hoping something stuck.

The irony is that the thing most people treat as a shortcut, i.e. lower production quality, cheaper tools, and faster output, is often what keeps a good idea from becoming a great one.

Cinema cameras on a subway platform sounds like a small detail, but it's actually a philosophy on quality that can massively pay off.

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.

Fresh Takes

Taye Diggs and Co. Launch ‘Microhouse Films’

Microhouse Films, launched by Taye Diggs and partners, is positioning itself as a creator-first vertical platform that strips out traditional gatekeeping layers and hands control back to filmmakers. No subscription fees, no hosting costs, and no ads, with a token-based system that lets creators decide when, what, and how to monetize their content—a clear departure from platforms like ReelShort or DramaBox that rely on aggressive spend and centralized optimization to drive traffic and retention. Will Microhouse effectively differentiate themselves and trailblaze the way in which creatives establish themselves?

A Quote from Founder Taye Diggs:

“When we thought about how to meaningfully impact the vertical space, we immediately focused on the creators and storytellers whose livelihoods depend on where this industry is headed. Microhouse Films is about creating a model that supports them in this next phase and allows them to keep telling stories that move us.”

Platform ‘HighFive’ Re-Releases Features for Vertical Viewing

HighFive is taking a familiar piece of IP and reframing it as a fresh product, debuting The Friendly from Joe Mantegna as a vertically reformatted, interactive experience that can toggle between mobile-native framing and wider aspect ratios, positioning itself as a post-theatrical tool for features that didn’t land in their initial window. The pitch is simple: extend a film’s lifecycle by adapting it to microdrama viewing behavior, where pacing and framing can reshape engagement without producing something new. The real test is whether format transformation alone can create a second audience, or if vertical success still requires building for the medium from the ground up…

Platform Spotlight

Crisp is a platform to watch because it isn’t trying to win on volume, it’s redefining what vertical can be, positioning itself as a curated hub for premium short-form storytelling across animation, documentary, and experimental series. Its hybrid of algorithmic discovery and editorial framing signals a shift toward taste over pure feed optimization, with leadership like Adrian Cheng pushing a strategy built on quality, genre expansion, and brand partnerships rather than repetition. The bet is that vertical can evolve beyond melodrama into a franchise-driven ecosystem, but the risk is clear—curation and experimentation run against the fast, familiar consumption patterns that currently power the space. If boutique platforms can survive among the masses is the question for the foreseeable future…

Show Spotlight

Reborn for the Crown (Vigloo):

Logline: After being humiliated at her high school reunion, Mia collapses and dies with a final wish: to wake up as her 18-year old self. Armed with future knowledge, she’s determined to re-write her past, avoid old mistakes, and rebuild her power…

Genre: Drama-Comedy / Second Chance / Teen

This 55-episode Vigloo series leans into early 2000s American high school comedy-dramas, repackaging familiar teen tropes like social hierarchies, identity reinvention, romance, and rivalry into a vertical format built for speed. It hits the basics with clear archetypes and accessible tone, but maintains the melodrama expected from a vertical. The pacing is efficient as it attempts to mimic its inspiration, but it’s not strategic, with mechanical cliffhangers and underbuilt emotional turns. The takeaway is simple: familiarity creates entry, but without adaptation, it limits engagement.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

In an interview with Forbes, GoodShort co-Founder Brenda Cheong breaks down what drives the microdrama boom, and what to pay attention to…

As new platforms appear daily, it’s becoming harder to differentiate against competitors, but Cheong says the biggest challenge isn’t creating a good series, but the ecosystem that surrounds it. The format works not just because they’re faster, cheaper, and built for how people actually consume content on phones, but because platforms like GoodShort are building full-stack ecosystems around IP, localization, and data-driven storytelling, using rapid production cycles and targeted distribution to scale globally.

The takeaway is that success in this space isn’t about format alone, it’s about controlling the entire pipeline from story to audience

Read the whole post here.

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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: Stef Dag

Instagram: 111K Followers

Youtube: 1.97K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 96.1K Followers

Who Is Stef Dag?

Stef Dag knew how internet shows worked before she became one.

Before Hot & Single, before the tour dates, before the Substack, she was Stephanie D’Agostini, directing digital video at Condé Nast. Vogue’s 73 Questions. Vanity Fair’s Lie Detector. Glamour’s All My Exes. Shows built around timing, discomfort, access, and the half-second when someone realizes they have said too much.

Hot & Single launched on Valentine’s Day 2023. Dag talks to people about dating, sex, loneliness, delusion, and the public embarrassment of wanting someone to want you back. The show could have been cheap. Instead, it has rhythm. The cuts are sharp. The pauses land. The questions know exactly where they are going.

Dag is not just holding the microphone. She is the reason the format works. Sometimes the person gives the funniest answer. Sometimes her face after the answer is funnier. Sometimes she lets the silence sit there long enough to become the joke.

The Condé Nast years are baked into the pacing. 73 Questions taught movement. Lie Detector taught pressure. All My Exes taught romantic discomfort. Hot & Single takes that machinery outside, strips away the celebrity polish, and lets regular people talk themselves into a corner.

But Hot & Single is only one piece of it. Dag is building the same voice across stand-up, writing, touring, and short-form. Her stand-up gives the whole thing a spine. The clips are not floating by themselves. They come from a comedian with an act, a point of view, and a room she is trying to fill.

Her Substack, diary of stef dag, gives the voice more space to spiral. It has the same comic temperature as the clips: anxious, horny, dark, self-aware, embarrassed, then suddenly precise. The live shows give the audience somewhere to go after the feed. The feed keeps bringing new people into the act.

She also has other formats orbiting the main one, including a viral TikTok show where she interviews men about female anatomy. That fits the same comic obsession: dating, confidence, ignorance, gender panic, and the weird performance of knowing what you are talking about when you absolutely do not.

That is the cleaner read on Stef Dag. She is not a comedian with one viral dating show. She is building a comic world around desire, shame, sex, self-delusion, and the little lies people tell when they are trying to sound normal.

The formats change. The voice does not.

Three Things We Love About Stef Dag

She knows where the awkward second lives: The pacing on Hot & Single comes from someone who has spent years cutting interviews, watching people over-explain themselves, and knowing exactly when the silence gets funny.

The stand-up holds it together: The clips work because they come from a comedian with an act, not just a host with a prompt. The live shows, the dating franchise, and the writing all feed the same point of view.

Every format sounds like her: Hot & Single, stand-up, Substack, anatomy interviews, touring. It all comes from the same place: dating culture as embarrassment, performance, and self-exposure.

@stefdag#fyp #herstory #90saesthetic #boyfriendcheck #period

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A major studio just handed creative control of a tentpole project to a creator’s 31-million-person community. A production label is taking development capital from 2,000 fans instead of a studio. A showrunner just left a major streamer to own his own YouTube channel because ownership matters more than distribution size. Three different structures showing the same rupture: the trade that built Hollywood—capital in exchange for control—is collapsing. The question isn’t whether studios give up creative control. It’s when.

So here are three trends I’ve been noticing, emerging from our Garden Harvest posts and my general diet of media consumption about… well, media.

1. Hollywood Is Importing the Creator OS

Sony announced at CinemaCon in April that it’s developing a Bloodborne animated feature. The detail worth focusing on isn’t the IP. It’s who they brought in alongside it.

Jacksepticeye — the YouTube gaming creator with over 31 million subscribers — is joining the project as a producer. Not as an “executive producer” credit attached for marketing reach. As a creative stakeholder during development.

Producer credits get handed out generously, so the title alone doesn’t tell you much. What makes this one structurally different is who he is to the IP. Jacksepticeye has been a public Bloodborne advocate for years, and his community knows that. By bringing him into the creative process rather than into the marketing rollout, Sony is moving the audience’s representative into the room before the creative is locked. The 31 million people who follow him aren’t being courted at release. They’re effectively seated at the table during development.

That’s creator-economy logic — imported into a Hollywood structure. And it’s not isolated. A whole layer of plays across the industry is moving in the same direction.

In February, Utopia, the independent distributor, launched the Utopia Screening Room as a $5/month Patreon membership. Each screening is positioned as “a digital stop on each film’s release tour” — the city-by-city indie release model converted from a touring schedule into a recurring community ritual. The audience isn’t buying tickets. They’re funding the tour.

In mid-March, Linden Lane Films — founded by Hollywood actor Stephen Kunken with the Stokes Twins and Ben Azelart on the talent roster — launched around a two-arm model. The Films arm handles traditional theatrical and streaming distribution. The Labs arm is the creator incubator that responds to trends in real time on the creators’ existing platforms. The Labs work isn’t promotional. It’s where audience signal feeds creative decisions for the bigger projects.

At SXSW in March, Brass Knuckle Films — Robert Rodriguez and Alexis Garcia’s fan-investor action label — unveiled its first five-project slate. Two of the five came directly from investor-pitched ideas. The label has now raised $2M from over 2,000 individual investors, and announced a “Best Logline Wins” contest where the community competes to have its own idea developed. The audience isn’t a marketing target. It’s the cap table and the writers’ room.

Together they form a pattern: Hollywood used to define itself by what it kept out. The audience was outside the wall. They showed up at the box office or they didn’t. The capital, the creative, the decisions — all inside. The audience’s job was to consume the result.

The creator economy was built on the opposite assumption. The audience is in the room from day one. They vote with watch time, comments, and memes. The creator iterates against that signal. The audience is not the customer at the end of the funnel. They’re a co-creator of what gets made.

The smartest Hollywood operators are importing that posture. Sony brings the community’s representative in as a producer. Utopia brings the audience in as distribution. Linden Lane brings them in as ongoing creative input through the Labs structure. Brass Knuckle brings them in as capital and as development.

The audience used to be outside the wall. The smart Hollywood plays are now tearing down sections of the wall on purpose.

This rewrites a piece of what the producer job actually is. The old job was to gatekeep on behalf of capital — decide what gets made, who makes it, who sees it, when. As Hollywood imports the creator-economy posture, the gatekeeping function shrinks. You don’t need a $30M P&A budget if the audience funded the production and the distribution is the audience. You don’t need a development executive to validate a script if 2,000 fan investors greenlit it. You don’t need a marketing team to manufacture awareness if the creator-producer’s community is already inside the project.

The studio role doesn’t disappear. It gets smaller and more specialized. Less middleman, more partner. Less gatekeeper, more amplifier. The producer who figures out how to operate inside a creator-economy structure — bringing craft and capital without insisting on the gatekeeping — is the one who keeps working.

2. The Pilot Is Dead. The Pre-Production Is the Product.

YouTube published a Culture and Trends report on independent animation earlier this year, and yes, you have to discount any platform’s report on itself. But there’s one number worth taking seriously: more than half of Gen Z animation fans now watch animatics weekly.

An animatic was always an internal step. A storyboard timed to scratch dialogue, used to vet a pitch before anyone spent real money. It existed inside the studio’s vetting layer — the place where ideas got killed cheaply so the expensive ideas could be greenlit with confidence. The animatic was development infrastructure not a product.

Now it is— Glitch Productions ships them publicly. The Amazing Digital Circus released animatic scenes with green-screen backgrounds specifically so fans would meme them. Vivienne Medrano’s Hazbin Hotel pilot — released as a YouTube video — became the proof of demand that landed the Prime Video series.

What the animation pipeline did first, the rest of the industry is doing now.

Adam Neuhaus, the documentary producer, spent a few weeks getting yelled at on Twitter for telling filmmakers they should build sixty pieces of content around their movies before release. His clarification was sharper than the original take. He wasn’t talking about marketing. He was talking about the production process itself becoming the audience-development engine. Production diaries. Crew portraits. The work of making the work.

Jonah Feingold’s new company Romantical is raising $3M on a thesis that branded short-form content for Hinge, Tinder, and BetterHelp is the proof of concept, the audience build, and the creative R&D for his rom-com features happening simultaneously. The shorts and the films feed each other.

Brian Robbins — who just left the Paramount co-CEO job — raised $100M to develop IP first on YouTube and TikTok and let the data tell him which projects deserve theatrical money.

These look like different stories because they come from different corners of the industry. They’re the same story.

The development funnel has inverted. The old model was: pitch a script, greenlight a pilot, hope it works, scale into series. The cost of failure lived inside the studio — a failed pilot was a $5M loss, a failed greenlight was a bigger one. The infrastructure of development was built around ranking pitches before money got spent.

The new model is: build community in public, prove demand iteratively, scale into long-form once the audience exists. The cost of failure has moved earlier and lower — out of the studio’s balance sheet and into the creator’s daily content. By the time the long-form swing happens, the audience is already there.

Structurally, that means a layer of the studio’s value proposition is being unbundled. The development executive — the person whose job was to read pitches and bet on which ones deserved a pilot — is being replaced by a community whose collective viewing is the bet.

This is the production-side mirror of the rented-vs-owned shift. Studios used to rent out the development pipeline to writers and producers. Now creators are building owned development pipelines that sell long-form swings to studios on better terms. The studio’s role moves from validator to amplifier. From “do you have the script” to “do you have the community.”

For producers, this reorganizes the job. The next generation of showrunners isn’t pitching scripts. They’re shipping animatics and production diaries. Whoever brings craft to that pipeline wins. Whoever insists on the old greenlight model finds themselves rewriting decks for a buyer that no longer needs to read them.

3. Legacy Talent Is Adopting the Creator Job

Phil Rosenthal — the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, in his mid-sixties — just signed a Banijay Americas deal that moves new episodes of Somebody Feed Phil to a dedicated YouTube channel starting in 2027. The eight-season back catalog stays on Netflix. Going forward, YouTube is the primary home, alongside a slate of short-form material built around the show.

The reasons Rosenthal gave matter. He said he always loved that Everybody Loves Raymond was free to watch everywhere, and that the YouTube move is a return to that ethos. Reach, directness, ownership. Global audience without a gatekeeper. More direct engagement with the people who actually watch. Greater control over what gets made.

Sounds like a creator…

This is what’s quietly happening across the talent layer of Hollywood. The job description for “talent” is being rewritten to include the things creators have been doing for a decade.

Mark Wahlberg’s production company Unrealistic Ideas — behind HBO’s Wahl Street and McMillion$ — just launched 4AM Club Challenge, a ten-part YouTube series putting creators through his brutal early-morning workout. The first season includes Druski, Dhar Mann, the Stokes Twins, Airrack, and Ben Azelart. He’s using his own production infrastructure to build a YouTube presence with the audiences he doesn’t yet have.

And Jim Louderback wrote recently about athletes — Faatimah Amen-Ra, Hayden Tyler Ancheta, Diana Flores — building “portable communities” that follow them across teams, leagues, and sports. The career insurance for a modern athlete is owning an audience that travels.

If athletes can carry their audience from team to team, actors and showrunners can carry theirs from project to project. In a world where buyers obsess over built-in IP and de-risked bets, a portable audience is leverage at the table.

This is the talent-layer version of Trends 1 and 2. Studios are bringing the audience inside the production. Development is being rebuilt around audience signal. And now talent itself is treating audience-building as part of the job — a prerequisite for the better deals, not a side activity.

For producers, this changes who you cast, who you sign, who you go into business with. An actor who can deliver 5 million people on opening weekend through their own channels is structurally different from one who needs a $30M P&A campaign to do the same job. The economics flow toward the first one.

The harder version of this question is what happens to the talent that doesn’t make the transition. The actors, writers, and showrunners whose visibility was always mediated by the studio’s marketing apparatus, and who don’t have a public-facing presence beyond press junkets. Phil Rosenthal at 65 figured out the answer is to behave like a creator. Plenty of his peers won’t.

Where the three meet

Read the three together and one through-line shows up.

Hollywood is bringing the audience inside the production. The development pipeline is being rebuilt around community signal. Legacy talent is taking on the creator job to keep working.

Every one of these shifts costs Hollywood the same thing: creative control.

For a century, the studio system has run on a single trade — capital for control. We provide the money, we keep the notes, the greenlight, the final cut, the marketing approvals. That trade is what built the system. It’s also what every legacy operator has refused to let go of.

That model is crumbling fast…

Markiplier released Iron Lung in theaters with no studio and no distributor. Lighthouse Studios is putting real capital behind Cole Bennett’s Lyrical Lemonade with the kind of creative freedom Hollywood would have demanded oversight on. Whalar can finance projects against creator audiences. Brass Knuckle can raise $2M from fans.

That puts a real question in front of every studio executive: when does Hollywood have to give up creative control to survive?

The talent, the IP, and the audiences are migrating toward the people who’ll fund them without insisting on control. So what does Hollywood actually have to offer that creators can’t get elsewhere? Capital and institutional know how for sure but having the knowledge doesn’t mean you have to have the control.

But the producers and executives who thrive in this environment are going to be the ones who make peace with the trade earliest. Less control. More partnership. Fund the work, support it, get out of the way. The job becomes amplification, not validation. The notes become a conversation, not a command. The creative control that legacy Hollywood has guarded for a century gets handed to the filmmakers and storytellers who actually know what they’re making.

That’s a hard transition. It cuts against muscle memory built over generations. It’s also the only one that keeps a seat at the table.

Markiplier going directly to theaters with Iron Lung is a small move in the grand scheme of things. The leading indicator is how soon studios realize the trade has flipped — and that the creative control they’ve held for a century is now the price of staying in the room.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Legacy Expertise in a Creator Ecosystem

Underscore Talent, one of the more prominent creator-focused management companies, has hired Lital Spitzer and formally launched a theatrical division. Spitzer brings serious legacy credentials, with tenures at Miramax, The Weinstein Company, and A+E before spending over a decade at 3 Arts Entertainment representing actors, producers, and filmmakers.

The instinct might be to read this as just another legacy media exec moving over to a creator company to help them institutionalize, or as a creator company trying to diversify, but that’s not quite what’s happening here.

The theatrical division they’re building isn’t being built to operate separately from Underscore’s creator business. It’s being built to work through it, using the company’s ecosystem of creator-led talent to open up opportunities that wouldn’t exist through traditional channels alone. The phrase in the announcement worth holding onto is “use Underscore’s ecosystem of creator-led talent to meaningfully enhance opportunities,” which points toward the ecosystem logic I wrote about a few weeks ago rather than a conventional film and TV play.

This is part of a broader pattern worth tracking. A few months back, Underscore also hired Sachi Ezura, previously VP of Adult Animation at Paramount. Legacy executives are being brought in to build infrastructure around a creator-first business, importing their film & TV expertise but in service of an ecosystem that already has the audience relationships and the cultural fluency.

That’s the bet Underscore is making, and it’s a coherent one.

The Filmmaker's Creator Playbook

Not every filmmaker is going to be represented by a firm like Underscore, with a theatrical division built on top of a creator ecosystem. But the underlying logic doesn’t require institutional backing to put into practice.

Documentary producer Adam Neuhaus made waves last week when he argued that filmmakers should be generating roughly 60 pieces of content beyond the film itself, building their audience from the very beginning of the production process rather than showing up at distribution with nothing but a finished cut. The fact that documentarians routinely make a film, move on to the next project, and bring no audience with them, he said, is wild.

The response from filmmakers was predictable. Sixty pieces of content sounds like a second job on top of an already impossible one. So he clarified, and the clarification is worth reading carefully because it reframes the whole thing.

He’s not talking about marketing. He’s talking about community building. Production diaries, introductions to collaborators, photo portraits, crew skills, inside jokes about the process, etc. Formats that are real, honest, and artful rather than optimized for any particular algorithm. The point isn’t to hack the feed, but to build a world around the work so that when the film arrives, it arrives inside a community rather than in front of strangers.

The podcasting analogy he uses is useful here. Podcasters spend enormous effort crafting full audio episodes and discover that most of their audience finds them through 60-second clips. That’s not what they imagined, but those people are still in the universe, and the next time something comes out, they’re already there.

That’s the mindset shift the creator economy demands of anyone making long-form work, whether they’re a YouTuber building toward a feature or a documentary filmmaker building toward their next project. The audience isn’t something you find at the end. It’s something you build the whole way through.

A lot of companies are starting to formalize that logic, but the logic itself is available to anyone willing to adopt it.

Late Night Finds Its YouTube Home

Good Night with Ben Gleib launches May 28 as the first late-night talk show built exclusively for YouTube, and the timing is not incidental. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is winding down. CBS has already shuttered After Midnight and The Late Late Show. The Tonight Show pulled back to four episodes a week.

The traditional late-night format is contracting in real time, and the economics of expensive linear productions for fragmenting audiences no longer make sense for the networks carrying them.

What Gleib is building looks different by design. The show tapes a day ahead of air, premieres weekly on his existing YouTube channel of 2.9 million subscribers, and features a live studio audience alongside what the team is calling “the first global virtual studio audience” in late night, pulling in real-time reactions from viewers around the world. There’s also a post-show after-party episode each week.

The key here is that the production credibility is real. Stewart Bailey, a four-time Emmy and two-time Peabody winner who showran The Daily Show under Jon Stewart, is showrunning. Keith Harris, the Grammy-winning drummer of the Black Eyed Peas, is musical director. Early guests include Bob Odenkirk, Tiffany Haddish, and Scott Galloway, who is also a backer.

The guest list is also worth noting. Alongside traditional celebrity bookings, the show is deliberately widening the late-night aperture to include creators, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts. That broadening of scope is less a creative choice than a recognition of where cultural conversation actually lives in 2026, which is no longer exclusively in Hollywood.

Now, late night on YouTube isn’t a new idea, but a show of this production ambition launching exclusively on the platform, with legacy television infrastructure behind it, is a new data point. A serious late-night bet on YouTube suggests the format isn’t dying, but moving.

GARDEN VIEW

@eugbrandstratA creator's fame is the least interesting thing about them. Today: how decentralised desire killed Hollywood, and why brands need to stop treating creators like celebrities. -- Follow @eugbrandstrat for more insights on how brands can effectively navigate modern digital spaces.

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There's a stark difference between celebrities and creators, and by now most people in the industry have felt it even if they haven't named it.

Historical fame no longer guarantees engagement.

In this video, brand strategist Eugene Healey breaks down exactly why the most successful celebrities today are the ones who have adopted a creator mindset.

It’s a must watch for anyone in legacy media trying to understand where talent strategy is actually heading.

HARVEST QUOTE

“The holding company structure is the first thing that makes a creator business financeable at an institutional level.”

— Josh Stein, Founder & CEO, Attention Capital

The argument for a creator diversification isn’t news, but Josh Stein’s argument from the lens of financing might be the clearest I’ve seen.

A single creator with a single content operation lives and dies by whether they posted this week. A holding company with multiple businesses underneath it, each with its own revenue stream and platform exposure, looks fundamentally different to institutional capital.

The cash flows are diversified, the credit profile is real, and the business no longer depends entirely on one person's output at any given moment. That's what makes it financeable, which is becoming increasingly important as the space matures.

And it's why creators like Jesser who are building holding companies right now are playing a different game.

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.

Fresh Takes

L.A. Cuts Permit Fees for Certain Projects—Including Microdramas

After mounting backlash from the L.A. county film community, the L.A. Film Office has introduced the “Low Impact Permit Pilot Program,” a scaled-down initiative aimed at smaller productions. Qualifying projects, limited to—30 cast and crew, a maximum of three consecutive shoot days, and restricted to three locations—will see permit fees reduced from $931 to $350, notification fees lowered from $250 to $156 per location, and Los Angeles Fire Department spot check fees waived entirely, with the program launching April 27. While the move offers tangible relief, it’s narrowly targeted at low-budget shoots and has constraints that many microdramas are already surpassing in production value. Whether this initiative will actually begin to unlock more productions is yet to be determined…

Brazilian Media Giant Globo Reimagines Legacy Films for Vertical

At Content Europe, Brazilian media giant Globo unveiled a slate that, for the first time, includes a full package order of microdramas—marking a notable shift for a company long defined by traditional telenovelas. Leveraging its existing IP, Globo is reworking established films and series for vertical consumption, even pulling recognizable talent into these adaptations to anchor audience familiarity. This kind of IP translation isn’t new, it’s already playing out across multiple markets, but its continued expansion signals a broader industry realignment, where legacy libraries are being actively re-engineered for mobile-native storytelling rather than built from scratch.

Ubisoft Monitors Microdrama Market…

Video game giant Ubisoft, already active in expanding its IP into film and television, has begun signaling interest in microdrama, with Taieb Ben Amor, director of production and business affairs for its film and TV division, stating, “we are seriously considering it.” Still, the hesitation is telling: while the format has proven it can scale, he points to a gap in quality that hasn’t yet met the narrative and production standards expected of Ubisoft’s flagship properties, especially as they prepare higher-end adaptations like Assassin’s Creed at Netflix. That said, the door isn’t closed—Ben Amor acknowledges the space’s rapid growth and the potential to translate their IP into short-form storytelling, making it clear Ubisoft is watching closely, waiting for the format to mature before making a definitive move.

Platform Spotlight

ShortMax is pushing beyond the dominant romance-revenge formula by leaning into fantasy, anime-inspired stories, and horror—genres largely absent from microdrama due to cost. To make that viable, it incorporates generative AI into its pipeline, using it to enhance VFX, environments, and stylized sequences that would otherwise be out of reach. The strategy flips the model: instead of avoiding high-concept worlds, it makes them producible at vertical scale. What sets it apart is this blend of genre ambition and tooling. While most platforms optimize for speed and volume, ShortMax is testing whether spectacle can coexist with microdrama economics—positioning it as an early signal of how the format could evolve as production technology advances.

Show Spotlight

In Love With Mr. Mafia (CandyJarTV):

Logline: A disciplined new student’s life is upended when she crosses paths with a dangerously magnetic classmate tied to a powerful mafia family. What begins as rivalry quickly ignites into a charged connection, pulling her into a world of secrets and hidden truths.

Genre: Drama / Romance / Young-Adult

This 41-episode CandyJarTV series positions itself as a hybrid—part mafia drama, part young adult slow-burn romance. It’s unique in this manner, and while the project has all the ingredients of a high-performing vertical; recognizable tropes, built-in tension, and a clear audience hook—its execution diffuses that potential by splitting the tone and underbuilding key emotional beats. Moments of danger, romance, and world-building are introduced but rarely escalated or paid off, leaving the central relationship and stakes feeling unearned. Still, strong casting and flashes of high-stakes storytelling in the final act point to a more focused version of the series that almost works. The takeaway is familiar: in vertical, the concept gets you in—but commitment to tone and structure is what sustains retention.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

The Real Reel, a quality blog that analyzes microdrama content, does an important case study into the use of AI in the vertical landscape, and what it can mean for all media moving forward…

As platforms like ShortMax begin integrating generative AI into their pipelines, they’re not just cutting costs—they’re unlocking genres like fantasy, horror, and mythology that were previously out of reach for microdrama. This shift expands the creative ceiling of the format, but also raises new questions around quality, authorship, and long-term audience trust. The takeaway: AI in vertical isn’t a trend—it’s a structural change already underway.

Read the whole post here.

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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: Russ Tafari

Instagram: 30.2K Followers

Youtube: 287K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 3K Followers

Who Is Russ Tafari?

Russ Tafari makes horror movies you can listen to.

That is his own line, and it is the cleanest description of the format. Tafari is a Las Vegas filmmaker, artist, producer, and horror host building the Russ Tafari Horror Universe across music, shorts, reels, and platform fragments.

The songs are not sitting next to the films. They are inside them. The beat carries the movement. The verses carry the narration. The edit gives the story a body. The VHS texture, deadpan host voice, desert locations, bodies, deals, burials, and late-night-TV framing all belong to the same world.

Too Many Murders plays like a crime scene with a hook. The Burial feels like a desert secret getting dug up one shovel at a time. Vault 13 packages the whole thing like horror programming leaking through an old television. The music gives the pieces rhythm. The film language gives them place.

The Las Vegas setting helps. Tafari is not using the city as a postcard. His Vegas is cheaper, stranger, and lonelier. Desert roads, low light and motel colors. Empty space around bad decisions. It gives the work a recognizable atmosphere without needing to explain much.

The branding is already tight: Filmmaker, artist, horror host. Creator of the Russ Tafari Horror Universe. The same identity keeps showing up across platforms, which matters because the project depends on repetition. The world is not being reinvented every time he posts. It is getting reinforced.

That is what separates the work from normal horrorcore visuals. Tafari can release a song, a short, a character fragment, a fake transmission, a horror-host intro, or a behind-the-scenes clip, and it still feels like part of the same feed from the same universe. The format can move because the world holds.

He has also named the thing early. Most creators wait until the audience gets large enough to justify calling something IP. Tafari is doing it in reverse. The universe is already there. The audience is catching up to the architecture.

That is why he feels worth tracking. Not because horror rap plus short film is a new combination on its own. Because Tafari is treating the combination like a repeatable world, not a one-off aesthetic.

Three Things We Love About Russ Tafari

The music and films are fused: The songs do not feel like soundtrack and the shorts do not feel like promo. They move together.

He understands horror as programming: Vault 13 does not feel like a normal video drop. It feels like something you found on the wrong channel at the wrong hour. That horror-host framing gives the whole universe a broadcast logic.

He is building IP out of atmosphere: The desert, the VHS texture, the deadpan voice, the crime-scene premises, the late-night Vegas feel. None of it is random. Tafari is turning mood into structure.

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Somewhere around 3.5 million years ago, a small but consequential mutation showed up in the human hand. The opposable thumb. Not dramatic. Not a new organ. Not a revolution in the biology of the species. Just a subtle shift in one digit that unlocked tool use, dexterity, and eventually, civilization.

Evolution’s best work rarely looks like a lightning bolt. It looks like a thumb.

I’ve been thinking about Lighthouse Studios the same way. When they announced the partnership between Lyrical Lemonade TV and Lighthouse Studios at SXSW in March, the coverage was dutiful. A new creator studio. A partnership with Cole Bennett. A programmed YouTube network. Filed, noted, moved on.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the structural implications of what they’re actually doing — because underneath the announcement is a model that reorganizes several key assumptions about how creator content gets built, owned, and monetized. It’s not a revolution.

But it might just be an opposable thumb.

So I went deeper. I talked to Akshay Mehta, the CEO of Lighthouse Studios (LHS). I sat with the financial architecture. I kept asking myself: what’s actually different here? And the answer, when it came into focus, surprised me.

BP/AP: The Era That Got It Wrong

The more time I spend watching the creator economy organize itself, the more I find myself dividing its history into two eras. Before the pandemic and after it. BP and AP.

The line isn’t arbitrary. The pandemic didn’t just accelerate digital consumption — it collapsed whatever was left of the argument that traditional media and digital media were separate worlds converging slowly. The convergence isn’t slow. It’s been underway for years, and the pandemic just made the timeline visible. What had looked like two camps occasionally borrowing from each other is turning out to be one ecosystem reorganizing itself in real time.

The BP era had its own attempt at scale. Multi-channel networks — MCNs — were the first serious institutional bet that creator content could be organized into something that looked like a media business. And for a moment, it looked like they might be right. Disney paid half a billion dollars for Maker Studios. DreamWorks bought AwesomenessTV. AT&T assembled a portfolio. The logic was seductive: aggregate enough creator channels, package the reach for advertisers, and you had a new kind of television network.

The fatal flaw wasn’t that MCNs thought too small. It was that they thought too much like the businesses that were buying them. They tried to own everything. They brought brands in before the content knew what it was. They monetized reach before they built anything worth residing in. And when YouTube tightened its monetization policies, when brand safety crises rewired advertiser behavior, when creators figured out they didn’t need a middleman to access their own audiences — the model collapsed. Not slowly. Quickly.

Machinima, once one of YouTube’s most dominant presences with over 12 million subscribers, had its entire back catalog set to private after Warner Bros. shuffled it through a series of corporate reorganizations. AwesomenessTV changed hands three times in five years — DreamWorks, NBCUniversal, Viacom — and eventually became a unit inside Paramount’s studio operations, barely recognizable as the Gen Z creator network it started as. The MCN era ended not with a single collapse but with a slow institutional absorption that rendered most of its original assets unrecognizable.

The lesson, in retrospect, is obvious: you can’t build a durable creator business by extracting value from creators. You have to create it with them.

What’s being built now is something different. Not revolutionary in the way that word gets overused in this industry, but evolutionary in the way that actually matters — someone looked at what didn’t work, understood why, and made different choices.

The Model Nobody Has Actually Built Yet

I’ve written about The Lighthouse campus before, and about the Whalar Group ecosystem that surrounds it. If you’re new here, the short version: Neil Waller and James Street built Whalar as a full-service creator agency, and The Lighthouse — a physical campus for creators in Venice and Brooklyn — is the most visible expression of their thesis that the creator economy needs real infrastructure, not just platform access. LHS is the newest arm of that ecosystem.

LHS is doing something structurally different enough that it deserves its own vocabulary. They call the core unit a YouTube Network Channel, or YNC — a purpose-built digital channel co-owned with an anchor creator, running a full slate of original programming on a scheduled weekly cadence, financed entirely by LHS. The comparison they draw explicitly in their own positioning is to what MCNs were not: co-ownership instead of extraction, production financing instead of DIY, curated programming instead of unstructured uploads.

The flagship YNC is Lyrical Lemonade TV, built in partnership with Cole Bennett. If you don’t know Cole, I’ve written about him before in a quick mention of the LHS announcement — he’s the 29-year-old founder of Lyrical Lemonade who started as a teenage music blogger in Chicago and built one of the most culturally significant platforms in hip-hop. Nearly twenty-five million subscribers. Thirteen billion total views. A festival, Summer Smash, that drew roughly 120,000 people in 2024 and 100,000 in-person attendees in 2025, with an additional 4.8 million live stream impressions. Artists like Drake, Juice WRLD, and Eminem have made Lyrical Lemonade videos. The brand is real, the audience is real, and the cultural authority is earned.

What LLTV is building on top of that foundation is a structured programming slate — building toward fourteen episodes a week across fourteen shows, running 48 weeks a year. The shows are diverse in format: a late-night style talk show, a travel series, a live freestyle performance series, short-form documentary, an internet-native explainer series, a Chicago neighborhood storytelling show. Cole Bennett executive produces and curates all of it, tapping creators who reflect his sensibility and extend the cultural conversation he’s been shaping since he was a teenager.

Neil Waller described it to my Columbia class last year as building “a human-driven algorithm, rather than a computer-driven algorithm.” It captures exactly what the programming logic is trying to do. YouTube’s algorithm decides what gets surfaced based on engagement signals. What LHS is betting is that a curated human sensibility — a tastemaker with genuine cultural authority — can do that job better than the algorithm alone, and that the result is something more durable.

The market positioning is deliberate. In a competitive landscape that ranges from individual niche creators to full streaming platforms, LHS is explicitly targeting the white space of high-volume, diversified networks — a quadrant that, if you look at the competitive map, is mostly empty. MrBeast and Dude Perfect occupy the blockbuster end of single-creator scale. Netflix and Amazon own the low-volume, high-cost premium space. Barstool, Complex, and Sidemen are somewhere in the middle. LHS is building something that doesn’t neatly fit any of those boxes.

The Most Important Decision They’ve Made (That Nobody Reported)

Here’s what I find most interesting about how LHS is actually operating — and it’s the thing the SXSW news cycle missed entirely. They’re not bringing brands in yet.

This is a deliberate strategic choice, and it’s the clearest expression of the philosophy underneath the business model. Akshay Mehta, the CEO of LHS, explained it to me this way:

They’re the financier. Not the brand. Not the advertiser. LHS is putting up its own capital — seeded by investment from the Whalar Group — and building the content before it knows exactly what the commercial returns will look like. The brand deals come later, once the shows have found their voice and their audience. The logic is that consistent, authentic content builds the kind of audience relationship that eventually commands premium brand dollars — but only if you give it time to develop without a sponsor in the room shaping what it is.

This is exactly how a creator builds. You don’t take a sponsorship before you know what your channel is. You post, you iterate, you learn with your audience. You figure out what works before you monetize it. Every creator who has built something durable did this. The ones who took brand money early, before the content had found its voice, usually ended up making content that served the brand more than the audience — and the audience noticed.

LHS is applying that same logic at institutional scale. The difference is that instead of one creator posting videos on their own dime, you have a funded studio deliberately holding off on commercial revenue to let the content breathe.

This connects directly to something I wrote about last week in The Specific is Universal, where Matt Ford, Co-Head of Digital Studio at Sony Pictures, put the shared ownership logic as cleanly as I’ve heard it:

Ford was describing the deal logic between creators and studios, but the principle extends here. LHS isn’t taking from creators — it’s building something bigger with them than either could build alone. The brand delay is the proof of that commitment. You don’t protect a creator’s creative process to extract from them later. You protect it because the thing you’re building together only has value if it’s real.

Akshay told me they’re already seeing validation of this approach. Monthly revenue is increasing — not because of new content, but simply because of consistency. Just showing up on a reliable schedule is building audience behavior.

The thing they’re watching for in the first twelve to eighteen months isn’t profitability. It’s habit formation — getting to two shows a day and being able to commit to that cadence for another year.

There’s also a specific programming methodology behind the scheduling decisions that deserves attention. Akshay described drawing on television programming logic — the kind of grid-based thinking that informed network TV scheduling for decades — combined with more recent research on viewer behavior patterns. Different content formats perform differently at different times of the week. Audiences that come for one type of content on Monday are looking for something different on a Thursday Night. Building habits requires understanding those patterns and programming to them deliberately.

The Ghost of MCNs Past (And Why This Time Is Different)

Every investor who looks at this will think about Maker Studios. Every journalist who covers it will draw the MCN comparison. It’s the obvious question, and it deserves a direct answer.

Akshay’s answer, when I asked him directly:

That’s the philosophical difference. But there’s also a structural one that matters enormously: the ownership model. Where MCNs took revenue shares from creators without giving them any stake in what was being built, LHS is co-owning the YNCs with their anchor creators. Creators receive meaningful participation in the upside — not just a fee for producing content, but actual ownership in the asset being built. Production costs are fully financed by LHS, creators are paid inside the budgets, and the long-term profit structure is shared.

This is a genuinely different contract than what the MCN era offered. But the deeper answer to the MCN comparison is what Akshay calls the second-generation argument. “In 2015, YouTubers were treated as something more akin to an advertising partner rather than the next generation of creative talent,” he told me. “There was a belief that number of views or number of subscribers would naturally convert to success in traditional media.”

Companies like Maker Studios and AwesomenessTV tried to accelerate that crossover — pushing creators toward traditional formats without truly understanding what made them powerful in the first place: the direct, unmediated relationship between a creator and the audience that had chosen them.

The second generation, he argues, has learned from that.

They understand that their power comes from having a genuine audience relationship on the platform — and that trading that away for a development deal or a pilot pickup is a bad trade.

Traditional media has become bloated and slow. YouTube audiences have grown up. The CPM gap between YouTube and connected TV is closing. The conditions that made the first attempt fail are no longer the conditions.

This is the AP era difference. The market has moved. The creators have moved. The capital is starting to move. LHS is betting they’re early enough to build the infrastructure before everyone else figures out the same thing.

The Honest Reckoning

As mesmerized as I am by it, I want to be honest about what makes this model difficult. The financial model is genuinely ambitious. The path to profitability depends on YouTube CPMs continuing to appreciate toward connected TV rates — a reasonable bet given the trajectory, but a bet nonetheless. It depends on brand deals materializing on schedule after the content establishes itself. It depends on anchor creators staying engaged through a recoupment structure that asks them to be patient before they see meaningful upside.

The Lighthouse campus integration is also, by Akshay’s own admission, still early. LLTV is operating primarily out of Chicago — because that’s where Cole Bennett’s world is. The Venice and Brooklyn campuses are part of the long-term architecture, but right now the relationship between the physical infrastructure and the studio arm is more conceptual than operational. The plan to use the campus community as an early screening audience and creative feedback loop is promising, but it’s a plan, not a practice yet.

And there’s the fundamental reality that this model has no direct precedent. They are candid about the risk factors: limited operating history, no audited financials, forward-looking projections without comparable benchmarks. When Akshay talks about what gives him conviction, the answer is telling: “You just have to spend any amount of time with the LLTV team to feel confident.” That’s a belief in people, not a proof of concept. Which is exactly what the early stages of any genuinely new model requires.

The Thumb

The first generation of YouTubers wanted Hollywood to take them seriously. They crossed over, pitched pilots, took development deals, tried to translate platform fame into something the old system would recognize as legitimate. Some succeeded. Most discovered that the thing that made them powerful on YouTube — the direct, unmediated relationship with an audience that had chosen them — was exactly what traditional media asked them to trade away.

The second generation isn’t making that trade. They’re staying on YouTube and building the infrastructure that used to be Hollywood’s exclusive domain — production capital, programming logic, distribution scale, IP ownership — natively inside the creator economy, on their own terms.

That’s what LHS is building. Not a new MCN. Not a cable network dressed up in YouTube clothes. Something that borrows the programming logic of linear television — the scheduling discipline, the habit formation, the weekly cadence — while operating with a completely different ownership philosophy and a completely different relationship to the creators at its center.

Is it proven? No. Does it have a direct precedent? No. But the conditions that made the first attempt fail are genuinely different now. YouTube is the number one platform on connected TVs. The CPM gap is closing. The second generation of creators understands where their power actually comes from. And for the first time, someone is building the institutional infrastructure to support them — not extract from them.

Not a revolution. An evolution. But maybe the right one.

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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.

Fresh Takes

TattleTV reformats Chaplin’s “The Kid” for Vertical

U.K. microdrama platform TattleTV is testing how far legacy cinema can stretch into vertical. Its latest release adapts The Kid by Charlie Chaplin into a mobile-first format—not by cropping, but by generating new image data to fill the frame, aiming to preserve the original composition. The logic is clear: silent cinema, driven by physical performance and visual clarity, translates cleanly to vertical viewing. TattleTV is framing this as a natural bridge between formats, following its earlier adaptation of The Lodger by Alfred Hitchcock. But the real play isn’t preservation, it’s reprocessing. If this works, it opens a pipeline where legacy IP isn’t just remastered—it’s reformatted, extended, and redistributed for a new consumption layer. The question is whether audiences see this as access or interference.

VerzaTV Adjusts Strategy Away from Microdramas 4 Months Post Launch

Verza TV, founded by E! co-founder Alan Mruvka, launched in December as a traditional microdrama platform. Four months later, it’s already pivoting. “Verza 2.0” shifts away from licensed vertical series toward a hybrid model that includes horizontal video and user-generated content. At launch, Verza relied on 80 Singapore-produced microdramas to build its library. Now it’s building a system. By opening to UGC and offering real-time monetization data, the platform is leaning into a feedback loop where content is rapidly tested and optimized. The horizontal addition matters less as a feature than as a signal. The format war is over. The focus now is velocity and iteration. Now, we need to see whether Verza can attract enough creators to make that system stick.

A Quote from Founder Alan Mruvka:

“Verza was built on the idea that the future of entertainment is mobile, immersive, and accessible. By evolving into a creator-driven ecosystem, we’re empowering the next generation of storytellers while maintaining the premium quality audiences expect. We are building the digital theatre for the next generation.”

Blink49 Studios Expands into Microdramas

Canadian indie studio Blink49 Studios is formalizing its move into microdrama. With Canada already functioning as a production hub for the format, the company has brought on Tieren Hawkins as VP of vertical content to build a slate of mobile-first, soap-driven series. Hawkins comes in with direct platform experience, having produced for ReelShort, DramaWave, and ShortMax on Canada’s East Coast. The mandate at Blink49 is straightforward: develop original ultrashort IP and leverage the studio’s relationships with brands, platforms, and emerging apps. This isn’t experimentation, it’s infrastructure. The indie layer is starting to organize around vertical the same way it once did around cable and streaming—the question is how long before this becomes a standard division across every mid-tier studio.

Platform Spotlight

TattleTV is built on reformatting IP, not just producing it. Instead of chasing volume with original vertical series, it leans into diversification; unscripted formats, behind-the-scenes podcasts, and most notably, the vertical reconfiguration of legacy and arthouse titles like The Kid and The Lodger. The strategy treats microdrama less as a standalone format and more as a distribution layer applied across different types of content. That expands what qualifies as “vertical,” while borrowing credibility from established cinema. What makes it distinct is the ecosystem thinking. By pairing reworked IP with supplementary content—interviews, BTS, companion media—TattleTV is mirroring the engagement loops of legacy streamers, where the show is just the entry point.

Show Spotlight

De Repente Casados (ReelShorts / Endemol Shine Brasil):

Logline: After a humiliating betrayal shatters her life, Sabrina enters a high-stakes marriage of convenience with a cold billionaire CEO who needs a wife to secure his empire—forcing two strangers to navigate power, intimacy, and deception as their transactional union threatens to become something real.

Genre: Drama / Romance / Comeback

This 89-episode series is the most recent example of ReelShort’s attempt at global expansion. The IP comes from an established title, Married at First Sight, which garnered 227M views in 2023, but is now reformatted in Portuguese with an updated script and notable actors. Partnering with Endemol Shine Brasil, the vertical capitalizes on all the makings of successful microdrama—quick twists, wide character arcs, and constant conflict. The bet is clear: proven IP plus localized execution can shortcut audience acquisition, but whether that translates into sustained retention, rather than novelty clicks, is where the model will be tested.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Crystal Martinez, a vertical producer and current head of development at MicroCo, heeds an important warning for aspiring creators within the blossoming industry…

As the industry continues to grow, steer clear of creators advertising themselves as “experts” and charging large fees for books, classes, or mentorships—not only because many of them are unproven or scamming, but because the industry is too early for anyone to be an “expert.” Do your research, verify credentials, and prioritize learning from people actively working and delivering results in the space.

Read the whole post here.

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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: Martin Walls

Instagram: 12.3K Followers

Youtube: 871K Subscribers

Who Is Martin Walls?

Martin Walls is a Chilean animator who has spent the last few years building one of the most fully realized horror worlds on YouTube.

The Walten Files began in April 2020 and grew out of an earlier Bon’s Burgers idea shaped by Five Nights at Freddy’s. That origin still matters, but the series stopped feeling like fan-adjacent internet horror a long time ago. What Walls built feels closer to a real story world than a format experiment.

The episodes are assembled from company tapes, training reels, old media, employee footage, and other recovered materials tied to Bunny Smiles Incorporated and Bon’s Burgers. Anthony, the uploader attached to the early descriptions, appears as the person gathering and posting what he can find. The series stays disciplined about what it withholds. It never hurries to explain itself.

Walls is also more restrained than a lot of analog horror creators. The videos are not trying to bury the viewer in disturbing images. They move through corporate language, mascot branding, cheerful presentation, and fragments of buried history. The fear comes from contrast. Bon, Banny, Sha, Boozoo, and the rest of the world arrive through flat promotional material and workplace media, which makes the violence underneath it land harder when it surfaces.

There is plenty of lore, but lore is not really the point. What lasts is the invitation to investigate. Bunny Smiles, the Walten family, Felix Kranken, Rosemary, Sophie, the disappearances, the hidden tapes, the half-explained timelines. The audience is not just following plot. They are assembling a universe.

The fan infrastructure around the project is substantial. There is an active wiki, an established merchandise lane, and enough sustained attention that new community signals still register like events. Makeshift plush drops have already been part of the ecosystem, and additional plush plans have reportedly been held until Episodes 5 and 6 are finished.

The delays matter less than they should because the audience is not simply waiting for the next upload. They are still inside the existing material. That is unusual for YouTube-native horror. Most projects in this lane need constant output to stay alive. The Walten Files has held attention through density, mood, and a world that feels larger than the runtime currently available.

Martin Walls did not just make an analog horror series. He built a horror property with enough narrative depth and fan participation to keep expanding between releases. The uploads are only one layer of it.

That is what stands out. The films, the themes, the company, the feature, the process. None of it feels disconnected. It feels like one body of work being built from multiple directions at once.

Three Things We Love About Martin Walls

He understands how much fear lives in format: The company tapes, promotional reels, and recovered-media structure are not decoration. They are the delivery system.

He built something people investigate, not just watch: The series holds because the audience is doing interpretive work, not passively consuming plot.

He made a small body of work feel much larger than it is: That is difficult on YouTube. The Walten Files pulls it off through density, restraint, and a world that extends beyond the uploads themselves.

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I was on the fence about speaking at StreamTV Europe. The Denver conference is well regarded, and the speakers and moderators are top notch. But Europe is a different animal. The creator economy doesn’t map cleanly onto a continent where a show that dominates in Spain means nothing in Germany, where public broadcasting still holds structural power that has no real American equivalent, and where regulatory frameworks treat content the way other governments treat roads and utilities — as infrastructure too important to leave entirely to the market. Was a thirty-minute panel worth a long transatlantic flight?

But something told me I needed to go.

Turns out the fragmentation and regulation I was worried about wasn’t the story. It was the backdrop. We say about country-specific content that breaks through globally that “the specific is universal.” That was true here too. The actual story was the same one playing out in every media market in the world, just more honestly discussed than I expected: we all know the model has changed. Nobody has fully figured out how to make money from the new one.

Here are the ten things I heard that I can’t stop thinking about. (And if you ever make it to Lisbon, grab a meal at O Magano — thanks for coming with me Tim Shey!)

1. “Fandom does not build itself. It builds around the community that feels ownership.” — Marion Ranchet, Founder, Streaming Made Easy | Session: Who Owns the First Click in the Living Room

This was one of the opening sessions of the conference and it set the frame for a lot that followed. Ranchet was making a specific point about ITV’s Love Island — which succeeds on social not because ITV repurposes clips but because the community around the show feels like it owns the conversation, in between episodes, in between seasons. The fandom isn’t a marketing output. It’s the product. The show is just the thing that feeds it.

I felt this one personally. I’ve watched it happen on shows I’ve produced — superfans building on social, real community forming in real time, and our streaming partners simply not interested in building engagement in the off-season. The show ends, the platform moves on, the community disperses. That frustration was part of the impetus for writing this newsletter in the first place.

When you build for a community that feels ownership, you build something that compounds. When you broadcast at an audience, you rent their attention one episode at a time.

2. “Working with creators — it’s not just a content strategy. It’s an audience acquisition strategy.” — Marion Ranchet | Session: Who Owns the First Click in the Living Room

Same session, one beat later. ITV’s I’m a Celebrity cast “Angryginge” — a creator — and his entire existing audience followed him into the show and carried him to the final. Casting a creator isn’t a social media stunt. It’s a distribution decision. You’re not buying content. You’re buying an audience relationship that already exists and inviting it into your ecosystem.

Legacy media has been treating creator partnerships as marketing tactics. The smarter operators are treating them as audience infrastructure. We wrote recently about Sony Pictures bringing in gaming creator Jacksepticeye as a producer on Bloodborne — a PlayStation horror game with a massive existing fanbase. He speaks for his community. His community is the audience. That’s the distinction. And it matters enormously for how you structure the deal, what you ask the creator to do, and what you measure at the end.

3. “I can buy attention cheaply, but I cannot buy relevance. And not a single boardroom can decide what relevance is. It is the community.” — Tobias Schiwek, CEO, We Are ERA | Session: New Forms of Distribution — Alternative Content

The arms race between platforms has made attention abundant and cheap. What’s scarce is relevance — content that actually matters to a specific community. And relevance can’t be manufactured from the top down. It emerges from communities and gets validated by them.

Schiwek followed this with an analogy that hit home: when electricity replaced steam in factories, the first instinct was to replace the one big steam engine with one big electric engine in the center of the factory. Nothing changed. It took a generation for someone to ask: why not replace the one overpowered engine with many small engines, each with a single purpose, distributed throughout the factory? That’s what’s happening in legacy media right now. Companies are protecting centralized power until the water boils, and by the time they try to distribute it, they’ve lost their bargaining leverage — with YouTube, with Amazon, with talent. You need those small engines running everywhere, powering every show to its community.

4. “The right way to do YouTube is not to worry about YouTube. The right way is to worry about your viewer. YouTube is just a platform to deliver that.” — Pedro Pina, VP YouTube Europe | Session: TF1 and Gaspard G are Transforming Journalism on YouTube

More radical than it sounds. The mistake legacy operators make is asking “how do I make money on this platform?” as the first question. The right first question is: what does my viewer need and how do I deliver it? Revenue follows audience. Legacy media has always made the thing first and then gone looking for the audience. Pina is saying flip it — start with who you’re serving and build toward them. The platform is just the road.

He also pushed back on the generational mythology the industry keeps telling itself. YouTube’s fastest-growing demographic is 55+. Gen Z are the biggest consumers of podcasts and long-form YouTube — in the living room, on the big screen, for hours at a time. The data keeps contradicting what everyone assumes they know. Build your strategy on the mythology and you’ll keep designing for an audience that doesn’t exist the way you think it does.

5. “Each episode is basically a content machine, because we can create dozens and dozens of clips used on YouTube Shorts, of course, but also on TikTok, Instagram Reels, podcast platforms.” — Gaspard Guermonprez, creator / Le Dossier | Session: TF1 and Gaspard G are Transforming Journalism on YouTube

This is the DNA-at-center, surfaces-everywhere model in its most concrete operational form. Le Dossier is a TF1/Gaspard collaboration — a 40-50 minute gamified interview format where political candidates sit with their own archive: old footage, forgotten tweets, past TV appearances. TF1 provides 50 years of archive. Gaspard provides the audience and the voice. No windowing — simultaneous on both channels via YouTube’s co-ownership tool. One piece of journalism produces a 4-hour podcast, a 40-minute YouTube episode, dozens of Shorts, Reels, TikToks, and clips. The IP is the archive plus the format. The surfaces are everything from a long-form sit-down to a 15-second vertical.

This is not a content repurposing strategy. It’s a content architecture strategy. The difference is that repurposing starts with the primary format and cuts it down. The architecture Gaspard is describing starts with the DNA — the format, the tension, the archive — and builds specifically for each surface from the beginning.

6. “Don’t speak about the creator economy. Speak about the economy of creation. We are part of this economy of creation. It’s our DNA. We are producers. We are creators.” — Alexia Laroche Joubert, CEO France, Banijay | Session: The Banijay Blueprint

The best line of the conference. Evan Shapiro said he was going to steal it right there on stage. Laroche Joubert was closing a section on Banijay’s Creator Lab experiment — where they gave five dormant IP formats to mid-level YouTube creators with €50k each to reinvent them. It worked in some ways and failed in others. The €50k was the wrong structure because it funded one-offs, not series. But the insight was more valuable than the content: legacy producers aren’t outside the creator economy looking in. They are the original creator economy. They just forgot it.

The reframe matters. “Creator economy” has been colonized to mean YouTube and TikTok and social-native content. Laroche Joubert is arguing the real question isn’t whether Banijay can enter the creator economy. It’s whether the creator economy will eventually recognize that format IP, production infrastructure, and decades of audience understanding are assets, not liabilities. Everyone who creates is a creator. Content will reach singularity.

At the end of the day, everyone who creates is a creator and content will reach singularity.

7. “Over 60% of our content discovery happens off platform. Our users are engaging with their community on Discord, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and that’s coming to us with a content wish list.” — David Ball, VP Business Development EMEA, Crunchyroll | Session: Content Acquisitions and Distribution

Crunchyroll is the world’s largest anime platform outside Japan — 50,000 pieces of content — and the majority of how its users discover what to watch next happens entirely outside its walls. The platform is the destination. The community is the discovery engine.

The implication is clarifying: if 60% of your discovery is off-platform, your most important investment isn’t your recommendation algorithm. It’s your community infrastructure — the Discord servers, the Reddit presence, the creator relationships, the social content. Those surfaces are doing the work. The platform is just where people go after the community has already sold them.

8. “Mr. Beast has 77 language versions. He has 150 million subscribers in English, with over 350 million subscribers in other languages.” — Fredrik af Malmborg, CEO, Dubhub | Session: The New Content Playbook

MrBeast has built more than twice as large an audience outside his native language as within it. The non-English audience isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the majority of the business.

The proof point Malmborg offered: take a Turkish drama series, dub it into French for $400 per episode, publish it on a dedicated French-language YouTube channel, and after a year you’re generating $2-3k in YouTube revenue per episode. That’s a $2k profit per episode, achieved by opening a surface the original IP never reached. The DNA is Turkish drama. The surface is French YouTube. The economics are simple and replicable. Most legacy IP owners aren’t doing this because they think of their catalog as a rights library to be licensed. That’s a very different mental model — with a very different revenue ceiling — than thinking of it as a multi-surface asset.

9. “If you have 100% of something that lives on social and you can only monetize it socially, that’s great, but there’s a ceiling. If you have 50% of something that could grow bigger and be scaled globally, then that’s arguably better, because you have no ceiling.” — Matt Ford, Co-Head Digital Studio, Sony Pictures TIP | Session: Creators vs. Hollywood

The cleanest articulation of the deal logic with studios I’ve heard. The creator instinct is to own everything. The studio instinct is to acquire everything. Both positions are self-defeating. What Ford is describing is a third model: shared ownership of something that can scale without a ceiling.

The session also produced the most useful research data of the conference, from Hub Entertainment Research: under-25s now see creator content and traditional media as interchangeable. No quality gap. No premium distinction. What they do have is a clear preference for community — content made for people like them, that their friends talk about. That association goes overwhelmingly to creator content, not traditional media. The DNA of legacy IP is still valuable. The cultural authority that used to accompany it is not.

10. “We’re not even doing the basics properly.” — Nick Ruczaj, Sharp | Session: Better Targeting, Less Tracking — Monetising the Big Screen in 2026

Save this one for last because it’s the honest bookend to everything else. While every other session was describing the future — find the audience, build for every surface, let community do the work — Ruczaj was pointing at the floor. The advertising infrastructure to actually make money from that future doesn’t exist yet. You can’t reliably cap how many times someone sees the same ad. You can’t measure audiences consistently across streaming and broadcast. Even the most sophisticated data partnerships cover a fraction of the market. The plumbing isn’t built.

Three days in Lisbon confirmed that everyone in European streaming has intellectually arrived at the new model. The practice — the infrastructure, the measurement, the economics — is still being built. And in that gap is where the companies that move too slowly will lose their bargaining power for good.

So here are my four big conclusions—

The revenue gap is real, and AI is the uncomfortable bridge. Everyone in Lisbon admitted the same thing, some on, some off the record: traditional money is leaving faster than new money is arriving. The distributed model works in theory. The economics don’t close yet. AI — for localization, formatting, catalog monetization — is probably how that gap gets closed. That’s a hard thing to say in a room full of people who could lose their job or cut their workforces considerably due to this. But it’s also true.

There is no playbook. That’s the point. The German soccer league, Bundesliga, built a six-tier distribution stack. TF1 partnered with a 28-year-old YouTuber to unlock a 50-year archive. Crunchyroll let Discord do its discovery work. None of these models are the same. None are fully proven. The companies waiting for someone else to declare victory before they move are going to arrive at the negotiating table with nothing left to offer.

This is moving faster than any of us thought. I didn’t go to Lisbon expecting urgency. I found a room full of people who have already accepted the new model and are now racing to build it before their leverage runs out. Tobias Schiwek’s warning stays with me: the steam engine companies didn’t lose slowly. They just waited too long.

Your IP must travel or it dies. Meet audiences where they are isn’t a cliché — it’s an operational mandate that almost nobody has fully executed. Your IP has a DNA. That DNA has to live on every surface in the language of that surface. A TV show is one expression of something bigger. The question isn’t how do we make a great show. It’s how does this world live on YouTube, on TikTok, in a Discord server, between seasons. Gather them. Get in dialogue. Hold them in. That’s how reach becomes residence. That’s how a show becomes a world.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Animation’s Independent New Wave

YouTube recently published a Culture and Trends report on independent animation, and while any report a platform publishes about itself deserves appropriate skepticism, there are genuine signals worth paying attention to.

The headline finding is one legacy media should sit with: 61% of Gen Z animation fans say they enjoy watching independent YouTube animation as much as, or more than, series from major studios. That’s a generation actively redefining what quality means, on their own terms.

What makes animation interesting from a convergence standpoint is how deliberately its best players are building for community participation from the start. For example, The Amazing Digital Circus released a scene with a green screen background specifically so fans would turn it into memes. They did, helping spread awareness of the show organically before it had any traditional marketing behind it.

Another telling shift in the report is what's happened to animatics. What was traditionally an internal storyboarding step to vet ideas before real production began has become the finished product. Over half of Gen Z animation fans watch them weekly, meaning that independent animators can now test characters and concepts publicly, build audience anticipation, and develop a fanbase before committing to full production. The expensive pilot as a prerequisite for greenlight is no longer the only path.

The report’s closing line is worth taking seriously regardless of the source: the next wave of new IP starts here. Given that legacy studios are already licensing digital-native content and rushing to partner directly with creators, it’s hard to argue with that conclusion, even accounting for who’s making it.

Studios Don’t Have to Just License, Though

The animation report above is a useful map of where independent creators are winning. But the more interesting question for legacy studios is whether they can build original IP on YouTube themselves rather than waiting to license what’s already proven.

The short answer is yes.

A post this week from Oliver Gilpin, someone with 13 years of IP development experience on YouTube lays out the practical reality clearly.

The core lesson is that distribution strategy and content development are no longer separate functions. They have to be designed together from the start, and for studios used to building first and distributing later, that may be a genuine cultural shift.

A few specific things he discusses that are worth internalizing…

• Pacing has to be calibrated for the platform and the specific audience, not for a traditional broadcast rhythm.

• Titles and thumbnails matter enormously and require real strategic thinking, “Episode 3” is not a distribution strategy.

• YouTube’s algorithm rewards repeated viewership, which means a pilot needs to be designed to create a community engagement loop from day one, not just to impress a greenlight committee.

The broader point connects directly to what the independent animators in YouTube’s report are already doing instinctively. Glitch Productions doesn’t drop an episode and hope the algorithm finds it. It treats each release as an event, builds merchandise around it, and designs for fan participation from the start.

That’s not just a creative approach. It’s a distribution strategy embedded in the creative process itself.

When the Creator Is in the Room

Sony Pictures announced this week that it’s developing a Bloodborne animated feature, based on the beloved and notoriously brutal PlayStation 4 horror game. The project is notable on its own, but the detail worth focusing on is who they’ve brought in alongside it: Jacksepticeye, the YouTube gaming creator with a massive following, is joining as a producer.

This is meaningfully different from the standard studio creator marketing playbook, where they finish a project and then brings in a creator to amplify its reach.

Jacksepticeye has been a genuine advocate for Bloodborne’s world for years, and his community knows that. Bringing him into the creative process rather than just for the marketing is a different kind of bet entirely. He’s not being used as a distribution channel. He’s being treated as a creative stakeholder (as well as the 48 million fans who follow him).

The distinction matters because it changes what the audience relationship actually is. When a creator who authentically loves a piece of IP has a hand in shaping its adaptation, the audience that follows that creator doesn’t just hear about the project. They feel some ownership over it. That’s a different kind of anticipation than a sponsored post can generate.

GARDEN VIEW

If you want to see this week's animation conversation made flesh, here's a recent interview with Vivienne Medrano, the animator behind Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, whose YouTube pilot went viral and eventually landed a full series deal on Prime Video.

Her story is the indie animation pipeline in its clearest form.

HARVEST QUOTE

“Will kids born today be the generation that rejects social media?”

— Reed Duchscher, CEO of creator company Night

The fact that this question is being asked by the CEO of one of the most influential creator management companies in the world is what makes it worth sitting with.

This isn't a media critic or a concerned parent. It's someone whose entire business is built on social media's continued relevance, openly wondering whether the next generation might opt out of it entirely.

Food for thought.

A logistical note: Garden Harvest is off next week, I’ll be back the following Friday.

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.

Fresh Takes

GammaTime Options ‘National Enquirer’ Tabloid Archives

GammaTime is betting that microdrama audiences don’t just tolerate sensationalism—they seek it out. They’ve recently announced that they will begin optioning stories from The National Enquirer, leaning into scandal-driven IP by launching The Drew Peterson Story, a true-crime series built on instant notoriety and pre-loaded stakes. But this isn’t about true crime—it’s about format alignment. Microdrama thrives on escalation and extremes, the same mechanics tabloids perfected. The play is clear: can unscripted hybrids match the retention of romance, or is this just the same impulse in a new wrapper?

Holywater Teases Musical Vertical—Starring America’s Next Top Model Alum

Playback, releasing April 17th on Holywater’s MyDrama, stars Sophie Sumner, winner of America’s Next Top Model, and marks one of vertical’s first true musicals. The series follows Maddie Bryce, a struggling songwriter on the verge of discovery, whose rise is tied to a secret she can’t afford to reveal. Watch the trailer here. It’s one of the platform’s biggest swings yet—pairing a new genre with recognizable talent—another signal that the space isn’t just scaling volume, it’s starting to take creative risks that could actually redefine its ceiling…

A Quote from Holywater co-CEO’s Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov:

“Our mission from day one has been to make vertical series mainstream — not by lowering the bar, but by raising it. Playback brings together some of the biggest names in digital and traditional entertainment — and that’s exactly the kind of project this platform was made for.”

GAM and Minivela Launch Spanish-Language Platform—’Pure Flix Familia’

Great American Media is entering the microdrama space with Minivela, a vertical platform targeting Hispanic audiences across the U.S. and LATAM. Its streamer Pure Flix will merge with Minivela’s mobile-first, creator-driven model to launch Pure Flix Familia, a new platform centered on faith and family storytelling. What’s notable isn’t just the niche—it’s the strategy. By pairing Minivela’s production engine with Pure Flix’s audience data, the platform is effectively building a feedback loop between content and viewership, with vertical series in Spanish, English, and Spanglish produced across the U.S. and Latin America. It’s a targeted bet: not chasing scale broadly, but locking in a culturally specific audience with high engagement.

New AMC Show ‘The Audacity’ Premieres in 21-Part Tik Tok Release

The Audacity, a new show from AMC and Succession showrunner Jonathan Glatzer, premiered on Sunday and took a new approach to its marketing—releasing the entire pilot in 21 segments via TikTok. The installments are numbered to guide sequential viewing, with a runtime and structure that mirrors the current microdrama playbook. It’s an early sign that studios aren’t just competing with microdrama—they’re starting to reverse-engineer it, borrowing its format language to repackage even premium, top-tier productions.

Platform Spotlight

Minivela is built on translating infrastructure, not language. Founded by telenovela veterans, it ports decades of Hispanic production pipelines and audience intuition into microdrama, giving it a cultural specificity most competitors lack. Rather than mimic standard romance formulas, it experiments with runtimes—series spanning 10 to 90 minutes—while focusing on younger, Latinx-immigrant stories that feel lived-in.That positions it as a targeted ecosystem, not a volume play. Its recently announced collaboration with Great American Media only accelerates that trajectory, pairing Minivela’s creative engine with established audience data and distribution. While others import the format, Minivela is exporting a culturally rooted version where real leverage is built.

Show Spotlight

The 7-Year-Old Exam Champion (Vigloo):

Logline: In his previous life, he was a world-renowned scientific genius who died of a heart attack, and was reborn as a young student named Zhang Han. Born into poverty with parents who died when he was young, he is determined to change his fate. He starts with the college entrance exam and, as a prodigy, sets out to change the world.

Genre: Drama / Suspense / Comeback

This 54-episode Vigloo original leans on a sharp hook—a reborn genius navigating childhood to escape poverty through academic dominance. But its real distinction is execution. Centering a child protagonist is a structural risk that’s paying off, with the series topping charts on Vigloo and broadening audience appeal beyond typical demos. What allows it to further stand out is craft and focus. Elevated production design and a narrative engine built on exams and social mobility, not romance, signal a push toward genre diversification. And it works. The question is whether it’s replicable or just an outlier…

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Irvin Gelb, an EP for microdrama series’, argues that the microdrama industry just hit its first true AI shock—one that flips the economics overnight rather than gradually.

In summary, AI-generated series are now dramatically cheaper and scaling fast, pulling ad spend and platform focus away from live-action while displacing crews and compressing production timelines. The implication is clear: this isn’t human vs. AI—it’s ownership vs. replaceability. As costs drop and speed increases, the only defensible position is controlling IP, identity, and audience in a system that no longer rewards labor alone.

Read the whole post here.

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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: Bruce Tetsuya

Instagram: 69.4K Followers

Youtube: 16.9K Subscribers

Who Is Bruce Tetsuya?

Bruce Tetsuya makes films about inheritance. Not money. Memory.

His shorts return to the same things again and again: family, grief, lineage, what gets passed down, what gets lost, what survives anyway. That repetition is the shape.

He is a Japanese American filmmaker based in Denver, and the work carries that specificity without forcing it. The films are not interested in announcing themselves. They are interested in holding onto something before it disappears.

He founded House of Kodo with his wife Jade and his best friend Drew. That detail matters. The operation feels small, familial, deliberate. House of Kodo handles commercial work while Tetsuya builds the narrative projects that seem to sit at the center of everything else. The creative life and the practical life are not separated. They are feeding each other.

The short film catalog is already deep. Counter Clockwise, Others Like It Cold, Hunter, Nightjar, Moments Before, In Wake of the Crashing Dawn, Embers, Aria. You can see the body of work taking form in real time. Each project feels like part of the same search.

The short that feels most important right now is Procession. It deals with Japanese American incarceration camps and carries a different kind of weight because of that. It was shot on 16mm, screened on PBS, and played Films of Remembrance in Little Tokyo. The film is not just moving through festivals. It is landing inside the history it is engaging.

The feature debut is coming with The Morning Sea, scheduled for production in summer 2026. That project seems to sit at the center of the next stretch. Around it, there is a larger run of work taking shape too: WITH HEART, PROCESSION, I LOVE YOU AND I’M GOING TO FIX YOU, END OF THINGS. The pace is fast, but it does not feel scattered.

His YouTube channel makes that even clearer. The “Road to My First Feature Film” series documents the build in public. Most filmmakers keep that stretch hidden until there is something finished to unveil. Tetsuya is doing the opposite. He is letting people watch the road before the arrival.

That is what stands out. The films, the themes, the company, the feature, the process. None of it feels disconnected. It feels like one body of work being built from multiple directions at once.

Three Things We Love About Bruce Tetsuya

The work has a real center: These films keep returning to memory, grief, family, and inheritance. Not as branding. As material.

The progression is visible: The catalog already shows growth. You can watch the voice get clearer from project to project.

He is building with intention: The company, the shorts, the feature, the public process. It all points the same way.

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When I started this newsletter 18 months ago, it felt like a white space. Very few people were writing seriously about the convergence of Hollywood and the creator economy — the deal structures, the leverage dynamics, the fundamental question of what each side actually has that the other needs. Now it seems like it’s all anyone talks about.

Which is how I ended up at The Lighthouse in Venice last week, watching The Wrap’s Creators x Hollywood panel on deal structure — a room full of industry people nodding along as a Lionsgate EVP, a partner at 3Arts Entertainment, and Tubi’s VP of Creator Partnerships explained, with apparent ease, why they’ve surrendered the one thing Hollywood never surrenders.

Creative control.

The panel was framed as a conversation about partnerships. But the more interesting conversation happening underneath it was about something harder to name: what Hollywood actually has that creators need, and whether the answer to that question is changing faster than either side wants to admit.

The Label Is the Tell

Brad Haugen, EVP of Digital Strategy at Lionsgate, dropped the most honest line of the afternoon almost as an aside.

“I don’t think the creator economy is actually a real thing,” he said. “I think it’s traditional Hollywood people bucketing a new generation of talent coming up in a new and different way, and they don’t know how to define it, so they just defined it.”

Sit with that for a second. Because if he’s right, it reframes the whole conversation.

The creator economy isn’t a sector. It isn’t a genre. It’s an operating system — open architecture, no fixed gatekeepers, anyone can build anything on it and own what they build. Hollywood is the opposite: a proprietary system with defined slots, where talent has historically plugged into infrastructure it didn’t own and couldn’t modify. You got the deal. You made the thing. The studio kept the IP.

The label “creator economy” is what a proprietary system invents when it encounters an architecture it can’t integrate. You name what you can’t control. And the reason Hollywood spent years struggling to name it is the same reason it’s now struggling to partner with it on equal terms — the OS doesn’t have a slot for the kind of creative ownership that creators have built their entire businesses on.

Why Leverage Flows to the Creator

This is where the creative control question actually starts. Not with culture, not with values, not with Hollywood having a sudden change of heart about sharing power. With architecture.

Creators have leverage right now because Hollywood is trying to run legacy logic on a new operating system. The deals that work — the ones the panel kept returning to — aren’t acts of generosity. They’re what happens when the proprietary system admits it can’t force the native app to rewrite itself.

The audience already lives in the open system. It was built there, it trusts what was built there, and it follows the people who built it. Hollywood needs access to that audience. The creator already has it. That asymmetry is the leverage.

Which is why creative control has become the first negotiating point, not the last. When MrBeast was shopping Beast Games to streamers, Amazon won the deal not on the size of the check but because they offered full creative control. Netflix was reportedly in the bidding and lost. The creator had the audience. The platform that was willing to leave the OS alone got the deal.

But leverage isn’t a business. And this is where the panel got genuinely interesting.

What You’re Actually Trading For

Most coverage of the Hollywood-creator convergence stops at the leverage question. Who has the power? Who’s getting the better deal? That’s the wrong frame. The more useful question is: what are creators trading their leverage for?

Because the answer isn’t the same for everyone. And the three people on that stage were each describing a different version of the trade.

Kudzi Chikumbu, Tubi’s VP of Creator Partnerships, described the lightest version. No notes. No interference. After an exclusivity window, the creator owns the IP and can distribute it elsewhere. “We want to be the exact opposite” of the traditional development process, he said — the one where you make the pitch, wait for meetings, get notes, and end up with something you don’t want to promote.

Tubi can afford to make this offer because their business model doesn’t require owning your show. Tubi is an AVOD platform — advertising video on demand — which means they capture value through ad inventory against engaged audiences, not through IP ownership in perpetuity. They need your audience to show up and watch. They don’t need to own the thing that brought them there. With $1.1 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, 100 million monthly active users, and a recommendation engine built around niche content categories, Tubi has built a business where the creator’s freedom is structurally rational, not just culturally correct.

The example Kudzi kept coming back to is Nobella Noor — a South Asian creator who came to him wanting to make one of the first South Asian home lifestyle shows on a major streaming platform. His answer: do your thing. She built her own production team. He gave no notes. The show comes out in May. She owns it after the window closes. That’s the Tubi deal.

Brad Haugen’s version of the trade is different, and worth taking seriously on its own terms. Lionsgate isn’t leading with freedom — they’re leading with infrastructure. Specifically, the distribution engine.

“The amount of knowledge in the worldwide television distribution department has been really eye-opening to me,” he said. People who can look at a 12-episode show and tell you immediately whether it’s sellable in South Korea, whether it needs 24 episodes for certain markets, what the international appetite looks like before you’ve finished production. That’s not something a creator builds alone. That’s decades of institutional knowledge embedded in a system that moves product around the world.

The Markiplier example he raised captures what the best version of this trade looks like. What Markiplier did with Iron Lung wasn’t just make a movie — he brought his audience into the journey of making it. By the time the film came out, the fans weren’t there for the film. They were there for him. The distribution infrastructure amplifies what a creator has already built. It doesn’t replace it.

Lionsgate is also, notably, trying to learn the OS before asking creators to trust them inside it. They’ve been putting shows on YouTube for free, cutting up The Royals for short-form, experimenting with how to grow audiences on new platforms using content they already own. The bet is that you can’t be a good partner in the open system if you’ve never tried to operate in it yourself.

Dunya McNeily, partner at 3Arts, is solving for the piece that both Tubi and Lionsgate leave out: the financial architecture that makes creative freedom sustainable over time.

Her version of the trade is the Icelandic Water model. Her client Julianne Hough wanted to build an intimate interview show — mornings after Dancing with the Stars, guests from the cast. Dunya went to Hough’s long-term brand partner first, got the budget, structured it with no exclusivity, then sold additional brand partners into the series, keeping the product integration light enough that it was placement, not commercial. The show worked. They’re doing another one.

“Ownership is everything,” she said. “My favorite term in the world is mailbox money, and I exist to create mailbox money for my clients.” That means equity, royalties, brand deals structured around long-term value rather than short-term fees. It means treating every content partnership as a piece of a larger business architecture, not a standalone project.

And it means knowing when to say no. “There are so many opportunities coming to these creators — here’s money, here’s money, here’s an opportunity. But you have to say no, and you have to take a step back and think like a true business person for longevity.”

Need, Want, and Ready — Three Different Conversations

Here’s the distinction the panel kept dancing around without quite landing on: not every creator should be doing this. And the ones who should aren’t all doing it for the same reasons.

Some creators genuinely need what Hollywood has to offer. The thing they want to make requires capital they don’t have, production infrastructure they haven’t built, distribution reach that takes decades to assemble. For them, the trade is real and the terms matter — because they’re not just looking for a step-up, they’re looking for a partner who can actually help them make something they couldn’t make alone.

Some want it without needing it — for the legitimacy signal, the audience expansion, the sense of having crossed over. That’s a legitimate choice, but it’s a different negotiation. The risk is trading creative control for something that doesn’t require it.

And then there’s the third category, which Kudzi named directly and the panel mostly skirted: creators who think they’re ready but aren’t. Not because of talent, but because of community.

His greenlight criteria at Tubi are three things: original creativity, a fandom that matches the platform, and a creator with the passion and capacity to make the jump. The middle one is the filter that most people miss. He’s not looking for follower counts. He’s looking for audiences that travel — communities that will follow a creator from their native platform to a Tubi, a streaming service, a movie theater. “Niche is the core,” he kept saying. What he means is that depth matters more than breadth. A million followers who found you through an algorithm is a different asset than a hundred thousand people who actively seek you out.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately — the question of what makes a community portable, what gives it the structural integrity to travel with a creator into new formats and new platforms. It’s a different question than audience size, and it’s the one that actually determines whether a Hollywood partnership works or fails. I’ll be writing about it directly in a future piece, but it’s worth flagging here: the quality of the community is the variable that most deal conversations don’t price correctly.

What Hollywood Keeps, What It Loses

Let’s bring this back to legacy storytelling for a moment, because there’s a version of this conversation that lets Hollywood off too easy.

Capital has other sources. Brands, private equity, platform licensing deals, direct audience funding — the creator economy has spent a decade building alternative pipelines that didn’t exist before. Institutional knowledge, the kind Brad described in Lionsgate’s distribution department, is real and hard-won. But it also gets hired. People leave studios. Infrastructure gets replicated. The advantages that Hollywood holds today are durable in some places and fragile in others.

What’s already gone — and not coming back — is the leverage to control the creative process. That ship has sailed. The OS doesn’t give it back. And compounded over time, especially in the middle and lower budget tiers of production where the math is tightest, studios will have to give up more of the development and production model not because they want to but because the alternative is losing the talent entirely. The high end, the tentpole, the franchise machine — that may hold its own logic for a while longer. But the middle of the market is where the pressure will be felt first and most permanently.

At the same time, something else is happening that rarely gets named in these conversations. The category of storyteller is dissolving. A generation of creators is coming online who will never call themselves filmmakers or screenwriters or directors. They’ll just be creators. They’ll make a podcast and a YouTube series and a feature film and a live experience and those things will live on whatever platforms make sense at the time. The format won’t define the person. The person will move through formats the way a musician moves through albums — as expressions of the same voice, not as separate careers.

This matters for Hollywood because it changes what the partnership is actually for. If you can’t control the creative process and you can’t own the category, what’s left?

Here’s what I think is left, and I’d argue it’s more valuable than what’s being lost. Think about the great record producers — not the musicians, but the people in the room who hear something the artist can’t hear from inside the song. Rick Rubin. Quincy Jones. Brian Eno. They don’t play the instrument (ok the latter two are/were amazing musicians but go with it). They don’t own the music. But they bring something that elevates the work in ways the artist alone can’t access. FX is the television version of this. Smart executives who seek out singular voices and make them sharper — not by controlling them but by understanding them well enough to push back at exactly the right moment.

That function — the elevation function — doesn’t diminish as creators gain leverage. It grows in value. Precisely because the gatekeeper role is dying, what remains is something rarer and harder to replicate: the experienced collaborator who knows the difference between a note that serves the work and a note that serves the institution.

As a producer, I’ve had my best experiences with exactly those executives. The ones who don’t try to control the work, but who understand it well enough to challenge it. I actively seek them out. And I’d argue every serious creator — whether they come from YouTube or film school or neither — eventually learns to do the same.

Hollywood’s future, at least the part of it worth preserving, probably looks less like a development machine and more like a collection of those people. The question is whether studios can reorganize around that before the creators figure out how to find them directly.

Both Sides of the Trade

The panel ended with the usual optimism. Trust the creator, be a good partner, the audience knows what’s real. All true. But the more useful version of that optimism is specific rather than general — because the trade works differently depending on which side of it you’re on.

For creators: the leverage is real, but it’s only useful if you know what you’re trading for. Capital, infrastructure, distribution reach, and the elevation function are four different things. Not every Hollywood partner offers all four. Not every creator needs all four. The ones who know exactly which bucket they’re in — need, want, or neither — will negotiate the right deal. The ones who don’t will end up with freedom they can’t fully use, or constraints they didn’t have to accept.

For legacy players: the control function is gone, and fighting to preserve it is a losing bet. The studios, platforms, and executives who figure out how to be genuinely useful to creators — not as gatekeepers but as collaborators, not as owners but as infrastructure — will have a role in what gets built next. The ones who don’t will find that capital, knowledge, and distribution are all available elsewhere. What isn’t available elsewhere is the elevation function. That’s the scarce resource. That’s what’s worth building around.

Brad’s throwaway line — that the creator economy is just Hollywood’s label for a new generation of talent it doesn’t know how to categorize — cuts both ways. It’s a warning to legacy players about the cost of misunderstanding what’s actually changed. And it’s a reminder to creators that the label doesn’t matter. The leverage does. And the leverage comes from one place.

An owned audience so specific, so loyal, and so portable that no platform — proprietary or open — can replicate what it means to that community. That’s not a negotiating position. That’s the whole game.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

An Opening for Creators

Rockwater Capital, a specialist in M&A / strategy advisory within the creator economy, published a sharp piece of analysis this week that shows a significant structural opportunity for creators in Hollywood.

The logic is as follows:

If and when the Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery combination closes, the new entity will almost certainly prioritize filling its own platforms, i.e. Paramount+, Max, and PlutoTV, with its own IP before licensing premium titles to competitors. That means less Friends, Game of Thrones, and Criminal Minds type content available to Netflix and Amazon, at any price. The pool of proven third-party library content shrinks, and what remains gets more expensive.

That leaves the streamers with a genuine choice: pay more for less, or redirect that capital toward more cost-efficient programming alternatives.

You guessed it: Creators.

Library content like Harry Potter retains subscribers through comfort and familiarity. Creator content built around talent with established fandoms serves exactly the same retention function, at a fraction of the production or acquisition cost. As proven IP becomes scarcer and more expensive, top-tier creators start to look less like a cultural phenomenon and more like a cost-effective substitute for the kind of content studios used to license.

As we all know, Netflix has already partnered with Ms. Rachel and Mark Rober, licensed YouTube-native children’s IP, and is widely expected to push further into creator-adjacent formats. Disney is piloting AI-enabled user-generated content and vertical video on Disney+.

The argument here is the acceleration toward creator content on major streaming platforms given the necessity aspect that consolidation will create. The question, as they put it, is which platforms move fastest and which creator-side businesses are positioned to capture the deal flow when they do.

To be clear… fewer major studios is not inherently good news for the industry, and we're not making that argument here at all. But understanding what shifts in this new landscape matters regardless of where you stand on it.

What Am I Buying Anyways?

Speaking of deal flow, Sean Atkins, who knows this space better than anyone, posted a timely take on Creator M&A following the TPBN sale to OpenAI.

His core argument is structural. Traditional media M&A is built on a simple premise: buy the asset, optimize it, extract value from it. It works because the asset exists independently of the people who made it. You can acquire a studio, replace the entire team, and the library still has value. The creator economy breaks that model entirely.

When legacy media acquires a creator business, what exactly are they buying? The audience doesn’t belong to a corporation. It belongs to a person. The trust was built through years of that specific person showing up, sharing stuff, and making their audience feel a genuine connection. That’s not transferable in any conventional sense, because the thing you paid for walks out the door every night.

This is why Sean says that creator acquisitions look fundamentally different from traditional media deals. You are not buying an asset. You are partnering with a person. That means long earn-outs, creative control provisions, continued involvement requirements, and incentives built around proving the business can eventually exist without the creator at the center. The whole structure reflects the reality that the value is relational, not purely financial.

If, as discussed above, streamers do accelerate toward creator content and M&A activity in the space picks up, the buyers who understand this distinction will be the ones who actually make the convergence work. The ones who approach creator acquisitions like studio library deals will find out quickly what they actually bought, which is nothing without the person attached to it.

The relationship is not the weakness in these businesses. As Atkins puts it, it’s the moat.

YouTube Enters FAST

As Creators have been inking FAST channel deals with Roku, Samsung, and Tubi, YouTube has been watching that licensing activity happen largely outside its own ecosystem. That just changed with the launch of “Stations”, YouTube’s own version of 24/7 ad-supported linear streams built directly into the platform.

The feature is currently being tested with music artists (Bruno Mars among the first) before opening up to all creators.

The strategic intent is straightforward. Every time a creator takes their catalog elsewhere, YouTube loses both the ad revenue and the viewing time. Stations is YouTube’s answer to that, giving creators a reason to keep their linear ambitions inside the platform rather than licensing out to competitors.

What makes this worth tracking is how it sits alongside everything else YouTube has been building toward, the living room push, the TV-first viewing behavior, etc. A creator with a loyal audience can now effectively run their own channel on the world’s largest streaming platform without leaving. That’s a genuinely different proposition.

The competition within FAST platforms for creator catalog content is going to be one of the more interesting distribution battles to watch.

GARDEN VIEW

AnimationEpic just celebrated 15 years of its YouTube series Inanimate Insanity with a theatrical event across 40 Regal Cinemas, debuting new episodes to fans nationwide.

It's a clean example of something we keep seeing: digital-native creators building the kind of devoted audiences that translate directly into real-world experiences. And yes, this includes theatrical.

As the monetization pyramid we analyzed a few weeks ago made it clear, the money isn't in the feed. It's in what the feed makes people care enough to show up for.

HARVEST QUOTE

“I’m bored listening to people who talk about celebrating movies when they do little about saving them.”

— Tom Rothman, Chairman & CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group

No explanation needed for this one. We’ve all had those conversations. What's actually required isn't more celebration of the form, it's a genuine willingness to explore what saving it looks like in this new media landscape.

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.

Fresh Takes

‘Forensic Files’ Sees Vertical Re-Release on GammaTime

Select episodes of TruTV’s Forensic Files are being reformatted for vertical viewing, signaling another push to repurpose legacy IP for mobile-native audiences. Content Partners LLC has licensed a 15-episode slate to GammaTime, where each case will be retooled for vertical pacing and retention while maintaining the show’s forensic-driven core. What stands out isn’t just the format shift, but the source: a once-mainstream, now dormant cable staple being reintroduced through a new distribution logic. If vertical can reactivate true crime catalogs, it begs a larger question—what other forgotten IP is primed for reinvention?

A Quote from GammaTime founder and CEO Bill Block:

“Forensic Files is the gold standard in true crime. Each episode’s tightly structured storytelling and high-impact reveals make them perfectly suited for GammaTime vertical viewing — delivering complete, gripping true crime stories in the mobile-first format.”

Netflix Shuts Down Vertical Rumors…For Now

Netflix is testing short-form in Latin America—but drawing a clear line on format. Despite ongoing experiments and signals from executives, Francisco “Paco” Ramos Netflix’s VP of LATAM Content put the vertical rumors to rest. The company’s first regional short series, Carísima, will remain horizontal, not vertical. That puts it at odds with competitors like ViX and Disney+, which are already moving into vertical storytelling. The takeaway is strategic: Netflix is willing to test duration, but not interface. For now, it’s betting that shortening content can capture new viewing behaviors without abandoning the cinematic grammar that defines its brand. But how long that distinction holds if vertical continues to prove itself remains the question.

FlareFlow Casts Netflix Star for New Microdrama Series

Park Min-Kyu, the breakout star from Netflix’s Single’s Inferno, is making his acting debut in One Year Love, a FlareFlow microdrama launching April 9 on COL Group’s vertical platform. The series centers on a marriage-of-convenience between a Korean expat and a Singaporean workaholic, where a fabricated relationship begins to turn real—until the return of a former partner destabilizes the arrangement. This follows a growing pattern: vertical platforms actively pulling talent from legacy and streaming ecosystems, recently including Taye Diggs, and repositioning them within a faster, lower-friction production model. Microdrama isn’t just a new format, it’s becoming a strategic reset point for actors at different stages of their careers—whether breaking in, crossing over, or recalibrating relevance.

U.K. Microdrama Studio ‘Onset Octopus’ Introduces New Business Model…

UK microdrama outfit Onset Octopus claims to be the first British producer to independently finance and produce a vertical series for international distribution. Founder Ben Pengilly is backing Cowboy After Dark end-to-end, with Dan Lowenstein directing, and a model that includes product placement alongside a key shift: profit participation for the director, echoing indie film structures over typical work-for-hire vertical deals. Microdrama is beginning to absorb—and rework—the deal logic of legacy media, potentially shifting leverage toward creatives and opening the door to a more independent production ecosystem within the format.

Platform Spotlight

BulletShorts, one of India’s top performers, is intriguing due to how it sits on top of existing behaviors rather than trying to create new ones: India’s decades-long habit of daily serialized viewing gives it a built-in advantage, allowing the platform to compress audience engagement. And instead of being hindered by linguistic fragmentation, BulletShorts can leverage India’s multi-language ecosystem as a replication engine, adapting and scaling stories across regions with minimal reinvention. The underlying question is whether this combination—habit, cost efficiency, and modular storytelling—positions it not just as a domestic player, but as a future exporter of microdrama formats.

Show Spotlight

Life Is Not a Game (CandyJar TV):

Logline: A shy teen gamer has secretly posed as a boy online for years, forming a deep bond with her teammate Jupiter, who turns out to be TJ, the popular jock she secretly likes at school. When their esports team earns a shot at a live tournament, her hidden identity unravels, putting her friendships, her team, and her first love at risk.

Genre: Romance / Action / Teen

This 43-episode CandyJarTV series shows how the format is starting to lean on pre-sold IP rather than pure concept velocity. Adapted from a best-selling teen novel, it brings an existing audience and narrative spine into a space typically built on speed and iteration. Instead of engineering hooks from scratch, it compresses established arcs into cliff-heavy episodes optimized for retention. What makes it work is translation, not reinvention. It shows how vertical platforms are beginning to acquire and repackage proven material. The open question is whether this becomes a pipeline for youth IP to find new life—or flattens what made it resonate.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Jen Cooper, a microdrama expert and founder of the ‘Vertical Drama Love Awards’, raises an essential point to the safety and continued growth of the medium—are the dynamics of viewing and marketing leading to the creation of more toxic or extreme subject-matter?

To summarize, Cooper says that microdramas are being optimized for virality, not storytelling. So when algorithms reward shock, sex, and violence—especially in the promotional clips that go viral—it pushes the format into a feedback loop where increasingly extreme content outperforms nuance, risking long-term audience fatigue and a race to the bottom.

Read the whole post here.

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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: The Jones Brothers

Instagram: 823K Followers

Tik Tok: 1.5 Million Followers

Youtube: 1.9 Million Subscribers

Who Are The Jones Brothers?

Darius and Dominic Jones are brothers from Minnesota making sketch comedy rooted in sports, Black pop culture, and the television shows that shaped them.

Most people probably know them from the football sketches first. The early work is built around NFL archetypes, athlete ego, game-day behavior, and the strange internal logic of sports culture. The comedy lands because it does not feel generic. It feels like it comes from people who actually know that world from the inside. Both brothers played college football, and the sketches carry that kind of specificity.

But the football stuff is not the whole story. It is the audience engine.

The more interesting part is what they have built on top of it. Their YouTube work around Dae Dae and the TV Universe is where the larger ambition starts to show. The premise is pure internet logic: a character realizes life does not work like television and starts spiraling through different fictional worlds. Dora the Explorer, Star Wars, Phineas and Ferb, Pokémon. But what matters is not just the premise. It is that the brothers used it as a recurring narrative object instead of a one-off bit. They stretched the idea across episodes, then pushed it into a full movie.

That is the part worth paying attention to. They are using the tools of the creator economy in a smart way. The shorts keep the audience warm. The channel gives them direct distribution. The characters and worlds create repeatability. Then when they want to make something longer, they do not need to wait for permission. They can just make it and put it in front of the audience they already own.

That makes Adventures of the TV Universe! more important than it might look at first glance. It is not just a long video. It is proof that the brothers are treating YouTube like a place to develop movie-scale storytelling, not just a place to post sketches. A lot of creators say they want to make films. The Jones Brothers are already using creator infrastructure to practice the form.

Their Instagram bio makes the whole thing unusually clear: “Follow us on our journey to make our first feature film”. Usually that kind of line reads like aspiration. Here it reads more like an operating plan. The short-form comedy builds the reach. The longer YouTube narrative work builds the reps. One feeds the other.

That is what makes them worth tracking. Not just that they are funny. Not just that they have scale. It is that they seem to understand exactly what this phase is for.

Three Things We Love About The Jones Brothers

They are using short-form as infrastructure: The sketches are not the end product. They are the repeatable format that keeps attention flowing while the brothers build toward larger narrative work.

They are treating YouTube like a film lab: Dae Dae and the TV Universe gets more interesting once you see it as a narrative prototype that eventually turns into a full movie. That is a much smarter use of platform than just feeding the clip cycle.

The path is already visible: The bio says feature film. The output shows longer-form ambition. The audience is already there. Nothing about the trajectory feels vague.

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