FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Audience Gave the Greenlight

A horror anthology series called Welcome to Exotic Foods is in production, and the way it got made is pretty interesting.

As Jeff Clanagan explains it, Producer Malik Davis and the team at Upscale Productions spent months building the project the right way around: story first, then the workflow. The series uses a hybrid production model where real actors and live direction sit at the center, with AI constructing the environments around them.

The distribution and marketing side came next, and the first move was a test. A hundred Gen Z viewers across five markets watched the trailer and pilot episode and were asked whether it was worth making. The response came back strong. That was the greenlight for the full season.

Not a studio executive’s instinct. The actual audience.

The traditional model develops for executives and meets the audience at the end. This model puts the audience in the room before the full season goes into production.

For independent filmmakers specifically, the implications are significant. one of the barriers that has always constrained independent work is path to audience. Audience testing before full development addresses this. Creators working this way are not waiting on permission, but rather arriving at development conversations with market validation in hand.

The series is still in production, with distribution details to come. But the process is the point.

Producers Are the Missing Piece

Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, reflected on the time he left the C-suite at MTV, Discovery, and Bertelsmann to go work for a YouTuber.

People thought he had lost his mind.

AdWeek recently published a piece called Creators Are the New Media Moguls, and Atkins is quoted alongside the CEOs of MrBeast, Babish Media, and JesserCo. His argument is not that the creator economy is overhyped. It is that most people are looking at the wrong part of it.

The headline is easy to read. MrBeast at 500 million subscribers, $21 billion in brand spend projected by 2026, CAA and TPG launching a $250 million fund for creator businesses, YouTube directors grossing hundreds of millions at the box office on shoestring budgets.

What his piece gets at, though, and what Atkins thinks most people skip past, is that the hardest part of turning a creator into a company is operationalizing and building governance. Getting the books clean enough that institutional capital can actually come in. Building the kind of internal structure that survives a platform shift or a deal falling through. None of that is glamorous, and none of it gets written about much. But it is where creator businesses actually succeed or stall.

That is why legacy media experience transfers into this space in ways that are genuinely useful, even if the day-to-day playbook does not look the same. Years of building businesses at scale, managing institutional relationships, and understanding what financial health actually looks like from the inside give you an advantage.

No single business line at Dhar Mann Studios accounts for more than 40% of revenue. That is not an accident. When Atkins builds around a creator, key-man risk is the thing that keeps institutional partners up at night. The answer is building a business diversified enough that no single algorithm change, no single platform shift, and no single deal collapsing can break the whole thing.

The creator economy has plenty of hype. What it needs more of is operators willing to do the less exciting work that makes the exciting stuff last.

Brands Are Devouring Hollywood

The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece this week on something we’ve talked about before, which is the line between advertising and entertainment being essentially dissolved.

The story starts with a meeting between Brian Grazer and GE’s CEO a decade ago. GE wanted Imagine Entertainment to make TV spots. Grazer passed. But when the conversation turned to an anthology series inspired by Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, Grazer was interested. The result was Breakthrough on Nat Geo, with GE as a producing partner. Not an ad. An entertainment program that happened to reflect well on the brand. That project seeded Imagine Brands, which has since worked with Nike, Ford, and Coca-Cola, and is currently developing something with SpaceX.

In the early days of television, brands did not just sponsor shows. They owned them. The Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Over the following decades, advertising became something Hollywood talent kept at arm’s length, with the occasional foreign market exception for a check too large to turn down. Now the brands are back, and they are coming with genuine creative ambition and A-list relationships.

What has changed is partly financial and partly cultural. Studios are squeezed. Brands are not. Companies like General Mills and Gap are sitting on marketing budgets that dwarf what many independent productions can raise, and they are increasingly willing to spend those budgets on real entertainment rather than traditional spots. The talent, for their part, has started to recalibrate what participation actually means when the creative quality is there.

Will branded entertainment leave its place as a “lesser version” of the real thing given the roster of talent and studios now involved in this space?

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"Hollywood was never going to greenlight Technology Connections. They were never going to feature a guy getting a million views for taking apart toasters. That wasn't going to happen on HGTV."

— Creator Hank Green

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Peacock x YouTube Bundle

In what some are calling a landmark deal, YouTube has agreed to include Peacock in its premium subscription tier.

There’s a few ways to look at this.

Doug Shapiro frames the deal primarily as a bet on advertising for NBCU. Peacock currently pulls in around $8 a month from subscription fees and $5 from ad revenue per user. Taking on the cannibalization risk to subscription income only makes sense if you believe advertising, along with lower marketing costs and reduced churn, can more than fill that gap.

But from the YouTube side, Samir Chaudry (from Colin & Samir), argues that although YouTube has over 125 million Music and Premium subscribers, it has almost nothing in the way of original programming sitting behind that paywall.

Samir’s take goes as follows:

Last quarter, Google’s subscriptions revenue grew 15% while YouTube ad revenue grew 13%, meaning subscriptions are now outpacing ads, and subscriptions only hold if you give people a reason to stick around.

Netflix has spent the past year signing YouTube talent. YouTube is not going to outbid Netflix for those creators. As Samir says, it does not need to.

What it can offer instead that Netflix cannot is a subscription-funded tier on the platform where a creator’s audience already lives. The path back to original programming is not rebuilding YouTube Originals as some have proposed, but rather financing arrangements with partners like NBCU, where creator-led shows can sit behind the Premium paywall without YouTube having to take on the studio risk or the branding.

Samir’s bet is that YouTube eventually consolidates into a single app covering live TV, a Premium tier with exclusive and licensed programming, and the classic ad-supported experience everyone currently has. One ecosystem, three tiers, the whole consumer in one place.

Instagram’s Scripted TV Boom

It seems that the new indie pathway to finding audience first and nailing that streamer deal is to go through IG first.

Natalie Jarvey recently posted a great story about the Instagram TV boom.

The example she highlights is pretty great:

Aaron Karo and Michael Doneger had multiple projects stuck in TV development, until they decided to stop waiting. Their new show idea was a buddy comedy about a lonely guy who builds a robot best friend, and rather than taking Friend Material around Hollywood, they made it themselves. With a thousand dollars, a camera Doneger already owned, and a few friends willing to help. Twelve episodes, posted straight to Instagram.

Less than three months later, the show has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times, and brands have already reached out about backing a second season. The goal is still to adapt the three-minute episodes into a half-hour series for a streamer or network, but the point is one we’ve talked about for a while here: that they no longer need permission from an executive to prove the concept works. As Karo puts it, when they sit down with producers now, they can show exactly how many people have already watched.

Natalie explores if this is becoming a pattern. She spoke to writer-producer Jon Stahl, who has been tracking the growth of vertically-shot scripted comedies and recently counted more than two dozen, with the number still climbing. Brooklyn Coffee Shop, the epitome of IG TV, has been running for three years and built a real audience around its workplace humor.

There’s more she brings up.

But the lesson is that these shows occupy their own corner, distinct from microdramas, even though they share the vertical format. They are closer in spirit to indie film than to the platform-produced, algorithm-dictated micro-series model.

As legacy media continues to de-risk, it’ll be interesting to see whether shows emanating from Instagram rather than YouTube (like the recent horror hits) will take off.

HBO Goes… Vertical?

HBO just announced HBO Max Shorts, a feature that drops users into a vertical, scrollable feed of clips and scenes pulled from the existing HBO Max library. It’s designed to help people find something to watch rather than spend ten minutes staring at the homepage.

Users who find something they like can then tap through to the full show or film, add it to their list, or simply keep scrolling.

Now, this is not original content (at least not yet?). These clips are existing programming reformatted into vertical clips, processed through an in-house AI tool that uses scene-level metadata to identify high-impact moments, with human editors involved in the final selection.

Netflix is doing something similar with its own short-form clips feature.

The question here is whether this is simply surface-level adapting that ultimately doesn’t move the needle in the great convergence.

Sure, this might be a better way to figure out what you want to watch, but wouldn’t this also be a better way to figure out what HBO wants to make?

Commissioning lower-cost new content for this format and analyzing data to see what works to then scale it up to full TV shows seems like sensible logic. But perhaps trying to compete with TikTok on its own terms is not worth the fight.

Either way, moves like this are worth keeping an eye on.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"If I read or hear one more report about how “Backrooms” and “Obsession” have changed Hollywood forever, or how YouTube is the new New Hollywood (or the new Sundance), I’m going to gag."

— Film programmer and journalist Anthony Kaufman

Love grounding takes like these. It’s worth reading Anthony’s full argument, which includes sobering stats such as the discovery rate on YouTube being 0.000005%.

His full post here.

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Before we start, an announcement for our LA-based subscribers. ​Ben Odell (CEO, 3Pas Studios) and Akshay Mehta (CEO, Lighthouse Studios) will be in conversation on building at the collision of legacy Hollywood and the creator economy this coming Tuesday, July 28 at 5pm. The event will take place at The Lighthouse Campus. Make sure to sign up here.

FRESH CLIPPINGS

Hollywood’s New Role in Culture

Reid Litman, the Global Director & Lead on Ogilvy Pulse, and Warner Bailey, the Founder and Host of Assistants vs. Agents, recently wrote a great piece together on bridging the gap between Hollywood and creators. Most importantly, they did it with a genuine focus on finding where the opportunities lie for the next generation.

It starts with data: Gen Z now makes up about 40% of moviegoers, up from 34% in 2019. They’re the largest audience segment, with attendance among the group up significantly over the last year. However, this is not really growth, but a shift in share of what’s becoming a smaller market.

In this environment, where one demographic has such an outsized impact on the success of a title, how do you operate?

Reid and Warner concentrate on discovery. 63% of Gen Z now discovers long-form content through social clips before engaging with the actual movie or show. As they explain, the clip is the new trailer, review, and often the recommendation, all in one.

Hence, the new role of Hollywood.

Since legacy media can’t create cultural relevance any longer, i.e. young audiences don’t look towards studios to tell them what matters, the job shifts from creating the cultural capital to building alongside it.

They go on: Gen Z assigns the meaning through clips, commentary, edits, memes, and shared language. As we know, all of that technically happens outside of the traditional system.

The role then becomes “recognizing that momentum early and building with it instead of trying to manufacture it.”

Ok. But what does that look like in practice? Warner and Reid have some examples:

Bringing creators into campaigns as partners, hiring fan editors, and building alongside communities rather than marketing to them.

In other words, the people who are best suited to create this cultural capital are not executives, but the fans who are participating in it already.

They leave us with some advice:

• Prioritize participation over passive viewing

• Build worlds audiences can help shape long before release

• Invest in fan communities as creative partners, not just marketing channels

• Design every release to feel like a moment worth leaving the house for

Yes, this requires a different way of thinking. But building for convergence is a better bet than fighting over audiences.

Case In Point

Something happened recently related to Backrooms which is an example that illustrates this new reality. And no, this isn’t another post about why the movie succeeded. Here, I want to focus specifically on the nature of the IP itself.

In short: nobody owns it.

If you’re like me and work in legacy media, you’ve probably optioned material. For those who are less familiar, those deals, in simple form, are you as a producer exclusively purchasing the option to produce the material from a writer, etc. And in that same deal, there’s a determined purchase price (typically a range based on budget) which the buyer will pay the writer for the rights to the material.

In even simpler terms, a writer creates something. A studio buys it off them. And then the studio charges an audience for access to the thing.

In certain cases, this can work similarly with creators, but whom do you buy Backrooms from? The audience itself?

This story is incredible: A Reddit user posted that someone had pulled their Backrooms-inspired artwork after a complaint filed on behalf of A24 Films LLC. Kane Parsons, the director himself, saw the thread and commented that he was looking into it and that it should not be happening (imagine that!). By Friday, A24 had issued a public statement, sharing on the official Backrooms X account that online creators "have every right to tell their own version of the story."

The kicker: “A24 clarified that it claims no ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post that started it all, or the community works built around it since.”

Going back to what Reid and Warner wrote about, the new Hollywood studio has to build alongside the fans, not cut them out. A24 could still do movie after movie on Backrooms, and fans would 100% go see them. But the nature of the partnership is collaboration, not buying the creators out.

Once again, this doesn’t mean it’s over for studios. It just means their role is a bit different than before.

Is This an Opportunity for Producers?

Yes.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the new producer class emanating from the creator economy. Today, it feels as relevant as ever.

I was reminded of it because this week, Colin McRae, the Director of Content at Viral Nation and Founder of CMAC Media, published a really interesting post about what the creator economy is missing.

And it’s obviously not creators. It’s builders. The producers and operators who will help turn creators into the next generation of entertainment companies.

Colin explains that the industry doesn't need producers in the traditional sense, but rather producers who think differently, simply because the job is changing.

Before, it felt like you could make a great piece of content and that was that. But, as he explains, it’s no longer enough. Now, you have to think about what it can become.

The producers who thrive will know how to build an audience around the work, grow the IP beyond a single release, and help turn stories into full blown businesses.

At the end of the day, there will be more and more creators, increased platform competition, and money flowing into entertainment. And in that environment, the people who know how to help creators build something bigger than just content are then ones who will win.

GARDEN VIEW

Unusual, but decided to repost last week’s video in case you missed it because it perfectly complements the Backrooms story above.

HARVEST QUOTE

"While it is fun to pit companies against one another — I am guilty of this as anyone — Netflix and YouTube can thrive operating in their respective lanes"

— Bloomberg entertainment journalist Lucas Shaw on the increasingly talked about Netflix vs. YouTube rivalry

Who would have thought?

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Desperate Race for Creator IP

The hunt for the next Backrooms or Obsession is underway, almost to a comical point. Though the people who have been watching this space for years are suddenly finding themselves with a lot of leverage they did not have six months ago.

Multiple producers and creators held off on taking their projects to market until after Backrooms hit theaters in May, sensing that studio executives were about to develop a powerful appetite for internet-derived IP. The instinct proved correct. Projects that had been sitting in development conversations suddenly attracted bidding wars within days of the box office results coming in.

Internet horror, whether found-footage YouTube series, viral creepypastas, or fan-built fictional universes, has been generating massive audiences for years with essentially no financial return for the people who made it. Backrooms and Obsession demonstrating to studios that the audience was already there and willing to show up in theaters effectively changed the negotiating position of everyone sitting on similar IP overnight.

The ownership questions the piece raises but does not fully resolve are going to become increasingly important as this rush accelerates. It talks about the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction collective where hundreds of authors have spent more than a decade building an interconnected universe of supernatural horror under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it is now reportedly being targeted for adaptation. Creative Commons licensing, which requires derivative works to carry the same open license, is not a framework Hollywood’s IP-hoarding infrastructure was designed to work with. How those contracts get structured, and whether the original creators of these collaborative universes retain anything meaningful when the machine comes for their work, is a question the industry will have to answer.

Now that Hollywood has arrived to monetize Creator IP, the question of who benefits, and on what terms, will be a central point on the convergence timeline.

The Deals

Trevor Henderson, the creature designer whose viral internet creations have now accumulated billions of views, landed two major studio acquisitions in the span of a week. Warner Bros. won a five-studio bidding war for Siren Head, with Brian Duffield directing and Zach Cregger co-writing. Duffield and Cregger, mind you, are two of the hotter creative forces working in Hollywood horror right now, which tells you how seriously WB is treating the IP.

Then, before that deal had even settled, Sony’s TriStar moved pre-emptively to acquire Cartoon Cat, Henderson’s other viral creature, before anyone else could bid. Henderson had made essentially nothing from either character for years despite their ubiquity across YouTube, games, and fan communities. Two weeks later, he is a millionaire with two studio deals and his original rights largely intact on Cartoon Cat.

The Mandela Catalogue went even bigger. Alex Kister’s analog horror YouTube series, which has accumulated over 100 million views across its official episodes alone, sold following an 11-studio bidding war to United Artists, Amblin Entertainment, and Amazon MGM Studios. Steven Spielberg is producing. Kister, who is 22, will direct the feature from a screenplay he adapted himself.

What these three deals have in common is that none of these properties were discovered by Hollywood. They were built by creators over years with audiences that chose to show up without any marketing budget or institutional support behind them.

YouTube Formalizes the TV Format

Elsewhere, YouTube announced that creators can now organize their video playlists into shows and seasons, complete with episodes, consistent branding, and series-level metadata. The feature lets creators either restructure existing playlists or build new shows from scratch through YouTube Studio.

The platform’s own definition of a show is interesting: “a collection of high-quality episodes with a clear connection across them, consistent hosts where possible, a uniform look and thumbnail style, and higher production quality for both video and audio.”

Sounds a lot like the language of a television network describing programming standards and not very much like a social media platform describing user-generated content. After all, they’re winning Emmys now.

This is a pretty meaningful step in the continuation of YouTube’s push to the living room. Giving creators the tools to present their work as a “show” rather than a “playlist” (words matter) is how you get audiences to change their perspective on what the platform is.

GARDEN VIEW

A little more on internet IP. While studios chase creator horror and creature lore, Italian Brainrot is getting its moment. This video captures a fascinating battle playing out in real time over brainrot internet IP.

HARVEST QUOTE

"Netflix is never going to beat YouTube at its own game, no matter how many food influencers or quack psychologists it signs up for shows."

— Entertainment journalist Matt Belloni on Netflix’s recent short-form video ambitions

I wrote about this topic last week, and the conversation has only gotten louder since. Simon Owens recently wrote about the dilution of the Netflix brand, and the argument gaining traction among analysts is a simple one: better, more premium, and more curated is the winning position for Netflix, both with advertisers and on Wall Street, while also delivering the most attentive audience in subscription streaming.

Trying to out-YouTube YouTube seems like a lost cause for legacy media.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Netflix Wants You to Stay Longer

Netflix announced this week that it is bringing short-form video from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst, People, Tastemade, and a slate of Penske Media brands including THR, Variety, Rolling Stone, and IndieWire onto its platform. The content ranges from three-minute shorts to 20-minute episodes covering travel, cooking, fashion, celebrity profiles, and home and gardening, discoverable directly from the Netflix homepage.

The initial read from most people is that Netflix is trying to become more like YouTube. Julia Alexander’s take in yeterday’s open conversation with Matt Belloni cuts closer to what is actually happening, and it is worth going through carefully.

Her argument is that Netflix does not actually need to become YouTube, and there is actually no reason it should try. If YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels on TV end up looking mostly the same with a similar batch of non-exclusive creators, neither platform has differentiated itself. Netflix’s strength has always been exclusivity and brand, and that is where it should stay.

The more interesting point is about how YouTube actually works versus how Netflix works. YouTube is a platform built around compulsive viewing across formats. Someone who watches a two-hour podcast might get pulled into a five-minute sports clip about the same topic, then a 45-second short, then something else entirely. The algorithm feeds viewer obsession without requiring any action from the user. Netflix is not built like that, and trying to graft YouTube’s logic onto a premium subscription platform designed around appointment viewing is a structural mismatch.

What Netflix is actually doing, Alexander argues, is something more specific and more defensible. It is trying to deepen fandom around its own premium content rather than compete for general browsing behavior. After a Jennifer Lopez film ends on Netflix, having her Vogue 73 Questions episode available keeps the viewer inside the app and inside the world of that property. After an NFL game on Netflix, a Bill Simmons podcast feeds the same audience without requiring them to leave. The short-form content is not the product. It is the connective tissue around the product that thus increases the fandom.

That’s a pretty coherent strategy, and a meaningfully different one from trying to out-YouTube YouTube. The question is whether the publishers Netflix has partnered with will produce content specific enough to serve that fandom function, or whether it ends up feeling like a general content library that competes with the premium shows rather than extending them.

Shifting credentials

IndieWire ran a piece out of VidCon & Cannes Lions this week that gets at something which is rarely stated this plainly.

The story that opens it is about French YouTube creator Inoxtag making a documentary about climbing Everest. He released it for a single night in theaters across France, and it sold 350,000 tickets in one day across 1,000 screenings, crashing every exhibitor’s website in the process. The next day it went up on YouTube and hit 10 million views in 24 hours. Disney+ later came calling and asked to license it exclusively, which would have meant taking it down from his channel. Inoxtag said no. Disney came back with a deal that left it on YouTube. As his manager put it, Disney wasn’t used to that kind of answer.

The article’s broader argument, though, is an uncomfortable one. Indie filmmakers have traditionally carried festival pedigree, critical esteem, and institutional backing as their proof of worth. As we all know, that system is under pressure not because anyone decided to undermine it, but because the metrics that increasingly matter for legacy studios are bleeding into every content conversation.

A major platform executive told the VidCon audience that the data he weighs most heavily when deciding whether to develop something is accumulated watch time on a creator’s existing content. Filmmakers don’t have that number. Even actors are already submitting social stats alongside their audition reels.

So, what's clear is that indie filmmakers find themselves more and more holding credentials in a language fewer people speak. A Sundance premiere, a strong critical reception, some awards here and there. These things still matter within the institutions that were built around them. But as creators become more central to how Hollywood actually operates, the people making greenlight decisions are spending more time looking at watch time, audience size, and community trust than at what a jury of ten people thought.

And the further the convergence goes, the more the question becomes unavoidable: in a room full of people who speak the language of audiences, what does a festival pedigree really say?

Studios are hiring for convergence

Sony Pictures Entertainment posted a job listing recently that gives a pretty good blueprint for how legacy media is actually adapting to the creator economy. The title is EVP, Head of YouTube and Social Platforms, Strategy and Operations, and the scope of the role is worth walking through.

The person Sony is looking for will be responsible for building and scaling a channel ecosystem across SPE’s entire portfolio of IP and franchises, with a mandate that touches content strategy, monetization, marketing, licensing, legal, consumer products, and cross-functional coordination with Film and TV Chairmen, Studio Presidents, and Marketing leads. Of note, it reports to the Co-Presidents of Global Distribution and Networks, which places it at the highest level of the company’s distribution strategy.

A few specifics from the job description that give us some more color: The role includes developing first-party FAST channels, building direct ad sales capabilities, co-developing IP enforcement and creator engagement policy, and identifying opportunities to integrate Sony Music and PlayStation into the platform strategy.

This is what studios taking the convergence seriously actually looks like in practice. Not a press release about embracing digital, nor a partnership announcement, but a C-suite hire designed to make YouTube and social platforms a core part of how they manage their IP and generate revenue. The role exists because Sony has concluded it can no longer treat these platforms as just a bolted on marketing channel, but rather see it as a core part of the distribution strategy.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"JUST GOT NOMINATED FOR A F***NG PRIMETIME EMMY"

— Kareem Rahma, host of Subway Takes

This is just awesome.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Instagram Wants to be TV

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

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

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

The Attention Map

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

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

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

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

Hollywood's Most Gilded Gate Has Been Breached

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

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

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

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

GARDEN VIEW

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

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

HARVEST QUOTE

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

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

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

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

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

FRESH CLIPPINGS

What the Roku deal means for creators

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

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

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

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

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

The new United Artists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, convergence at work.

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

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Private Equity Has Entered the Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Deals

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

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

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

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

Another Creator Box Office Hit

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

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

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

GARDEN VIEW

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

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

HARVEST QUOTE

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

— Jamie Branson, Founder & CEO of ViewTV

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

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

Have a great weekend…

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The New Director Mindset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is honestly not that complicated. Trust them.

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

Studios Are Adapting in Real Time…

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

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

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

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

… And So Are Film Labs

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

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

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

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

GARDEN VIEW

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

HARVEST QUOTE

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

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

But this cuts both ways…

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

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

Have a great weekend…

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What Teens Actually Think About Movies

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

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

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

A few things stand out:

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

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

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

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

Convergence Gets Its Own Conference

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

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

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

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

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

Roku Makes a Big Bet on Creators

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

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

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

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

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

GARDEN VIEW

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

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

HARVEST QUOTE

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

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

No explanation necessary.

Have a great weekend…

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YouTube’s Victory Lap

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

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

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

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

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

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

The game truly has changed.

Or Has It?

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

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

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

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

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

Creator-Driven Movies Keep Winning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GARDEN VIEW

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

HARVEST QUOTE

“Each episode will run approximately 12.5 minutes.”

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

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

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

Have a great weekend…

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Cannes Opens the Door

If there is a single institution that represents the old guard of independent cinema, it is the Cannes Film Festival. Which is what makes this week’s announcement genuinely worth pausing on. For the first time in the festival’s history, the Marche du Film is hosting a Creator Economy Summit, a half-day forum explicitly designed to bridge traditional cinema and the creator economy, taking place just around the corner from where the world’s finest auteurs are premiering their latest work.

The framing from the organizers is careful but direct: The creator economy is reshaping how stories are developed, financed, and distributed. Creators are expanding into long-form storytelling and film production, and Cannes is acknowledging that this is no longer a peripheral conversation.

The symbolism matters as much as the substance. I’ve spent a year and a half tracking the convergence of creators and legacy media and seen it accelerate week after week. And when …

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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 …

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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 o…

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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 t…

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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.…

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A slightly shorter edition today as we head into the holiday weekend. Hope you’re enjoying some rest this Passover/Easter.

Today, it’s all about brands, a conversation that comes up constantly in the creator economy and broader entertainment space. We’ve been covering some of these conversations and moves, but the question we want to ask today is: as the lines between creators, studios, and advertisers continue to blur, what happens when brands stop buying space in someone else's garden and start planting their own?

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Brands Want to Be Hollywood Power Players

There’s a take worth sitting with this week, courtesy of a post from David Freeman in the context of this Adweek article about how the ambitions of brands in Hollywood might actually work this time.

Distribution is open, creation is democratized, and gatekeepers are optional. For the first time, brands genuinely don’t need permission to build media. Yet most still act like they do.

The core mistake, David argues, is r…

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The Romantical Ecosystem

For over a year, this newsletter has been thinking through what the convergence of the creator economy and legacy media actually can look like in practice.

Jonah Feingold’s new company is the epitome of it.

Feingold is a director with four features behind him, a fifth about to release, and a sixth starting this summer. He has made films for Paramount+, Amazon, and IFC. By any traditional measure, he has a filmmaking career. But he is also in the middle of raising $3 million for Romantical, which is not a movie. It is a media company built entirely around the romantic comedy, designed to produce films, digital series, brand partnerships, live events, and licensing, all compounding around a single genre identity and a single audience that already exists and is not being served well enough.

What makes Romantical interesting, though, is how deliberately it is structured around the relationship between short form (digital content) and long form (featu…

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Tubi Doubles Down on Creators

Tubi is continuing to build what looks like the most deliberate bridge from digital platforms to premium long-form storytelling of any streamer operating right now. The latest move is a partnership with TikTok that gives selected creators a pathway to developing original series exclusively for Tubi, with TikTok using its Spotlight program to drive its own audience to the finished shows. Both scripted and unscripted projects are on the table, and an initial cohort is expected to enter the incubator program this summer.

The model is straightforward and worth paying attention to. TikTok surfaces the talent and the built-in audience, Tubi provides the infrastructure and the platform for longer-form work, and creators get the thing most of them are actively looking for: a real shot at developing beyond short-form content without having to give up the creative control or the authenticity that made them worth watching in the first place.

Tubi alre…

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The Stream Flows Both Ways

The typical story goes like this: something starts on digital, builds an audience, and eventually gets picked up by a streamer with bigger money and wider reach. The direction of travel has felt almost gravitational, digital to legacy, creator to institution.

Somebody Feed Phil is about to go the other way.

Phil Rosenthal, the creator behind Everybody Loves Raymond and the Emmy-nominated culinary travel series, has signed a deal with Banijay Americas that will move new episodes of Somebody Feed Phil to a dedicated YouTube channel starting in 2027. The back catalog, eight seasons worth, stays on Netflix. But going forward, YouTube becomes the primary home for new content, alongside a slate of short-form material built around the show.

The reasons Rosenthal gives are worth sitting with. He points to Everybody Loves Raymond being free to watch everywhere as something he always loved about that show, and frames the YouTube move as a return to that …

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