FRESH CLIPPINGS

Instagram Wants to be TV

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

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

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

The Attention Map

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

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

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

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

Hollywood's Most Gilded Gate Has Been Breached

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

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

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

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

GARDEN VIEW

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

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

HARVEST QUOTE

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

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

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

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

Have a great weekend…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 that convergence shows up at Cannes of all places, it stops being a trend and begins to settle into a permanent feature of the landscape.

Made By Us Studios Is Changing the Game

We talk a lot at Open Gardens about creators operating as fully realized media companies rather than talent for hire by legacy companies. Made By Us Studios, launching this week out of digital management company Made By All, is one of the clearer real-world expressions of that thesis we have seen yet.

Most deals treat creators as an input: attach their audience, distribute the output, keep the IP. The model they are describing is a structural departure. Made By Us is positioning creators as upstream partners in ownership, monetization, and long-term value creation from day one. Content is driven by built-in audience demand, developed in partnership with creators, and distributed through channels the creators already own. The studio doesn’t sit above the creator. It’s built around them and lets them keep ownership.

To run it, Made By All has brought in Tanya Cohen, formerly of Range Media Partners where she helped build integrated models across representation, production and ownership, and before that, WME, where she became the youngest partner in the agency’s history. Her hire alongside existing co-CEO Leanne Perice signals that this is being built with genuine Hollywood infrastructure behind it, not just a rebranded social media marketing operation.

The quote from Cohen worth holding onto: “the creator economy is no longer adjacent to Hollywood, it’s becoming its operating system.” That framing is exactly what this newsletter has been tracking across deal flow, platform strategy, and IP development for the past year and a half. The fact that executives at this level are now saying it out loud, and building companies around it, suggests the conversation has moved from thesis to execution.

Buzzfeed Gets Another Shot

Byron Allen just acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed and will become its CEO.

For context on what Allen actually does: his Allen Media Group produces high-volume, low-cost content, courtroom shows, comedy blocks, lifestyle networks, and distributes it across a portfolio of local TV stations and cable networks he has been accumulating for years.

Which makes his YouTube ambitions the interesting part of this story. On the acquisition call, Allen was direct: BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube. That is a different game from anything in his current playbook.

The irony is that BuzzFeed was once genuinely ahead on YouTube and the fumbled spectacularly, as Simon Owens explains. “Why I Left BuzzFeed” became its own YouTube genre, which is not a legacy any media company wants. The HuffPost and Complex acquisitions then saddled the company with debt that consumed the capital that could have gone toward building on that early lead.

In his departure statement, founder Jonah Peretti outlined plans that actually point in a more interesting direction than Allen’s linear playbook might suggest. BuzzFeed Studios is being set up as a new entity spanning vertical micro-dramas, animation, digital video, and premium studio work including feature films, with Tasty also being spun out as its own independent operation. That structure, if executed seriously, looks less like a cheap content machine and more like the kind of multi-format creative infrastructure that the convergence moment actually calls for.

Allen’s acquisition at least clears some of the financial wreckage and gives BuzzFeed a stable floor to rebuild from. It will be an interesting story to track.

GARDEN VIEW

With the Backrooms feature hitting theaters on May 29, here's a conversation with Kane Parsons, the VFX artist who started the whole thing. He was 16 when he began posting his found footage Backrooms series on YouTube, turning a 4chan phenomenon into one of the more compelling analog horror universes on the internet.

Now, he's directing the feature adaptation for A24.

HARVEST QUOTE

“Fox Studios can’t become Dhar Mann tomorrow, and Dhar Mann can’t become Fox Studios. And neither one really wants to. As long as we can have an ‘and’ conversation [...] we can find a way to go forward.”

— Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios

The best part of this quote is "neither really wants to."

That's the part that usually gets lost in these conversations. The convergence of creators and legacy media isn't about one side absorbing the other, and much less so about one side going away.

It's about each bringing what the other genuinely can't replicate on its own.

It’s solid advice. The whole point is the "and."

Have a great weekend…

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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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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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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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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…

Leave a comment

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?

FRESH CLIPPINGS

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 racing to make content for content’s sake. That’s not the game. The race is to own an audience. Content without an audience is a cost. Content with one is an asset.

Starting on someone else’s platform (Amazon, Netflix) is fine, but the goal has to be building toward something you own. The moment a brand owns its audience, it owns the economics. From renter to owner. From campaign to franchise. From impressions to fandom.

He goes on to say that YouTube is the most underutilized asset in marketing today, not as an ad platform but as a destination. A global channel where any brand can develop formats, build recurring programming, and accumulate real fans rather than buying attention that disappears when the budget stops.

The question worth asking internally: if you stopped paying to reach your audience tomorrow, would they come back? If the answer is no, that’s not a content problem. That’s the whole problem.

The most important new title in corporate America right now isn’t CMO. It’s Chief Entertainment Officer. The Gap’s VP of Development hire, which we highlighted a few weeks back, is starting to look less like a novelty and more like the beginning of something.

So what does this all mean for Creators and Hollywood?

When Ad Budgets Build Hollywood Instead of Renting It

Ok, now that it’s established that brands should stop renting attention and start owning audience, Randy Greenberg’s piece in his Substack this week takes that argument and gives it a number.

Global advertising spend crossed $1 trillion in 2024. Procter and Gamble alone spent $9.2 billion. Coca-Cola spent $5 billion. At the end of the year, what does a brand have to show for it? Nothing permanent. The spots ran, the impressions were logged, and the budget resets to zero on January 1st.

Greenberg’s provocation is simple: what if brands redirected just 5% of that spend toward equity in scripted entertainment content? Not branded social series or sponsored segments on someone else’s show, but actual scripted content developed with professional writers, directors, and talent, placed inside the distribution systems built to monetize it over time. The 22 largest brand spenders in America at 5% would produce a combined scripted content budget of roughly $3.5 billion. For context, that is the size of a major streaming platform’s content operation, from money that was going to be spent on advertising anyway.

The distinction he draws is worth holding onto. A thirty-second spot costs what it costs and when it’s over, it’s over. A scripted show is an asset that enters a system, streaming, syndication, licensing, international distribution, where payback is at least structurally possible. Advertising pays for other people’s programming. The question is whether some of those dollars could be funding content the brand actually owns.

The most instructive case study in the piece is Dick’s Sporting Goods, which has been operating a real brand studio for a decade. Two Sports Emmys, Netflix distribution through Obama’s Higher Ground, a SXSW premiere, and a formal studio launch in 2025 with Imagine Entertainment. That’s what institutionalizing the creative function actually looks like.

For Hollywood, this is the conversation that should be happening more openly. Brand equity in scripted content is not a new idea, but the infrastructure to make it work at scale is newer than it has ever been.

Where to next?

The old boundaries between brand, creator, and studio are dissolving, and the question of who finances, makes, and owns content is genuinely up for grabs in a way it hasn't been since the network era. As we’ve been exploring here, it’s the era of the Open Gardens.

Creators built audiences that brands now want access to. Brands have budgets that Hollywood needs. And Hollywood has the craft and distribution infrastructure that creators are actively trying to acquire.

It’ll be very interesting to see how this all plays out.

Have a great weekend…

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

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 (feature films). The branded shorts he has already made with sponsors like Hinge, Tinder, and BetterHelp are not just marketing. They are proof of concept, audience development, and creative R&D happening simultaneously. The social content feeds the films, and the films feed the social content. It is a circular ecosystem, and the compounding logic is the whole point.

I caught up with Jonah this week, and it was clear that this started from a personal frustration as much as a strategic insight. He was tired of moving job to job without owning anything, and he noticed that almost nobody involved in making a movie is genuinely invested in its long-term success. Romantical is partly an attempt to fix that, giving crew and cast real participation rather than the token backend points that rarely pay out.

He also made a distinction that stuck with me. All filmmakers are creators, he said, but not all creators are filmmakers. The skills transfer in one direction more cleanly than the other. His advice to independent filmmakers right now is essentially to adopt the creator mindset without abandoning the craft: stop waiting for permission, shoot with your friends, release it, and do it again, and again…

The open question is whether Romantical can hold together as a business. Building an ecosystem around a genre is a genuinely different bet than building one around a personality, and it requires the brand itself to become the draw rather than any individual creator at the center. Jonah’s aware of that challenge. And the infrastructure he is assembling: short form that develops audience, films that validate the brand, and direct distribution that keeps first dollar in rather than losing it to layers of intermediaries, is exactly the kind of structure the smarter players in this space are converging on.

The Pyramid Makes the Case

This media monetization pyramid from IPR.VC’s recent white paper connects directly to everything Feingold is building with Romantical, and frankly to most of what this newsletter covers.

The numbers tell a clear story. Social video generates around $0.25 per hour of consumption. Theatrical commands $7.18. Live experiences push past $32. The gap is enormous, but the insight isn’t to abandon the bottom of the pyramid for the top. It’s to understand that the bottom is where attention and fandom are built, and fandom is what makes the top possible.

That’s the logic underneath the concept of the circular media ecosystem. The branded shorts and social content aren’t a compromise or a concession to the algorithm. They’re the discovery layer that creates the attention to make the films worth releasing theatrically. And the films, in turn, validate the brand and deepen the audience relationship in ways that social content alone never could.

It’s also the logic underneath what Fox and Tubi are doing: keeping social content immediate and responsive while the film studio works on a longer timeline. In each case, the bet is the same: capture attention where it lives, convert it into something that monetizes at a higher tier, and build the infrastructure to connect those two things deliberately rather than accidentally.

Marky Mark Goes Digital

Add Mark Wahlberg to the list of legacy talent building a deliberate digital footprint. His production company Unrealistic Ideas, which has HBO projects like Wahl Street and McMillion$ on its resume, is making its first move into the creator ecosystem with 4AM Club Challenge, a ten-part YouTube series launching today.

The format is straightforward: Wahlberg puts some of the internet’s biggest creators through his famously brutal early-morning workout routine at his home gym, with candid conversation alongside the exercise. Guests for the first season include Druski, Dhar Mann, the Stokes Twins, Airrack and Ben Azelart, which is a guest list that reads like a deliberate map of the creator landscape rather than a random collection of names.

That’s the smarter read on what this actually is. Wahlberg brings the cultural weight, the production credibility, and a genuinely compelling personal brand built around discipline and routine. The creators bring their audiences, their energy, and the kind of platform fluency that makes the content feel native rather than produced. Each side gets something the other has, which is increasingly the template for how legacy talent makes the digital transition work.

Wahlberg isn’t dabbling. He’s launching a YouTube channel, producing original content through his own company, and partnering with creators who already have the audiences he doesn’t yet.

That’s not a celebrity cameo strategy. It’s a distribution strategy.

GARDEN VIEW

If you're thinking about building a presence online, or already are, this one is worth your time.

Ex-YouTube and Instagram insider Jon Youshaei breaks down actionable strategies you can actually implement, not the kind of general advice that sounds good and changes nothing.

HARVEST QUOTE

“I hope social media’s role shifts from foreground to background noise in our lives. A tool that helps people find their niche community and then pushes them offline to actually meet those people in person.”

— Libby Rodney and Abbey Lunney, founders of the Thought Leadership + Futures Group at The Harris Poll

The Next Big Think! writers explain how younger generations are growing skeptical of the platforms they still use every day, with nearly three quarters saying TikTok content feels staged and performative.

However, despite that sentiment the discovery still happens there, which is exactly why the funnel from social to something more premium, whether that's a film, a live event, or a community, matters more than ever.

It’s worth reading their full take here.

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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 already has evidence this works. Kelon Campbell’s Terri Joe: Missionary in Miami brought his TikTok-native characters into a feature film format and debuted at number eight on Variety’s streaming original movies chart. That’s not a novelty result. It’s a proof of concept.

The broader context here is Fox. Tubi sits inside the same company that, as we highlighted last week, recently launched Fox Creator Studios and signed Frankie Quiñones to a scripted development deal.

These moves are not happening in isolation.

A New Type of Studio

Linden Lane Films is a new studio built around a premise that’s become harder to argue with: the most valuable thing a creator has isn’t their subscriber count, it’s their audience relationship. The company, led by Hollywood actor Stephen Kunken alongside entrepreneur Morgan Rothschild and consultant David Baum, has signed the Stokes Twins and Ben Azelart and structured itself around two distinct but connected operations:

Linden Lane Films handles traditional feature and streaming distribution.

Linden Lane Labs is the creator incubator where those same talents develop original long-form IP, reacting to trends in real time rather than waiting for a slot in a broadcast calendar.

That second part is the interesting piece. The Labs content is explicitly designed to be immediate and responsive, living on the platforms where creators’ audiences already are, while the film studio operates on a more conventional timeline with theatrical and streaming releases. The idea is that the short-form feed and the bigger projects feed each other, with social content keeping audiences warm and engaged between larger releases, and the films lending the whole operation a sense of scale and ambition that pure creator content rarely achieves on its own.

It’s a structure that mirrors what the smarter players in the convergence space are figuring out more broadly. The creators who are building something durable are the ones treating short-form as a distribution engine rather than the end product. Linden Lane is essentially institutionalizing that instinct.

Brass Knuckle Films Has a Slate

A year ago at SXSW, Robert Rodriguez and Alexis Garcia launched Brass Knuckle Films, an action label backed by fan investors rather than traditional studio money. This week, back at SXSW, they announced what that investment is actually going to make.

The initial slate has five projects. Three are Rodriguez originals, including Smooth Operators, an action film written by DJ Cotrona and Brooks McLaren, and Future Proof, a character-driven thriller co-written with TJ Fixman. The other two came directly from investor-pitched ideas, which is the detail worth pausing on. As we first highlighted last year, this isn’t a production company that consulted its audience after the fact. The community has been part of the creative process from the start.

Since launching, Brass Knuckle has raised $2 million from over 2,000 individual investors. That number is modest by Hollywood standards but the model is the point. Rodriguez is one of independent film’s most recognizable names, and he’s deliberately chosen to build his next chapter around his fans rather than institutional backing. The announcement of a “Best Logline Wins” contest for investors, where the community competes to have their idea developed, makes the participatory ethos even more explicit.

We highlighted this at launch because it felt like an early signal of something worth tracking. A filmmaker with real credentials treating his audience as collaborators and co-investors rather than passive consumers is a meaningful bet on where the relationship between creators and their communities is headed. A year in, with a real slate and a growing investor base, that bet is starting to look less like an experiment and more like a business.

GARDEN VIEW

Following the success of Iron Lung which became the talk of the town last month, Theo Von and David Spade are taking their new film Busboys directly to Cinemark and Regal theaters on April 17, with no studio and no distributor involved.

Reed Duchscher, CEO of Night, the management firm behind Von, put it plainly: just them.

This raises the same question that Markiplier did: how much of the success depends on the model, and how much does it depend on the creator specifically? This one will be an interesting data point either way.

Separately, the director Jonah Feingold is cooking up a Brass Knuckle-type of venture, which we’ll dive into next week.

HARVEST QUOTE

“We’re starting to call it the Acrobat Cinematic Universe”

— Jared Carneson, head of social media at Adobe

Once you get past the cringe of hearing Adobe being called a cinematic universe, the underlying move is something we’ve been tracking recently as it relates to branded entertainment. The company just launched The Marketers, a five-part workplace comedy on YouTube starring Hasan Minhaj and Patty Guggenheim, with creator cameos from The Try Guys.

It promotes Adobe Acrobat, but it's structured like a TV show, with recurring characters, running jokes and the explicit ambition to build an ongoing entertainment franchise around a software product.

It's the branded entertainment thesis in its most literal form.

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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 ethos. Reach, directness, and ownership are the through line. YouTube offers him a global audience without a gatekeeper, more direct engagement with the people who actually watch, and greater control over what gets made and how.

That framing matters because it reframes what YouTube represents for an established creator like Phil.

A few weeks back I highlighted Court TV, a traditional network, being acquired by Law&Crime, a digital-native media company that built its audience on YouTube. But this one’s different, and it’s early to call this a trend. However, it’s exactly the kind of move that will get quietly watched by a lot of people in the industry to see how it plays out.

Also, let’s not forget last week’s discussion, which warns of the algorithm going against exactly this type of premium content.

They’re Keeping Busy at FOX

Three things out of Fox this week that are worth reading together, because they point at a coherent strategy rather than a series of unrelated announcements.

First, the company has hired Billy Parks to lead Fox Creator Studios, the digital-first division it recently launched to partner with top creators. Parks comes from Slow Ventures’ creator fund by way of The Chernin Group and CONAN, which is a resume that sits comfortably at the intersection of Hollywood instinct and creator economy fluency. Fox Creator Studios has already been building in the food space, with partnerships spanning Gordon Ramsay, Rosanna Pansino and Sorted Food among others, and Parks’ mandate is to expand that into new verticals. The broader Fox digital strategy he’s stepping into includes investments in vertical video, a rom-com podcast acquisition and a publishing partnership with HarperCollins. It’s a lot of surface area, deliberately so.

Second, comedian Frankie Quiñones has signed a development deal with Fox Entertainment Studios to co-write and star in a scripted TV comedy. Quiñones built his following through a viral character called Creeper and has been stacking credits across Hulu, FX and NBC. The deal is a clean example of what Fox is presumably going after at scale: talent that already has an audience, a distinct voice, and enough momentum that a studio partnership accelerates something rather than creates it from scratch.

Third, Baywatch is coming back, and Fox is casting social media stars alongside more traditional talent. Noah Beck, Brooks Nader, Livvy Dunne and Shay Mitchell are among those attached, and the casting has already done what it was presumably designed to do, generate online conversation before a single frame has been shot.

Taken together, the picture is of a network that has decided the creator economy is not a separate lane but the same road. Hiring someone with Parks’ background to run Creator Studios, signing digital-native comedians to scripted development deals, and casting social media talent in legacy IP reboots are all versions of the same bet.

Whalar Launches Lighthouse Studios

Whalar Group, the creator economy company behind The Lighthouse campuses in Venice and Brooklyn, is launching Lighthouse Studios, a new venture designed to help creators build what the company describes as enduring entertainment franchises.

The first partnership is with Cole Bennett and the Lyrical Lemonade team, which is a strong opening move. Lyrical Lemonade built its name through music video production and festival culture and has become one of the more genuinely influential creator-led brands operating at the intersection of music and youth culture. Pairing that kind of cultural credibility with Whalar’s infrastructure and capital is the model in miniature: find creators who already have a distinct identity and a loyal audience, and give them the resources to build something with more permanence.

The broader context is worth noting. Whalar has been building toward this for a while, from the Creator Houses it launched in 2021 to the physical Lighthouse campuses that followed. The studio launch is less a pivot than a logical next step, the company graduating from supporting individual creator careers to backing the kind of consistent, returning programming that actually builds franchises. That distinction matters because it’s where most creator ventures stall. Audience attention is one thing. Getting that audience to show up reliably, week after week, for something with real production ambition behind it is a harder problem, and the one Lighthouse Studios is setting out to solve.

What makes this worth watching in a wider sense is what it represents structurally. Lighthouse Studios is not a legacy media company experimenting with creators like Fox, as we discussed above, and it’s not a solo creator trying to scale. It’s an organization built from the ground up around the proposition that the creator and studio models are not in tension but are actually the same thing at different stages of maturity.

As Fox builds out Creator Studios and as established shows like Somebody Feed Phil move toward YouTube on their own terms, the infrastructure supporting that convergence is quietly becoming its own industry.

GARDEN VIEW

Can creators actually become the next Disney?

That's the comparison everyone keeps reaching for. And for good reason. As Kaya Yurieff and Jasmin Enberg say, it makes for a good headline.

In their latest podcast episode, the Scalable founders make a compelling case for why the analogy is more aspirational than accurate.

Creator businesses are built around real people rather than ownable characters and universes, the media landscape is too fragmented to produce another dominant brand at Disney's scale, and the incumbents are quietly getting smarter while creators are still figuring out their business models.

Worth a watch.

HARVEST QUOTE

“YouTube isn’t a mobile app with a TV feature. For a growing number of viewers, it’s a TV app with a mobile feature. Oh, and it’s THE biggest streaming platform by any measurable metric. The faster you build for that reality, the better your content will perform.”

— Kevin Espiritu, Founder & CEO of Epic Gardening

As more YouTube viewing shifts to the living room, the content that performs best for certain creators is starting to look less like social media and more like television.

Kevin found that once half their audience migrated to TV screens, longer and slower videos dramatically outperformed their shorter mobile-optimized content.

The medium is shaping the message, and for legacy media companies finding their footing on YouTube, that shift only works in their favor.

Have a great weekend…

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When the Algorithm Eats Itself

Two pieces circulating this week are worth reading together, because they’re pointing at the same problem from different angles: platforms optimizing for volume may be quietly destroying the thing that made them worth building on in the first place.

The first comes from Oliver Gilpin, a digital studio owner with 14 years on YouTube, and it’s a pretty damning case study. He compares two channels: one producing premium 3D animation at $15k per episode posting once a month, and another churning out AI-generated content at $500 an episode posting ten times a month. Same CTR, same average view duration. The AI farm wins the algorithm almost every time, because YouTube’s recommendation system bets on future watch time, and a channel posting ten videos a month gives it more surface area to work with. Quality, as a signal, barely enters the equation.

The second post comes from Christian Zilio, who spent years at TikTok preaching volume as gospel and watching the data confirm it, which makes his conclusion all the more interesting.

He still believes in volume as a core strategy, but he’s starting to wonder whether the industry has confused a useful tool for an end in itself.

Where they connect is in the question neither fully answers: if platforms keep structurally rewarding volume over quality, who keeps making the good stuff? YouTube has spent years pitching itself as the future of television, but that pitch depends on creators investing in premium production and treating the platform as a long-term home. The algorithm, as currently trending, kinda punishes that bet.

And those are the real stakes here. This isn't at all an argument against AI, we’re way past that. It's a warning sign against tendencies people are experiencing in which platform environments become hostile to great storytelling that human creators may stop showing up.

If YouTube alienates the people willing to invest in genuine storytelling, it doesn't get a balanced ecosystem of human and AI content. It gets AI farms, and is that what we all want?

So What Happens to Digital-First Studios?

We’ve highlighted in the past how legacy media creatives have started channels on YouTuve, and just this week, former CBS Comedy head Jon Koa and WireImage co-founder Jeff Vespa launched Some Assembly, another YouTube-first studio built around premium long-form content.

The pedigree behind it is serious. Koa spent three years as EVP of Comedy Development at CBS, where he launched Ghosts and The Neighborhood, and held senior roles at ABC contributing to Modern Family and Black-ish. Vespa built his name as a Cannes Lion-winning creative director and celebrity photographer shooting for Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New York Times. They’ve also brought in Benjamin Key, former Global Head of Video Strategy at Condé Nast, to advise on platform strategy and audience development.

Their stated mission is to make content that looks and feels like TV but is built for digital distribution from the ground up, with brand integration baked into the creative architecture from the start rather than bolted on afterward. That last part is worth noting as a model, because it suggests a more sustainable economics than traditional ad revenue alone.

This is exactly the kind of migration that should feel like good news. Legacy media executives with real track records choosing YouTube as their primary distribution layer is a genuine vote of confidence in the platform’s potential.

But, read it alongside the algorithm conversation above and the tension is hard to ignore. These are precisely the people that a volume-rewarding, quality-blind platform infrastructure is designed to frustrate. They’re bringing craft and production investment to an environment that seems would rather surface a channel posting ten AI-generated videos a week. If YouTube wants this talent to stick around, it has to be a place where that bet can actually pay off.

Only time will tell.

Update to BBC x YouTube

We highlighted the BBC’s YouTube deal a few weeks back, and recently they made headlines again by declaring that “YouTube economics are challenging for broadcasters to make a positive return on premium content.” The argument, laid out in their charter review consultation, is that advertising pricing on YouTube is significantly lower than linear or broadcaster VOD, fewer ads are served, and the platform takes a large revenue cut. The conclusion they seem to be drawing is that there is little commercial upside to building seriously for YouTube.

Evan Shapiro thinks they’re looking at this the wrong way, and he makes a compelling case.

His core point is that the BBC walked into YouTube with the wrong playbook entirely. Rather than monetizing their existing library, which is one of the largest and best in the world, they committed what’s been reported as £1 million per series to fund brand new YouTube-first content.

The smarter approach, and the one that Channel 4, CBC, and PBS have all demonstrated, is to treat YouTube as an additive broadcast layer for content that’s already been made. Sunk cost programming finding new audiences and generating incremental revenue, not a separate production line requiring fresh capital.

The economics complaint also has a specific wrinkle in the BBC’s case as the corporation is legally prohibited from selling ads on its linear and streaming services, which makes the comparison to YouTube CPMs a strange one to lead with. But we’re more interested in the former argument.

The BBC’s own charter document acknowledges that it must reach audiences where they are, and that failing to do so means failing its public mandate.

This holds true for any legacy media company. And the opportunity sitting in their deep libraries can be a useful one. Decades of movies, TV shows, documentaries, and more that younger audiences have simply never seen is already made, already paid for, and already good.

YouTube is one of the few places where a 15 year old documentary can find a genuinely new audience and perform. That's not a consolation prize, it's a real distribution advantage that most media companies would love to have.

GARDEN VIEW

A shockingly honest reflection by creator YCImaging, in which he discusses a lot of the issues we touched on today.

A must-watch for any creator or anyone thinking of becoming one.

HARVEST QUOTE

“The Vice President of Development will source, shape, and prioritize ideas; evaluate and narrow creative pitches; partner on unscripted and original series development; and shepherd projects from concept through greenlight and production.”

— A recent job posting for… The Gap.

I know. It reads like a listing for a studio or production company, and that's exactly the point.

We've talked before about how branded entertainment is quietly becoming just entertainment, and job postings like this are where you see it actually happening.

Have a great weekend…

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The Discovery Problem

It’s no secret that discovery has become one of the hardest problems in the creator economy, and Natalie Jarvey has some insight into a startup that might be able to help alleviate this pain.

For all the talk of opportunity, most of the largest podcasts and YouTube channels have been building for a decade or more. Even on TikTok, where the algorithm can elevate a new voice overnight, the biggest accounts have been posting consistently since 2020.

The platforms feel open. But in reality, they are deeply saturated.

That saturation is pushing some talented creators out. Cookbook author Carla Lalli Music, for example, shut down her YouTube channel last year because the economics no longer justified the cost of high production. The audience was there. It just wasn’t big enough.

The startup in question is Chronicle Studios, a San Francisco startup that has raised $11.6 million in seed funding to tackle the discovery problem with AI tools. The pitch is straightforward: YouTube is the top of the funnel, but most creators and independent studios have not cracked how to scale there consistently.

And what makes this story notable is who Chronicle has brought in. The company has tapped Scott Greenberg and Brett Coker, the co-founders of Bob’s Burgers animation studio Bento Box Entertainment, as it expands its platform. These are not digital natives experimenting on the margins. They are legacy animation executives who built and sold a studio to Fox and are now stepping directly into the creator infrastructure layer.

Scott says: “If we can really help make social video accessible, I believe there’s a world where you can be an independent production company, and creators can own their content and really have a shot to make money.”

Let’s all hope he’s right.

A YouTube Rent/Buy Button?

Here’s an interesting idea making the rounds. I am not sure it is the answer, but it is exactly the kind of thinking this moment requires.

Filmmaker Jonah Feingold, whose credits span IFC releases and studio rom-coms to a sizable YouTube presence, wrote an open letter arguing that YouTube should become the true home base for independent film distribution. His ask is surprisingly simple: let creators add a rent or buy button directly to their own uploads on YouTube.

The argument is that the current indie landscape is fractured. At the top tier, you have well-capitalized distributors with real marketing muscle, but access is limited and economics are structured around institutional capital. In the middle, smaller distributors and aggregators take their slices while offering modest reach. And at the bottom, full self-distribution gives you ownership but no foot traffic.

Feingold’s thesis is that YouTube already solves reach, infrastructure, and audience behavior. The app is installed. The credit cards are on file. The algorithm can surface work at scale. What it does not currently offer creators is seamless transactional ownership within their own channels. Studios have that capability. Creators do not.

Whether or not this specific product tweak is the solution, the framing is useful. It forces the question of why the largest distribution platform in the world still separates the creator economy from premium film economics. If the future is audience-first IP, then tools that allow independent filmmakers to own both their work and their distribution layer start to look less radical and more inevitable.

From Online Lore to Theatrical IP

A24 just announced BACKROOMS, a feature adaptation of the viral internet horror phenomenon.

The Backrooms began as a 2019 post on 4chan describing an endless maze of empty yellow office rooms. Since then, creators across YouTube, gaming, and online fiction communities have expanded the lore into a full-blown digital mythology. It is not IP in the traditional sense. It is collective internet world-building.

Now A24 is turning it into a feature, directed by Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms found-footage short exploded on YouTube a few years back.

This follows the same pattern we’ve seen of online-native horror concepts becoming studio-backed theatrical bets.

Hollywood still needs built-in awareness to underwrite risk. And internet-born IP offers something interesting given that the internet has already decided it’s worth obsessing over.

In other words, digital IP may become the new way to fund riskier, original feature film projects.

GARDEN VIEW

Comedy streamer Dropout is experimenting with something that feels both backward and forward at the same time.

After releasing physical Blu-Rays of its series Game Changer (which quickly sold out), the company is now launching a 24/7 linear channel within DropoutTV. The channel will run continuously, programmed like traditional television. But without ads, since it’s supported by subscribers.

At a moment when streaming has trained audiences to expect infinite choice, Dropout is leaning into the opposite: a lean-back experience where you don’t have to decide what to watch.

It’s a reminder that new media models often circle back to old formats, just rebuilt for different economics and a different relationship with the audience.

HARVEST QUOTE

“We can stop writing memos to CEOs in our heads. We stop waiting for the cavalry of enlightened leadership. And start looking ahead to what comes next and start being part of the forces that shape the new Hollywood”

— Richard Rushfield, in his latest State of the Union for The Ankler.

A timely provocation.

It’s easy to narrate this moment as decline and imagine that if only the right executive showed up, the old system would snap back into place. Rushfield’s point is sharper: stop waiting.

Every collapse creates negative space. One model recedes, another has room to form.

The rebuild isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening in independent financing experiments, creator-led ownership models, and direct-to-audience relationships that don’t require institutional permission.

The cavalry isn’t coming.

Which means the opportunity belongs to the people willing to build something new.

Have a great weekend…

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A Network Channel Gets Acquired by a YouTube Channel

Yes. You read that right.

For the past year, we’ve written about legacy companies hiring creators, licensing their shows, giving them first-look deals, etc. The flow of power has mostly moved in one direction: Hollywood absorbing and learning from digital talent.

This time, the current runs the other way.

The legal news network Court TV has been acquired by Law&Crime, a digital-native media company that built its audience on YouTube.

Let that sink in. A cable network brand, born in the era of bundled television, is now being folded into a platform-native operation that grew up on the algorithm.

Court TV has real legacy. It surged in the 1990s and 2000s on the back of cable expansion and looser state rules that allowed cameras into courtrooms. In 2019, E. W. Scripps revived the brand to ride the true crime wave. The content still resonated. The problem was distribution. Linear audiences kept shrinking.

This is not a story about declining interest in courtroom drama. If anything, public fascination with live trials, legal analysis, and true crime has only intensified in the digital era. It is a story about where that demand now lives and how it is accessed.

Just because linear viewership is down does not mean appetite is. It means the audience moved elsewhere.

Law&Crime understands that shift because it was born inside it. The company plans to expand Court TV programming across YouTube and other social platforms. Same subject matter.

If this is a preview of what is coming, the implications could be huge.

We may start to see more digital-native operators acquiring legacy brands that still carry trust, archives, and institutional credibility but struggle inside outdated distribution models.

Wall Street Bets on the Creator Flywheel

Propagate Content, the production company behind The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Stick, has secured a $50 million investment from Ares Management.

The headline is the check size, but the real story is what the check is for.

Propagate plans to use the capital to scale its digital creator–focused slate. Not as a side experiment. Not as a marketing arm. As a core growth strategy.

The company framed the partnership around its ability to move talent from social platforms to streaming and build them into durable brands and franchises. That language matters because it signals that this is not about chasing views. It is about building infrastructure around audience trust.

This is the infamous “flywheel” in action. Digital attention creates proof of demand. Streaming expands reach and monetization. Franchises compound value across formats.

For a while, the industry treated legacy media and the creator economy as opposing forces. One serious. One scrappy. One institutional. One chaotic.

Deals like this suggest something else entirely, and indicate towards the convergent future we’ve argued for here.

The institutional capital faucet is open, and it will continue to flow toward the bridge between creators and legacy media.

An Indie Distributor Goes Full-Creator

Independent distributor Utopia just introduced something really smart.

They are launching the “Utopia Screening Room,” a direct-to-consumer membership channel hosted on Patreon.

For five dollars a month, subscribers get access to “exclusive screenings of newly released films, fan favorite library titles, and new surprises each month.”

On the surface, it sounds like another streaming add-on. It is not.

What Utopia is building is a digital extension of the theatrical window. Each Patreon screening is positioned as “a digital stop on each film’s release tour,” designed to connect “audiences nationwide who love and appreciate independent filmmaking to some of the most exciting, emerging creative talents working in the industry today.”

That framing is important. This is not replacing theaters. It is expanding the tour.

For years, indie releases have relied on city-by-city momentum. Open in New York. Then LA. Maybe Austin. Maybe Chicago. Do Q&As. And if you’re lucky, word of mouth will take you all the way.

Now, the Q&A can travel even when the filmmaker cannot.

Members can watch the film live and engage directly with the director and cast in a more intimate online setting. If they miss the scheduled event, the screening and conversation stay available for 24 hours.

This is what happens when indie distributors borrow from the creator playbook. Direct relationship. Recurring revenue. Community layered on top of content.

It’s a new effort, and who knows if it’ll work longer term, but it’s a great step in the right direction.

GARDEN VIEW

Simon Owens sat down with Jim Louderback, the voice behind Inside the Creator Economy.

They covered a lot of ground:

Are media companies overreacting to the threat of Google Zero? Why are athletes becoming the next wave of super creators? And will YouTube slowly absorb Hollywood rather than compete with it?

A wide lens conversation on where power in media is actually moving.

HARVEST QUOTE

“We should stop describing the moment as a generic contraction and start describing it as a reallocation of value.”

— Martin Moskowicz, Chairman of German production and distribution giant Constantin.

This is one of the sharper reframes we’ve seen from inside legacy media.

It is easy to look at layoffs, shrinking slates, and box office volatility and label the moment a contraction. That word implies disappearance.

Moskowicz suggests something more precise. The value is not vanishing. It is moving.

Capital, attention, and leverage are being redistributed across platforms, formats, and power centers. If you misdiagnose that shift as a simple downturn, you miss where the opportunity is relocating and, most importantly, how to adapt to it.

His full guest column is well worth the read. Read it here.

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The Case for YouTube Originals 2.0

Kaya Yurieff & Jasmine Enberg wrote a great piece on why YouTube should reconsider its Originals efforts, which were scrapped back in 2022. As they argue, it’s all about timing and execution.

We have covered for a while the Netflix vs. YouTube fight, which is in its infancy as the platforms fight for audience dominance, and while YouTube is currently sitting comfortably at the top, there are a few things that Netflix (and legacy media) have that YouTube covets.

Kaya and Jasmine explain:

First, advertisers. Much of YouTube’s revenue comes from small and mid-sized businesses, which makes its ad model look closer to Meta or TikTok than broadcast TV. If YouTube wants true TV budgets, it needs premium, predictable inventory, the kind brands can anchor major campaigns around. That explains the push into tentpole cultural moments, premium ad packages, and positioning itself as a legitimate “TV” destination.

Second, prestige. Netflix forced its way into Hollywood legitimacy through awards and original films. YouTube hasn’t fully crossed that line. Even when creators break through, institutional validation often comes only after they partner with traditional platforms (see: Ms. Rachel getting nominated for an Emmy only after she went to Netflix). Prestige still lives elsewhere.

The goal isn’t to mimic a traditional studio, but to create premium environments for advertisers and cultural legitimacy in Hollywood.

And there’s some urgency.

Because today, it’s no longer unrealistic to imagine major creators migrating off YouTube. Case in point: Netflix’s agreement with Spotify restricts podcasters from uploading full episodes to YouTube, signaling real competitive pressure and forcing the platform to work harder to keep its top talent.

Amelia Dimoldenberg Makes a Movie

Another clear signal of convergence with Amelia Dimoldenberg, the creator and host of Chicken Shop Date, developing and starring in a romantic comedy for Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures, produced by Gloria Sanchez Productions.

This isn’t just a creator “getting a shot” in Hollywood. It’s IP migration. Dimoldenberg didn’t rise through the traditional studio system. She built a global audience on YouTube with a format-native interview show that turned awkward charm into a recognizable brand. Now that brand is being translated directly into a studio-backed film, with a premise that mirrors her on-screen persona.

For studios, this is de-risked development. You’re not betting on a spec script alone; you’re partnering with a creator who already owns tone, audience trust, and cultural relevance, giving that spec script legs. For creators, it’s a pathway beyond platform algorithms and into long-form, premium storytelling.

The wall between internet personality and movie star keeps getting thinner. Hollywood used to manufacture stars. Increasingly, it licenses them from the internet.

Legacy Talent as Creators

With the Super Bowl and Olympics in the zeitgeist, Jim Louderback highlighted in his weekly newsletter an interesting story about athletes becoming creators. These athletes, he says, are building “portable” communities that follow them across teams, leagues, and sports.

Examples include:

• Faatimah Amen-Ra, both a pro basketball player and CEO of the Women’s Premier Basketball Association, building competitive teams while teaching athletes how to become creators so their careers extend beyond the court.

• Hayden Tyler Ancheta, a wrestler at SF State and Team Philippines, who has turned a 100K+ following into brand deals and millions of views, proving that today’s sports metric isn’t just the box score, it’s whether fans are following your journey.

• Diana Flores, a flag football champion and advocate for women’s sports, who has a combined 200K followers, a book, and major partnerships into a blueprint for the modern creator-athlete, where performance and storytelling carry equal weight.

The parallel makes itself. Could actors, writers, directors in legacy media do the same?

Imagine a showrunner walking into a pitch not only with a script and a vision, but with a portable audience that has followed their process for years. In a world where buyers obsess over built-in IP and de-risked bets, a creator-backed community becomes leverage.

Because if athletes can carry their audience from team to team, there’s no reason legacy Hollywood talent couldn’t carry theirs from project to project.

It applies even stronger to actors, who inherently carry a more public presence. Fans can’t follow your journey if you appear once every few years for a press tour.

Perhaps becoming a creator is not a steep price to pay?

GARDEN VIEW

Mike Shields from Next in Media sits down with with David Freeman, who recently launched Kynetic Media Partners after 15 years at CAA, where he helped build the agency’s digital department back when creator talent was largely dismissed in Hollywood.

David is focused on building the infrastructure that turns fandom into enterprise value.

Topics include how tech companies have effectively become Hollywood, the rise of mega-creators like MrBeast building billion-dollar businesses, and how AI could transform content creation. David also breaks down the importance of real operators around talent, the emergence of creator-led media empires like Dude Perfect and Rhett & Link, and why consolidation and major exits in the space feel inevitable.

HARVEST QUOTE

“We started this podcast during the actors’ strike over Zoom, and made the show independently, with no real plan beyond making something we liked and staying creative. Licensing to a streamer was never even a thought.”

— Actor Jake Johnson, discussing his new deal with Hulu for his podcast We’re Here to Help.

He almost sounds like a creator, doesn’t he?

That mindset is the lesson. The show wasn’t reverse-engineered for a platform or built with a distribution strategy in mind. It started with taste, momentum, and genuine creative impulse. The audience came because it felt real.

That’s the creator playbook, and he’s proof that legacy players can follow it. Build something that resonates first. Monetization follows.

Have a great weekend…

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Content as the Top Funnel

By elevating Josh D’Amaro, the Head of Experiences, to the top job, Disney is making a clear business statement: the real, durable value is not in the content, but in what content unlocks.

That sounds familiar if you’ve been paying attention to creators.

In the creator economy, content isn’t the profit center. The biggest creators build audience through content, then capture value through products, live events, memberships, and IP extensions. Even MrBeast runs profit through commerce and experiences, not views.

Disney is doing the same thing at industrial scale.

Yes, movies and shows don’t account for the majority of profit on their own. But they remain the entry point into everything that does generate outsized value: theme parks, merchandise, live experiences, lifelong brand attachment.

This aligns with what Doug Shapiro has been arguing for a while. When one input into a value chain becomes cheap or abundant, value flows elsewhere. But that doesn’t make the input irrelevant. It makes it more strategically important.

The dangerous misread is the idea that this shift means content matters less.

That’s simply false. Strip away the films, characters, and stories, and you’re left with… an empty castle.

The TikTokification of Studios

A little more on last week’s story about how Paramount+ is making a significant push into short-form video and user-generated clips as pretty much every studio is thinking of attempting this.

Taking a step back, for years studios treated short-form as marketing. Clips lived outside the real product.

But that era is ending. Short-form is becoming the front door, not the billboard.

Discovery now happens inside the scroll. People don’t decide what to watch. They stumble into it.

Taylor Dempsey has a few predictions that we should all be conscious of:

1. Content will be designed for short-form moments from day one.
Not just trailers, but scenes meant to live on their own.

2. Platforms become taste engines, not libraries.
Less browsing thumbnails. More scrolling scenes until one earns your time.

3. Marketing and content merge.
The line between “the movie” and “the promo” collapses.

4. Success is measured by cultural surface area.
How often a story shows up in feeds, group chats, and remixes, not just opening weekend or total streams.

Bottom line: studios aren’t competing for streams or ticket sales. They’re competing inside the scroll. And if that’s where discovery now lives, the real challenge is learning how to make it great.

A New Type of Streamer / Creator Deal

In the past, we’ve highlighted several creator partnerships with legacy companies, but recently there was one that established a new kind of relationship.

You-Tuber and social media star Salish Matter and her dad are partnering with Netflix to develop their fan-favorite franchises across scripted, unscripted, and animated series, in which Salish will star. The deal also includes consumer products and experiential offerings.

What makes this one different is that there was no single pitch or pilot driving the deal. Netflix bet on the creators themselves, their audience, and their ability to develop ideas collaboratively over time.

That makes this far closer to an overall deal than a one-off project order.

It’s a clear signal that legacy platforms are moving away from buying finished projects and toward backing creators as long-term, scalable IP engines.

GARDEN VIEW

Quite the interesting conversation at the “New Hollywood Power Players: The Rise of Creators on TV” panel at CES in Las Vegas.

Takashi Najano (Samsung TV Plus), Rishita Patel (Crunch Labs), Evan Shapiro (Media Cartographer), and Ryan Wilson (Sansung Ads) join Variety's Co-Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Littleton for the discussion

HARVEST QUOTE

“I don’t know, it feels weird. I guess maybe I’m a villain to some of them (legacy media), but I feel like a friend. We know how to make something that’s engaging on social media that’s engaging to the young people.”

— History creator Kahlil Greene

A timely quote given the outsized success of Iron Lung and the increasing convergence between the legacy and creator worlds.

It’s easy for us in traditional media to see creators as a threat or as an enemy. But the reality is much different.

If creators have cracked how to consistently earn attention and loyalty from younger audiences, why we wouldn’t want to partner with and learn from them?

Have a great weekend…

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