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

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

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

So I wrote a substack about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s where Rebecca and I most diverge—

The YouTube channel requirement:

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

My rebuttal:

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

Who Needs Another YouTube Channel?

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

My rebuttal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is it so revolutionary?

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

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

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

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

Filmmakers as Creators?

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

My rebuttal:

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

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

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

Every. Hand. Went. Up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I come from a place of pragmatism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where I differ is in the frame.

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

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

But that comfort was also a trap.

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

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

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

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

The hope is in the convergence.

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously Obvious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And noble rooms are hard places to make a living.

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

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

That disagreement is worth having out loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are five things I took away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. “Formatting is world-building.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaways Behind The Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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The 30-second spot and the trailer are dying, and not just because attention spans got shorter. They feel corporate.

Even for a middle-aged dude like myself, I’ve developed a strange aversion to trailers. They talk at you, not with you. They often feel… slow. (Yikes!). That’s the gap between what corporate does and what a creator connection does — and the implications run deeper than marketing.

I’m a producer. I still love making movies. But every producer I know has another part of their brain that’s always running — the part that’s thinking about how to get someone to actually watch the thing. And that part of my brain is what I’ve been trying to update to the new operating system…

I used to think about it like this: you make the movie, you cut a trailer, the trailer pulls people to the movie. Linear. The movie is the destination. Everything points back at it.

Now I think about it the other way around. You find the core DNA of the thing you’re making, and that DNA travels out across different surfaces, creating connection in each one.

The movie is still the destination. That doesn’t have to change. What’s changed is that you can’t get there in a straight line anymore. You get there by building everything around it first — the ecosystem the DNA lives in.

The movie is one surface. Instagram is another. So is a live activation, a merch drop, a stunt. All of it connected by the same DNA. You’re not just making a movie anymore. You’re making the ecosystem the movie has to live inside.

WHERE THIS STARTED

A few weeks ago I was talking with Christoph Becker, Chief Creative Officer at Whalar Group, and he was talking about the challenges of creating symbioses between creators and brands.

“Im constantly telling brands that to sell a product, you can’t mention the product.”

We’ve all been hearing some version of this. But hearing it from Christoph — someone who’s spent decades in the ad world at the highest levels — especially in the context of the bigger conversation we were having about creativity, it resonated in a different way. And I had been thinking about this very issue in making movies and tv shows. They are a product. And you gotta sell it and the thirty second spot and trailer aren’t the answer…

Christoph wasn’t talking about clever copywriting, he was talking about how a brand needs a brief that can be interpreted across different surfaces, with different creators, organically.

The brief is what I was referring to above as DNA — in a perfect world the brand hands it to creators and lets them make it their own through their relationship with their community.

The brief was historically used to prescribe the message. It created strict, immutable guardrails.

Now, what it needs to do is prescribe the DNA — still guardrails of sorts — and then let go. The brand sets the DNA loose and lets creators decide which surfaces it lands on.

Because the surface belongs to the creator, and the creator belongs to their community. A brand that wants in has to be loose enough to be translated — into a TikTok, into an in-joke, into a piece of content that creates an emotional exchange the brand itself could never have authored.

But the dialogue isn’t one-way. The creator shapes the DNA for the community, and the community shapes it back. They remix it, they spread it, they build inside jokes around it, they turn it into something the brand never could’ve predicted.

The reach is the creator’s. The trust belongs to the community. The brand is just a guest.

Christoph added one more thing which might seem obvious to sophisticated marketers but gets lost on producers like me: somewhere in all of this, there should be a unifying visual element. A color. A shape. A motif. Something that lets the DNA stay recognizable across every surface it travels through, immediately connecting it to the whole ecosystem.

I’ve been turning this over for weeks now, and every time I try to articulate why it matters, I keep landing in the same place. I know — believe me, I know — that the entire internet has already written about A24’s Marty Supreme campaign. There is nothing left to say about the blimp. And yet… it just feels like the very best example to make the point…

…So bear with me.

THE DNA OF MARTY SUPREME

You probably know the broad strokes, but just a quick refresher…

The whole campaign was built around a single color — Hardcore Orange. It wasn’t invented for the campaign, it came from the movie. Marty Mauser tries to launch a business selling orange ping pong balls — his scheme for putting his stamp on the sport.

A24 took that exact orange out of the film and put it on everything else. An orange blimp drifted across the country from Nashville to LA. Streetwear brand Nahmias made a windbreaker in that same Hardcore Orange and seeded it to half of Instagram’s most-followed athletes (connecting ping pong to professional athletes does a whole bunch of work I’ll mention later). The character’s scheme to make orange the signature of his career became the studio’s scheme to make orange the signature of the movie.

The orange is the visual DNA. What it’s carrying — the emotional DNA underneath — is obsession. The way Chalamet describes the orange is obsessive. That’s the emotional DNA of the movie. And you start to see how Chalamet the actor is obsessed in the same way Marty the ping pong player is obsessed — and the two are melded together in the color orange.

Sounds like intellectual masturbation? Only when you say it out loud. The feeling watching Chalamet do this is the same feeling you get watching Marty: a man possessed.

META METHOD MARKETING: OBSESSED OBSESSION

Inside the film, Safdie doesn’t let you forget the obsession for a second. Marty is in perpetual motion — hustling, scheming, performing — all in an attempt to become the greatest ping pong player who ever lived in a sport almost nobody takes seriously. Orange and obsession are now one thing.

We’ve already seen how the actor and the character share the obsession. The interesting part is what Chalamet did with it once he brought it out into the real world.

He pitched the unhinged ideas in the leaked Zoom meeting — orange landmarks, orange blimps raining ping pong balls, four named shades of orange (hardcore, corroded, falling apart, rusted) that his “visual artist” supposedly spent six months developing. He dropped surprise coordinates on Instagram and made fans chase him across cities. He climbed to the top of the Las Vegas Sphere — the first person ever to do it — to declare Marty Supreme “an American film that comes out on Christmas day.”

The Zoom video isn’t a marketing stunt. It’s the same obsessive performance, just on a different surface. The film and the campaign aren’t separate things. They’re the same artifact, carrying the same DNA.

And here’s the point. The campaign isn’t promoting the movie. It’s its own content. People discovered it first because they live on Instagram — and what they found wasn’t an ad. It was a piece of content that made an emotional connection on its own terms, that pulls the viewer toward more of it. The movie is the ultimate expression of the DNA. The campaign is one path into it.

Now back to the parenthetical about jackets…

MERCH MADNESS

The Nahmias jacket got seeded to a long list of celebrities — but the names worth focusing on are the athletes. Tom Brady. Michael Phelps. Steph Curry. Three of the most obsessive competitors alive, in three sports that we all take very seriously.

When you put the Hardcore Orange jacket on Tom Brady, it’s not advertising, you’re staging the emotional thesis of the film in real life. I’m speculating here but I’d imagine Brady doesn’t have a lot of respect for ping pong. The orange jacket on his body says (ironically): even he takes this seriously now.

That’s what makes it funny, but it’s also what creates the feeling, the emotion… The delta between ping pong and Tom Brady is enormous — and that delta is exactly what makes Marty’s obsession funny and heartbreaking at the same time. He cares this much about a sport that the world treats as a basement game. When Brady wears the orange, the delta collapses for a moment. The character’s delusion becomes real. The world is taking ping pong seriously because Tom Brady is.

None of these guys mention the movie, and none of them have to. The casting itself is the message — the orange just carries it. The audience doesn’t think about any of this consciously, they just feel something. That something is goodwill, and goodwill gets cashed in at the box office.

And the jacket is just one surface.

MERCH EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Hardcore Orange ended up on Wheaties boxes, on the pyramids at Giza, on the top of the Las Vegas Sphere, on a blimp dropping ping pong balls over Camp Flog Gnaw, on a soundtrack release, on listening events in New York and Tokyo, on an actual underground ping pong tournament A24 hosted with Airbnb.

The DNA found surface after surface to live on. Some of them just generated feeling. All of them were the ecosystem.

But the jacket feels like the biggest tell — about how well this whole thing was working. The Nahmias windbreaker retailed at $250. It’s currently reselling on Grailed for $1,000, $2,000, $4,000. People are paying sixteen times retail for a piece of cloth — not because it’s a movie ticket but because it carries the DNA. The orange and the obsession, manifested in a jacket.

The emotion was the product. The value just showed up wherever it landed.

And this leads me back to how legacy executives, producers, even directors might need to rethink things…

THE AUTEUR IS NOT EXEMPT

Wasn’t this all orchestrated by a marketing department? 1000%. And one of the best marketing teams in the business. Josh Safdie just made the movie he wanted to make. He didn’t walk into A24 pitching orange-and-obsession as the campaign thesis. He didn’t pitch Chalamet going ape shit on a Zoom call with the stoically-faced A24 marketing team.

But we can’t keep talking about “meeting audiences where they are” without considering how storytelling itself is changing.

You could argue Alejandro Iñárritu doesn’t need to think this way. He’s an auteur. And I’ll be there opening weekend to watch Digger with Tom Cruise. But Iñárritu wants to win. The Digger rollout shows a filmmaker who’s thinking carefully — an unrecognizable-Cruise reveal, a teaser hidden inside a Cruise montage, a longer trailer. Smart, mysterious, old-school. It might even work. But if Iñárritu thought he needed to spread Digger across every surface — to tell the story in this new way — would he do it?

If I want to keep making movies and TV shows, I need audiences to show up. And if that means changing how I think about them, build for them, and market to them, I’m going to do that work now. Not when it’s too late.

A few months ago I was at StreamTV Europe in Portugal, speaking on a panel and sitting in on as many others as I could. One presenter shared a statistic we all intuit but rarely see written down so cleanly: 80% of people aged 18 to 24 discover new shows and movies on social media.

That number used to feel like a marketing problem. It isn’t. It’s a storytelling problem. If that’s where the next generation of audiences lives, that’s where the next generation of storytellers will tell their stories. Not deliver them. Tell them.

To sell a product, you can’t mention the product.

It’s not about 30-second spots. It’s about creating emotional connections that build goodwill — connections that eventually lead someone to want to watch the movie or the show.

Many in the next generation, and they may not even be so easily categorized as filmmakers, aren’t looking at the big screen as their canvas. They’re looking at the whole ecosystem of surfaces.

Their stories live in a Tom Brady photo wearing an orange jacket. In a blimp over the 405. In a Zoom video that wasn’t supposed to leak. In a windbreaker reselling for four grand. The screen is one place the story lives. It’s not the only one anymore.

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

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

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

Didn’t move the needle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pivot

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

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

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

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

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

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

These guys made three moves that are worth noting…

The Operating System

Decision 1: Invent the Category

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision 2: Trust the Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision 3: Turn the Audience Into Infrastructure

This one started as an accident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lemonade Stand

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

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

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

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

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

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

What They Built and What It Means

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

Hold a high production standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Hollywood Is Importing the Creator OS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Legacy Talent Is Adopting the Creator Job

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

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

Sounds like a creator…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the three meet

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

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

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

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

That model is crumbling fast…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it might just be an opposable thumb.

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

BP/AP: The Era That Got It Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Model Nobody Has Actually Built Yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Akshay’s answer, when I asked him directly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Honest Reckoning

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

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

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

The Thumb

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

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

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

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

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

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

But something told me I needed to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here are my four big conclusions—

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative control.

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

The Label Is the Tell

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

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

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

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

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

Why Leverage Flows to the Creator

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

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

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

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

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

What You’re Actually Trading For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Need, Want, and Ready — Three Different Conversations

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Hollywood Keeps, What It Loses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both Sides of the Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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I first heard about Mad Realities a year or two ago. They called themselves the MTV of the internet generation, which sounds reductive until you actually look at what they’ve built — unscripted formats designed natively for social media platforms that generated over a billion views last year across just eight shows.

Eight shows. A billion views.

My first reaction to watching this kind of content was judgment. This isn’t storytelling. This has no substance. But I’ve learned to recognize that instinct for what it is — the defensiveness that kicks in after you’ve spent decades building a career and suddenly the skills and instincts you killed yourself to develop are being challenged and downgraded.

The work is pushing through that. Asking what I can learn from it instead of why it doesn’t meet my standards.

That’s why I launched this Substack. So that people like Alice Ma — who are building the systems that will define the next era of entertainment — can illuminate legacy storytellers like me. So we can understand where we still have enormous value and where we have to change. Where there is real opportunity, if we listen.

I reached out to Alice to understand how she’s thinking about all of this. Mad Realities had just brought on CAA as they position themselves as a bridge to Hollywood, working with unscripted divisions and production companies to help them figure out how to build content that actually works in a social-first environment.

After digging into her background and spending a long Zoom together, something else happened. Jeopardy announced they were launching a special YouTube version featuring creators on March 31.

So we ended up spitballing on how she would bring Jeopardy into the social media ecosystem — a thought exercise that turned into something like a playbook for any legacy format that wants to thrive in this era.

But before getting there, it’s worth understanding where she comes from, what she’s actually built, and the underlying principles that made a billion views from a handful of micro-formats possible.

The Bridge Builder

If you watch Mad Realities — poppy, unpretentious formats about bodega cats and pop culture trivia — you might be surprised by Alice Ma’s background. Computer science, political economy, and Arabic at Berkeley. Research in Jerusalem on how narratives coordinate human behavior across borders. The first published investigation into terrorist crowdfunding on Bitcoin. A social venture that earned a medal from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. A core role in ConstitutionDAO, which raised $53 million in seven days from thousands of strangers on the internet to try to buy an original copy of the Constitution at Sotheby’s.

That last one is the key.

ConstitutionDAO proved that decentralized communities could aggregate resources at a scale previously reserved for institutions and billionaires. Alice watched it happen from the inside — and then asked what that same coordination mechanism could do if you pointed it at entertainment.

That’s how Mad Realities was born.

Not a creator who got lucky with a format. A systems thinker who studied how decentralized networks organize capital and behavior and then built a media company on those principles.

Think about Hollywood at its pinnacle — it used to pull minds like this. Now someone with Alice Ma’s toolkit looks at the studio system and sees a machine built for a world that no longer exists. She’s not trying to get into that room. She’s building the next one.

The Team and the Machine

Today the company is Alice and five full-time employees — a head of content, a head of partnerships, two showrunners, and an operations manager. Six people. They’ve done over seven figures in ad revenue, already surpassing last year’s total in the first quarter of 2026, with a pipeline of brand deals that Alice can barely work through fast enough.

When I asked her what she’s building toward: “We’re making a new Hollywood ecosystem. And in the process, we’ll bridge over from previous Hollywood because the best resources, the best people, the best capital, the best know-how — everything is all there. Our strategy has been very deliberately to be the bridge.”

That’s why they signed with CAA. Not because Mad Realities wants to go to Hollywood. Because when a legacy studio calls asking how to evolve, Alice wants them to call her. “It’s less like we’re trying to go to TV. It’s more like we want to create a bridge for people asking, how do I transform in the digital era. We would like them to call us.”

Her ideal partnership: team up with Paramount to bring back MTV with social-first adaptations. Pimp My Ride becomes Pimp My Rideshare. Paramount puts up money and ad sales infrastructure. Mad Realities supplies the internet-native creative process. Both sides get something they can’t build alone.

The Business Model

The engine underneath is worth understanding. Mad Realities functions as a digital publisher. Brands buy across the entire network of shows. Mad Realities handles integration, guarantees views, delivers a predictable CPM. Gen Z sees through paid ads instantly. But a brand integration inside a show the audience loves — that’s a different animal.

The brands with the biggest budgets have a problem most people don’t appreciate: they physically can’t efficiently spend their marketing allocation. The channels they relied on are giving diminishing returns. They need new pipes. Mad Realities is building those pipes, one format at a time.

I wrote about Broadway Video building the definitive machine for comedy inside legacy media’s infrastructure. Alice Ma is building the equivalent for unscripted entertainment inside the infrastructure that replaced it.

Her priorities, in order: ad sales, live events, commerce, books, then TV. The “books” surprised me. A Shop Cats coffee table book isn’t merch. It’s brand permanence. “It lives on my coffee table,” she said. “It’s like I’m living rent-free in someone’s head. How do you make an IP long-lasting and enduring and iconic?”

Television sits at the bottom. Not because she doesn’t value it. Because she sees it as marketing for the IP, not the business itself.

The Gap Between Creators and Capital

Her vision at scale: 20 to 30 hit IP formats. Tentpole originals launching every spring and fall. The infrastructure to get bold ideas funded, even sight unseen.

“The curse of the creator economy is that no one has figured out how to fund a bold new idea,” Alice said. “You can be a guy in your room making vlogs for five years and become a big YouTube creator, but you can’t convince someone to give you a million dollars to try something different. And that limits what types of ideas it can be.”

The gap between what creators can do alone and what requires real capital is the structural problem she’s trying to solve. Not by raising venture money for its own sake. By building hit IP that makes the capital chase her. She watched the 2010s digital publishers raise enormous rounds and scale for scale’s sake without hits to justify the investment. They all flamed out. Her instinct runs opposite: stay efficient, keep ROI high, let hit IP attract capital on favorable terms.

But she’s clear-eyed about what neither side can build alone. In our conversation, I shared a core belief of mine: for the creator economy to really scale, it’s going to need Hollywood. Not Hollywood the system, but Hollywood the people and the knowledge. The best craft, the best production instincts — those still live inside legacy. What legacy doesn’t have is the internet-native creative process that makes content work inside discovery algorithms.

Alice agreed. But she also sharpened it: “My categorization of what we’re doing would be that we’re making new Hollywood. A new Hollywood ecosystem. And in the process, we’ll bridge over from previous Hollywood because the best resources, the best people, the best capital, the best know-how — everything is all there.”

The Shape of K-Pop

To understand how Alice builds anything, you have to understand the theory she’s building from.

“The shape of K-pop is interesting because it mirrors the shape of sports,” she told me. “It’s extremely participatory, and it’s very fan-driven. You stan a certain group, and you follow them, and they win awards, and they compete against other groups, and you care when yours wins over theirs. But then so much of it is fan-driven. People are constantly making fan videos, and that’s how people engage with and find out about and participate in K-pop. The audience is very deeply a part of it. And can go really deep.”

That depth is the key. The engine doesn’t run on casual listeners. It runs on people who are all the way in — making content, organizing, evangelizing — and then pulling new people into the orbit.

What makes K-pop structurally distinct is the infrastructure built around that depth. Agencies (as they are called) don’t just produce music and hope fans show up. They build proprietary platforms — like HYBE’s Weverse — designed as moats where every interaction is tracked, analyzed, and monetized.

Music functions as a marketing funnel. The real product is the parasocial connection itself. Weverse alone has over 113 million app downloads and roughly 10 million monthly active users, 90 percent from outside South Korea. It’s not a fan page. It’s a closed-loop operating system for fandom.

I’ve written about the difference between building a moat and building a wall. K-pop agencies are the best moat builders in entertainment — identity-driven ecosystems where the fan relationship itself is the product. Western entertainment is still catching up.

And then there’s the network layer. Agencies cultivate super fan nodes — individuals and pages with outsized influence — and intentionally disseminate information through them. Private groups, early access, built relationships. The nodes transmit to each other, and suddenly the entire global fan base knows that Lisa got a haircut. It functions like a distributed communications network, with the agency as the signal and the fans as the infrastructure.

How Alice Applies It

Alice is careful about where the analogy maps and where it doesn’t. Not every cultural property is a cult of personality. But the participation architecture translates everywhere.

“What you can apply from the K-pop analogy is the ability for anyone to play and participate,” she said. “In K-pop, people set up fan clubs. It’s actually very fan-driven marketing. They’re the ones doing the crazy stuff.”

This is the lens through which she evaluates every format Mad Realities builds. Not: will this get views? But: does this have a shape that lets the audience participate, go deep, and do the distribution work themselves?

I’ve written about the distinction between fans and community, between viewers and inhabitants. Alice’s version of the same insight is more operational. She’s not diagnosing the gap. She’s building the formats that close it.

The Shows and How They Work

Mad Realities targets subcultures with passionate, pre-existing fandoms and builds formats that channel energy that’s already there. They’re not creating demand. They’re giving it a home.

Alice’s language for this: “We love formats that are synonymous with an idea that a lot of people can experience.” Not a niche. Not a trend. An idea so universal that the format becomes the default expression of it.

Shop Cats is the breakout. Someone on the team noticed that across bodega content on the internet, the comments kept saying the same thing: stop talking, show me the cat. Nobody owned the category. They piloted it, it exploded, and now it’s bilingual — captioned in Spanish from the start. When TikTok faced its ban scare, they started posting on RedNote with Chinese captions and became one of the top creators on the platform. Families DM asking for a bodega cat walking tour map. They’re scrolling through episodes trying to find addresses. The show has escaped the screen and entered people’s physical lives.

That’s what “synonymous with an idea” looks like in practice. Shop Cats didn’t invent the love of bodega cats. It became the thing you watch when that love needs a format.

Hollywood IQ is pop culture trivia where the audience plays along. The format is the participation. People watch to the end because they’re competing in their heads. When you watch Hollywood IQ, you’re not spectating. You’re in the game.

Proof of Love — the origin show — was a live dating format where the audience voted on who appeared in the next episode. Art gallery tapings in Soho, word of mouth only, sold out Webster Hall for the finale. Live events and audience participation baked in from day one.

The live event muscle has only gotten stronger. Shop Cats Live is a spin-off comedy show where the audience can adopt actual cats between sets, featuring rising stand-up talent. Two hundred people bought tickets on a Wednesday night at the Georgia Room. “We are finding audiences crave live, real experiences,” Alice told me. “It is a key component of our flywheel.”

That flywheel — views attract brands, brands fund production, production generates IP, IP creates opportunities for live events and commerce, all of which deepens the fan relationship and drives more views — is the same architecture I wrote about with Teton Ridge. Each show is a digital vertical with its own ecosystem.

But the most interesting thing about Mad Realities isn’t any individual show. It’s the development system underneath all of them.

A pitch at Mad Realities is a name and a logline. Five loglines from a potential showrunner tells Alice whether they’re creatively sharp enough and chronically online enough to run a show. If someone can’t generate five good names and loglines on the spot, they’re probably a line producer, not a creative showrunner.

Before piloting a new format, the team creates burner accounts on social media and immerses themselves in the target community. If they’re considering a show about cats, they like cat videos until the algorithm drops them deep into cat-focused content. From there, they study what people are talking about, what the existing content looks like, where the gaps are, what’s popular, what behaviors define the community. It’s ethnographic research conducted through the algorithm itself. By the time they shoot a pilot, they already have a granular understanding of whether the format fits a real audience’s existing behavior.

A season is 20 to 30 episodes treated as a “public pilot.” They release and record new episodes in parallel, evolving the format live based on what’s working. The opposite of the legacy cycle where everything is shot before anyone sees a frame.

Out of 15 to 20 pilots, Mad Realities has two long-running hits and a half dozen more shows with growing communities. But Alice believes six or seven of those pilots could have been hits. They didn’t die from audience indifference. They died from resource constraints. Six people can only run so many shows. The bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s capacity. Six people can only run so many shows.

The entire development cycle that takes Hollywood two to three years — and a one-in-twenty shot at a greenlight — happens inside a single season. The ratio isn’t the point, the velocity is.

Alice put it plainly: “Not all stuff that is viral is good. But the stuff that is good and is viral, if you can figure out how to also make it good on TV, the flywheel is extra powerful. It compounds.”

She’s aware that the DNA of what works in short form doesn’t automatically translate into longer formats. I’ve written about this — in The DNA of a Hit I argued that digital blockbusters scale through an emotional core concept, a one-word DNA that everything grows from but that each format must bring something new and different while respecting that broadly appealing DNA.

Dude Perfect’s is wonder. MrBeast’s is survival. Chicken Shop Date’s is vulnerability. If you can pull any single moment from the thing and the whole world would regenerate from it, the DNA is strong enough to build an ecosystem around — to scale across formats, surfaces, and participation layers.

Alice operates from the same instinct.

The Charlie D’Amelio case is instructive. People liked Charlie because she was a normal girl in Connecticut. The Hulu show turned her into a Kardashian, and the audience rejected it because it violated the core of why she resonated. The internet version honored the DNA. The TV version screen-printed over it.

As Alice put it: it was “completely different from the core DNA of why it hit.”

Extension has to grow a different tree from the same seed. Not plant a different seed entirely.

The Keys: What Makes Social-First Formats Work

Here’s what sits underneath everything Alice builds. These aren’t her words exactly — they’re principles I’m extracting from watching how she thinks, how she evaluates formats, and how she talks about what works and what doesn’t. Call them the conditions that should be honored for a social-first format to have a chance at becoming a cultural property rather than disposable content.

1. Be synonymous with a category people already live in. Don’t invent a niche. Find the existing behavior and own it. Shop Cats didn’t create the love of bodega cats. Hollywood IQ didn’t invent trivia night. They became the definitive format for something people were already doing. When the format is synonymous with the idea, the audience doesn’t need to be convinced. They just need to be shown this is the version worth watching.

2. The audience is playing, not watching. Every successful Mad Realities format has a participation mechanic — voting, playing along, visiting locations, quizzing friends. The fan does the work.

3. Every touchpoint is part of the show. Social media isn’t the marketing for the show. It is the show. The Instagram grid, the pinned posts, the comment replies, the DMs, the coffee table book — that’s all the experience. If someone is following you, they’re a fan. Design every touchpoint to tell them what you want them to know. Then they’ll do the distribution work for you.

4. Protect the DNA. Every successful IP has a core identity — a reason people fell in love with it in the first place. Extending it into new formats only works if the new expression honors that core. The moment it violates it, the audience doesn’t just lose interest. They feel betrayed.

5. Characters, not influencers. The formats that cut through right now feature real people who are not performing their realness but simply are real. Alice points to Jury Duty — Gen Z loves it because the hero is a normal, genuinely good person, and that sincerity is the contrast to the cynicism everywhere else online. The moment your cast starts performing for the algorithm rather than being in the moment, the thing that made the format special dies.

6. Test fast. Evolve live. Film and release in parallel. Treat a full season as a public pilot. Post the pilot even if it bombs — accountability over preciousness. You don’t need to get it right before you ship. You need to ship so you can get it right.

These six conditions aren’t a recipe. Plenty of things that meet all six still fail. But I’d wager that things have rarely succeeded at scale on social media that violate more than a couple of these.

Which brings us to the structural problem that sits underneath all of this: the shift that makes these conditions necessary in the first place.

From Scarcity to Ubiquity

For most of Hollywood’s history, scarcity wasn’t just a constraint. It was the strategy. Shows aired at a certain hour, events happened once, and if you missed them, they were gone. That scarcity created value and ritual. It gave content weight simply by being hard to access.

That logic doesn’t hold in a system where attention is continuous and culturally mediated through feeds that never turn off.

In an interview published last week by Natalie Jarvey on Like & Subscribe, Jenny Storms, Chief Marketing Officer of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, described how even the Olympics had to confront this. What was once the ultimate example of scarcity had quietly become a liability.

“In the past, scarcity was its special sauce,” Jenny said. “But in the world where social is everything, being part of the cultural conversation every day is important. Only happening once every four years, it became out of sight, out of mind.”

The response was structural. NBC credentialed creators with real on-the-ground access and let them tell stories in their own voices. They helped Olympic athletes build their own social brands. And they stretched the franchise into a year-round presence — seeding content eighteen months before Paris and now operating on an 852-day calendar leading into LA 2028.

Scarcity built the value of the Olympics. But a participation-driven, creator-powered, year-round ecosystem is what now sustains it.

That same pressure applies to every legacy entertainment brand. A show built for scheduled viewing and clear boundaries between when it exists and when it doesn’t — that structure creates authority but also distance. In a social environment, distance becomes irrelevance.

This is where most legacy adaptations go wrong. They hear “be everywhere” and translate it into volume — more clips, more posts, more surface-level activity disconnected from the brand’s core identity. That’s not ubiquity. It’s dilution.

Ubiquity only works when it’s structured — when every expression of the brand shares a common DNA but expresses itself differently depending on the surface. Presence that compounds versus presence that fragments.

So when Jeopardy announced its YouTube launch while we were mid-conversation, the thought exercise wrote itself.

Jeopardy: A Thought Exercise

This isn’t a critique. Jeopardy is iconic, and Alice believes the younger generation genuinely thinks it’s cool. But iconic today doesn’t guarantee iconic in twenty years.

“I would actually say that Jeopardy is still iconic to a 25-year-old today,” she told me. “I just don’t know if they will still be iconic for the five-year-olds today when they grow up. And what a shame to have made something so ubiquitous and not keep it going.”

The question is not whether Jeopardy needs to change what it is. It doesn’t. The question is whether it’s willing to build an ecosystem around it.

This is the key distinction. The instinct most legacy brands have is to ask: how do we make the show work on social media?

That’s the wrong question.

The right question is: how do we take the DNA of this show and build a living, breathing universe of touchpoints around it — social, live, physical, interactive — where each one reinforces the others and the audience has a role to play, not just a seat to sit in?

That’s what Alice does for a living. So we applied her framework.

And when we looked at Jeopardy’s current digital presence through that lens — the touchpoints, the grid, the YouTube strategy, the brand identity across surfaces — what struck us wasn’t that they were doing it wrong. It’s that there’s so much available runway they haven’t used yet.

The DNA (What You Protect)

Jeopardy’s superpower is smart, normal people competing at a high level. Not celebrities. Not influencers. The anti-clout show. In a culture saturated with cynicism and performance, Jeopardy is increasingly rare — real people being genuinely brilliant. Alice compares it to Jury Duty, which Gen Z loves for the same reason: the hero is a normal, good person, and that sincerity cuts through everything else online.

This is the DNA. Any internet adaptation that violates it — random influencers brought on for follower counts, contestants performing for the algorithm — would, in Alice’s words, “desecrate the institution.” The rigorous casting filter isn’t a limitation. It’s a feature.

Everything that follows is designed to amplify that DNA, not replace it.

Phase 1: De-Slopify

Alice looked at Jeopardy’s digital presence and drew a sharp line: retro Jeopardy — the classic aesthetic, the iconic font, the game board — is cool. Young people respect the institution. But the current social presence doesn’t look like retro Jeopardy. It looks like generic television marketing. Her advice: “De-slopify your socials.” Keep the iconic parts. Strip the rest. Specifically:

• YouTube thumbnails that actually compel a click (Alice’s verdict on the current ones: “They just aren’t anything”)

• TikTok edits that show contestants’ faces in the first three seconds — split-screen, real humans, not just the game board

• A community manager who actually responds to comments and builds relationships

• A brand identity refresh that leans into the retro cool and strips the cheesy 2020s TV energy

None of this is expensive. Alice suspects it would multiply reach significantly from basic social-native standards alone.

Phase 2: Character-Forward, Not Influencer-Forward

Jeopardy already has what most internet shows spend years trying to build — genuinely compelling, relatable people doing something impressive. The digital strategy just doesn’t let you see them:

• Weekly photo carousels of contestants — yearbook-style portraits, tagged, co-posted. Most of these people have modest followings and would be thrilled. Their friends and families amplify it organically.

• When someone goes on a streak, treat it like a tentpole — surge social, push it into newsletters and substacks, make the streak a cultural event that draws casual viewers in

• Guest appearances like the recent Rebecca Black episode — internet-literate, funny, and genuinely reverent of the institution. Not influencers chasing clout.

Alice is adamant on this last point: if she started seeing Jeopardy contestants trying to become influencers, the institution would feel corrupted. The casting filter that keeps the show full of normal, brilliant people is the thing that makes it special. The internet strategy should showcase that, not undermine it.

Phase 3: The Bar Trivia Play

The format is already synonymous with trivia. The question is why the brand isn’t everywhere trivia already happens:

• Send Jeopardy trivia kits to thousands of bars. Original questions. Everyone plays the same game that week.

• Tag Jeopardy if you win. Winners post, friends repost, people argue about the questions, more people show up next week. Every winning post is organic content.

• Producers visibly scout from the tags — suddenly the path onto the show feels open and democratic. Golden ticket energy.

• Take it further: city-by-city brackets. One champion per city. Bracket-style competition. A shot at the actual show.

The casting stays rigorous. The aspiration to get on becomes a participation mechanic that lives across the country, every week, essentially for free.

And make the front door visible.

Put the rules of how to get on Jeopardy front and center on Instagram and the website — make it a pinned post. People love open auditions. They love the chance to win a shot at being on the big shiny stage. Right now, most fans don’t even know what the path looks like. Let them see the door, even if the door is hard to walk through.

Phase 4: Expand the Universe Without Changing the Show

The core broadcast stays untouched. Around it:

• A social-first spin-off format — bite-sized, phone-native, genuinely different from the broadcast show, not a confusing three-minute clip that lives in no-man’s-land

• Behind-the-scenes content: hometown tours with contestants, “where are they now” with past champions, a documentary series about the clue writers

• IRL pop-ups — Jeopardy on the road, live in bars, live on campuses

• A Roblox game — fan-made versions already exist, so the demand is proven

• Cultural artifacts for superfans — merch that signals belonging, not just consumption. A Jeopardy streetwear drop. The right collaboration with the right brand could turn the retro-cool institutional identity into something people wear, collect, and display.

• Monetize social content directly — let brands participate in the social-native content even if the cable show keeps its own ad structure. The extra cashflow justifies the investment in quality and creates a self-sustaining loop: better social content attracts brands, brand revenue funds more social content, more social content grows the audience

One structural note across all of this: ubiquity is the baseline, but it needs spikes. One or two tentpole moments a year — not so many they cause fatigue, but real events that concentrate attention and give the always-on presence something to build toward. A live championship event. A celebrity tournament with real stakes. A bar trivia national finals. The tentpole gives the everyday content a reason to exist and gives casual fans a reason to pay attention right now.

“It’s not like we’re trying to turn it into the Bachelor,” Alice said. “I think people like that it’s normal people who don’t seem like they’re there for clout.”

That’s the DNA of the show. Every phase and touchpoint sprouts from it.

What Humility Unlocks

A caveat before the closing note.

Everything laid out here is a thought exercise, and thought exercises have the luxury of ignoring the walls that real operators hit daily. Jeopardy has contractual obligations, network relationships, union rules, and institutional dynamics that constrain how fast anything can change.

Mad Realities is six people generating a billion views across eight formats because they understand the shape of what works on the internet right now. Participatory. Identity-forming. Format-driven. Fan-powered. Every touchpoint part of the show. Every show synonymous with something the audience already lives in.

That shape is not proprietary. It’s what Alice is offering to build for every legacy company willing to walk across the bridge.

Jeopardy is one of the most beloved brands in American culture. It doesn’t need to change what it is. It needs to extend where it lives.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: talking to Alice, studying her work, it holds up a mirror. I look at what we’re building at my own company — the shows we’re developing, the communities we’re trying to grow, the relationship between our content and our audience — and I have to ask myself the hard questions.

How much of what we’re doing is built for the infrastructure that exists now versus the infrastructure we grew up in?

How seriously are we taking participation, not as a marketing layer but as an architectural principle? Are we building for fans or for inhabitants?

I opened this piece by admitting that my first instinct when I see content like Mad Realities is judgment. That’s the honest knee jerk reaction for a lot of us in legacy. But the opportunity on the other side of that is enormous — not to abandon what we know, but to combine it with what people like Alice understand.

The craft and storytelling instincts that legacy built over a hundred years are still valuable. They’re just not sufficient anymore.

The bridge goes both ways. Legacy has something she needs. She has something legacy can’t build alone. The question is whether enough people on both sides are willing to walk across it.

Someone is going to own the shape of what works.

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A Note From The Team: Team Open Gardens is on the road this week. We’ll be returning next week with a new Deep Dive! We’ve decided to repost one of our more widely read pieces that has remained relevant despite the countless shifts and changes throughout the industry at large. See you next week!

At 3Pas Studios, we’ve always made our living the old-fashioned way: pitching studios, selling shows, spending years getting something green lit.

That model still works — sometimes. But not enough. So we’re now financing our own shows directly for social platforms. Not an experiment. Not a hobby. This is the real plan: big talent with real online communities, clean digital formats, made cheap — but made. No waiting for permission. There’s a lot more to it. But that’s the headline.

We still love our legacy business. We’re still playing that game.

Open Gardens is my lab notebook for these new horizons.

Today’s entry is for every legacy producer, writer, or director who wants to make their first real YouTube show — and needs an honest roadmap for how to actually pay for it.

The Producer’s Dilemma

Imagine this: you’ve produced network pilots, indie features, maybe a streaming hit. Now you want to break into YouTube for real — not just a sizzle, but a show. It should feel premium. It can’t take two years to make. It can’t cost your entire overhead budget. Probably can’t cost your catering budget on your last movie if we’re being real.

So: how do you get that first YouTube show made? And how do you make money — or at least not lose your shirt — doing it?

A quick reminder course here… You’re used to:

• Enough buyers to sell and deliver a few shows or movies a year.

• Maybe a first-look deal covering rent.

• Funds that actually bet on legacy media.

• Indie Feature Models that Some (Crazy) Investor would believe in

• Profit downstream: syndication, licensing, second windows.

And the new reality is:

• Legacy buyers want risk-free hits, not speculative slates.

• Equity isn’t chasing movies and TV the way it did.

• Audiences are on social, watching creators who deliver now.

• If you could find the money its impossible to hit legacy costs and make that money back on YouTube alone.

• One digital show won’t pay back legacy budgets.

Tough truths? Nobody wants to bankroll your YouTube series like a network used to bankroll your drama pilot. But that’s not the end of the story.

How Successful Creators Actually Do It

Creators don’t wait for permission. They build formats, test ideas cheaply, and create repeatable systems that keep the lights on.

Take Corridor Digital as one (very successful) example:They didn’t chase one sponsor for one viral short. They built two engines:

• Corridor Digital: polished shorts designed for big splash moments.

• Corridor Crew: consistent, lower-budget weekly content — behind-the-scenes, VFX react, audience talkback.

Revenue mix:

Brand integrations (~40%)
YouTube AdSense (~33%)
Memberships on their own site (~28%)
Throw in merch, licensing, occasional client gigs.

This pattern is everywhere: volume and cadence plus multiple revenue streams. Not every creator sells merch or memberships — but all of them spread risk across multiple income buckets. It’s not so different from a healthy legacy studio.

The takeaway: One YouTube show won’t build you a sustainable business. But you still need to get that first one made — and use it to build the rest.

The Good News: Investment Models Are Evolving Fast

You won’t get Netflix money to make a single YouTube series — but the smart money is coming back, just not the way it did before. The catch? Your show needs to plug into something bigger than itself.

Beyond everything I’m reading about this, here’s why I’m sensing the shift: three conversations I’ve had recently — vague on purpose, because, well I’m not a reporter and these were private conversations.

But the pattern is what matters.

One: A veteran film executive is quietly building a software platform for creators: take one piece of longform content, automatically spin out all the short versions for every platform, A/B test them in real time using AI, then re-edit for maximum reach. Call it picks and shovels for the next digital gold rush. But they need content to run through their platform so they are funding shows.

Two: A major creator company is gearing up to fund shows directly: fifty-fifty revenue split with creators (legacy and new media), shared IP once costs are recouped. But here’s the real twist: they’re programming to match actual audience behavior — studying what kinds of content people watch at different moments and designing shows to slot right into those habits. They have the data and they are programming for it.

Three: A savvy digital entrepreneur just raised capital to build a C3 play aimed at untapped commerce categories where creators haven’t yet flooded the zone. The model is simple but potent: pick the right category, build the product, partner with the creator who can reach that audience, make the content that sparks the community — and let that community drive the commerce. Not a brand-new blueprint, but some of the details make it unique and where he’s applying it makes it especially interesting.

Three different coffee chats — one unmistakable trend (besides the fact that they are in early stages still): new money is going to flow in, but it will flow through bigger, more integrated systems. Each of these bets is about scale, repeatability, and building whole business models — not funding lone passion projects.

And new systems and funds will emerge — but they chase digital studios with audience in place or creators with enormous communities.

Because there is no real way to build financial models based on revenue generated, a lot of this will probably including hedging with other revenue streams (like commerce) or pre-negotiation syndication on paid platforms. Or the Nebula formula where the investor owns the platform.

Legacy film and TV built their success by erecting walled gardens — clear revenue scaffolding that let everyone plug and play. Social media blew a hole in that wall. Now, the scaffolding is being rebuilt in real time, but it’s infinitely more dynamic — new platforms, new workflows, new layers of commerce glued onto attention.

The takeaway: money will come, but not to bankroll a show in isolation.

It’s there to build systems — and your show has to fit neatly into a system that looks like it might last. Most won’t. Some will catch fire. Bet wisely.

Colin and Samir on their podcast last week named content financing as one of the three trends coming out of Cannes Lions. They called it “deficit financing.” It’s an interesting use of a TV term — traditionally, deficit financing means the studio pays part of the show’s production cost up front (the “deficit”) because the network’s license fee doesn’t cover it, betting they’ll make a profit later through syndication and other rights.

I actually like how they’re applying it to digital: intentionally or not it captures the idea of taking outside investment for partial ownership, skipping fees, keeping costs lean, and betting on the back end. In this version, the deficit is the hard cost of the show, and the labor and talent costs are the creators’ “investment.”

Their point was that there’s more and more conversation about how to finance these premium shows. They also made a great point about how all this focus on YouTube is going to further transform what YouTube looks like and TV generally. Part of that transformation will be more and more legacy creators working their way into the space.

As YouTube pushes more premium viewing (we’ve all heard that stat— 45% of US YouTube watch time is on TV sets and how they want to increase production value of creators), more legacy talent wants in. But real premium takes time and budget. Even top creators know: scripted content can pull you away from your core and has no guaranteed upside (unless you’re Dhar Man and that’s what you do).

And the issue again is around modeling revenue.

Because there isn’t any one way to make money, there isn’t any scaffolding that guarantees specific returns. The creator economy was built on sweat equity and low costs. Now as we talk about ramping up in premium how do we get there?

Kinigra Deon, like so many successful creators, is a great counter-example: she tests with shorts, pilots what hits, then expands. Sometimes, she cuts a hit series into a feature-length movie later. Her edge? She owns the audience so she can test before she invests too much time. Legacy creators don’t often have that capability because they didn’t control their audience through social platforms.

Add to that: many legacy teams don’t know how to make a polished short for $2,000 or $10,000 or for that matter $100,000 an episode. Plus, union realities in the US. (We’ll unpack that in a future post.)

So: for legacy producers, the puzzle is this — you can’t pay your normal teams normal rates, you still need polish, and you have to bet on a small upside that might only pay off if you can do it again and again.

Don’t Piss Into the Ocean

A slick YouTube show no one watches is just digital landfill.

Step one: leverage other people’s distribution first. Drop the pilot on a creator’s channel, license it to a big Facebook page, cross-post on TikTok in snack-able chunks. This builds audience and validates the concept before you sink budget into growing your own hub.

Partner with a creator who has an audience. If you’re credible, you have currency. Dan Jinks won an Oscar; Nebula gave him a show on their platform to oversee because of that. If David Bernad (The White Lotus) wanted to make micro-dramas tomorrow, big creators would answer the call.

You’re not David Bernad?

Use IP smartly. Lifetime has built an empire reimagining tabloid stories for quick-turn TV movies. Allegedly a Luigi Mangioni microdrama is being made. Not advocating for sensationalism or exploitation, making the point that IP is everywhere and grabbing life rights could be a point of leverage to bring a legacy name creator and a new media creator together and get your first win with a huge package and something that marries the power, prestige and know-how of legacy creators with new creators. Or maybe even skip the legacy side… and just go right to the creators. Depends on what you want to make and who you know.

And speaking of IP, bring something big to socials. As I spoke about previously what would Miami Vice look like re-imagined for the digital area. Hook something big and make it social first (easier said than done, but when has our job been easy?)

Look for overlooked communities too: One Minute Documentaries posted a short about a kid obsessed with crocheting — 10 million views. Sometimes, one passionate OpenVerse (as I call uncontrolled communities) can outperform a mainstream pitch.

Also: legacy TV stars with huge online fandoms but who haven’t really leaned into the creator space yet — gold mine. Alyssa Milano, for instance, already has a podcast (Sorry Not Sorry), but many stars like her could reconnect with fans through fresh, smart digital shows beyond just audio. Think of Alyssa (4 million followers on Instagram) trying to survive a weekend using only 90s tech and rules in a playful unscripted series — it’s nostalgia you can feel, not just remember. And by the way — this is a terrible pitch; the real move is to find out what Alyssa actually wants to do. You get the point…

And always think beyond the show: How does one show build a flywheel that sustains a community, more shows, and eventually commerce?

Now you have your show idea, a partner in the creator space and hutzpah to go make it. How the fuck do you pay for it? Not six months from now when all these funds we mentioned above go online and are chasing content (inside their business models) but right now…

Show Me the Money: How to Actually Fund That First YouTube Show

Let’s break down the current ways investment flows into creator shows. Some of these will feel out of reach for a legacy producer flying solo. Others open up only if you partner with the right creator. None of them is a magic wand — but to beat a dead horse, getting anything made was never easy, even back when the scaffolding was solid.

Back-Catalog Licensing, Revenue Advances & Revenue-Based Financing

Spotter will license a creator’s older YouTube videos for a lump sum — think “Bowie Bonds” for digital (Bowie Bonds were a way for David Bowie to raise cash upfront by securitizing future royalties). The creator keeps ownership, Spotter takes ad revenue for a set term (usually five years). So far, Spotter has deployed close to $1B to channels like MrBeast and Dude Perfect. Typical deals run around $1.5M, but range from $15K to multi-million packages for top-tier talent.

Jellysmack runs a similar play, but with a twist: they repurpose old videos across Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and more, squeezing extra revenue from every platform. They’ve committed $500M so far to buy up back catalogs and grow them outward.

Creative Juice, backed by MrBeast amongst others, offers “Juice Funds” — advances from $10K to over $250K, repaid as a cut of the channel’s future revenue. No bank loans, no personal guarantees — performance pays it off.

Fundmates gives creators up to 14× their monthly AdSense upfront, with flexible repayments that adjust based on how well their channel performs. They even throw in mentoring on thumbnails, pacing, and titles to protect their investment.

Breeze does the simplest version: quick cash advances against expected AdSense, no ownership strings, no surprises.

These models rely on one thing: a real, monetizable back catalog or a strong, predictable revenue stream. You, the legacy producer, probably don’t have that on your own — but a creator might. And here’s the question you’re already asking: Why wouldn’t they do this alone? Why do they need me?

Turns out, some do want help. Here’s a real example straight from an Open Gardens reader: a seasoned legacy comedy producer tried to sell a show to a streamer starring a giant digital science-type creator. The creator knew his sketches killed on YouTube, but the producer knew how to craft TV-caliber comedy. They spotted a white space: repackage the creator’s science personality into a broader, scripted comedic format — a new lane for his 20 million followers. The legacy buyers said no — as the saying goes, all the pioneers were slaughtered… as this was a long time ago (like two years…)

Fast forward to now. That same producer can help sell the creator’s back catalog. The creator gets some upfront cash and puts part of it into funding a new show that legacy and digital build together. Many big creators hate dealing with the business side. They want a partner to handle deals, taxes, and production headaches. Be that partner and you have a seat at the table. Go find these creators. You’d be surprised how many work alone and crave guidance.

Fan Investment & Tokenization

There are heavyweight crowdfunding portals like Republic (which helped Robert Rodriguez raise $2 million for his Brass Knuckle action slate), WeFunder (which funded The Chosen), and StartEngine (backed by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary). But these are best suited for big multi-project slates or company-level capital raises — they want the whole scaffolding, not just a one-off show.

If you’re a creator looking to raise true investor capital — not just tips, merch sales, or patron perks — for a single social-first series, you need platforms purpose-built for turning your fans into actual investors who share in your success.

This is not Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Substack, OnlyFans, Fanhouse, Fansly, Locals, Liberapay, Tipeee, or the typical perks-and-access crowdfunds. This is regulated investment crowdfunding for creators, where the audience backs your work in exchange for real revenue sharing.

Here are some to know:

• GigaStar Market: SEC-approved crowdfunding for YouTubers. Fans buy shares of your future AdSense earnings for a set term. Record raise: $1.3M in nine days.

• Everbloom: Fans buy digital tokens tied to a share of your revenue, plus perks and possible resale value. Smart contracts handle payouts automatically.

• FanVestor: Fans invest directly in a celebrity’s new venture — albums, tours, product lines — and earn a true financial stake, not just early access.

• ClipStake: Fans stake money upfront for a planned video and get a slice of its AdSense after it launches.

• OverSubscribe: The one to watch for legacy talent — a regulated “Creator Public Offering” where fans can invest as little as $50 for a share of your future income. Up to $5 million per raise.

I’ll break down why this could be a serious legacy bridge in a future Open Gardens deep dive — stay tuned. More at the end of this article about that.

Grants & Tax Credits

Creators can tap non-dilutive money from governments — and this is exactly where legacy producers should play offense, not defense.

In traditional film and TV, rebates and tax credits often mean the difference between a greenlit and dead project. We know how to structure budgets, chase local spend, and tick the paperwork boxes to secure that free money. The good news? Some of this could apply to digital-first content now — but most creator-led teams don’t know how to navigate it. That’s your edge.

International Incentives

• Canada’s CMF and IPF: Longtime backers of web series and digital drama — six-figure grants are routine if you meet Canadian content rules. A savvy co-pro with a Canadian partner can unlock serious value.

• UK: The Arts Council, BFI, and the Create Growth Programme often support online shorts, niche docs, and culturally focused digital series. Perfect for prestige mini-shows or local interest stories.

• Europe: National film boards in France, Germany, the Nordics, and elsewhere have funded educational YouTube channels and cross-border web projects for years. Co-pro rules can be a maze — but legacy producers excel at co-pro paperwork.

• Australia, Singapore, Korea: Big push in these markets to export digital-first cultural content. Grants often come with built-in marketing or festival support.

I didn’t find any state subsidies in the US. But I also didn’t dig that hard. You should. Maybe there’s opportunity stateside already (Readers: please hit us up with any info on this for US digital productions)

The real point: Most indie creators can’t juggle the forms, compliance checks, or co-production structures that come with these incentives. Legacy producers can. Use that skill set to stack rebates and international grants the same way you’d layer tax credits and soft money on an indie feature.

Another arbitrage — if you have experience producing off shore— in Latin America for example, you might be able to stretch US digital budgets into meaningful content spends. (And yes, we’ve done this at 3pas and are doing more).

The Bigger Truth: Make One Great Show — But Plan Beyond It

One show alone won’t replace your studio deal. It’s the bridge — the test case that proves you can work in this sandbox and keep your shirt on.

Think like Corridor Digital: they didn’t just drop one polished short and pray for virality. They piloted smartly, cheaply, but with enough craft to stand out. Then they built a repeatable format around it — a system that turns out videos consistently, hits multiple revenue lines, and owns the audience directly.

You’re here to build the scaffolding around the hit — the format you can rinse and repeat, the sponsor-friendly segments, the behind-the-scenes spin-offs, the community Discord that keeps fans sticky, the newsletter that converts followers into paying members.

A single YouTube show is a proof of concept; the second proves it wasn’t a fluke, the third proves you can translate your skills from legacy to new media consistently and bob’s your uncle. You can build to scale.

The creators who last don’t chase viral one-offs — they build ecosystems.

You know how to develop franchises and spin IP into toys and remakes — same muscle, just new bones. So make that first show tight, make it native to the platform, make it cheap enough to fail gracefully — but design every frame to be the first brick in the next ten projects you’ll make once the system works.

Own your audience. Own your pipeline. Own your upside. That’s the bigger truth.

What’s Next: AI, Cheap Costs, and the Fight for Control

High-end scripted is still expensive, and unions still matter in the US. But the cost curve is bending: AI tools will compress budgets in ways we can barely see yet. Someone will make the next Game of Thrones for the price of an indie short — and it’s not far off. But it will take SOME resources and there will be investors to back them.

If you take investor money, remember: they might want control. Read the fine print. Protect your IP. And if you’re partnering with creators, protect their creativity too — it’s the heartbeat of the whole bet.

As I hinted above, I see some potential in one specific platform: OverSubscribe. They actually reached out to me about raising capital for Open Gardens itself. We’re still in early growth here, but it hit me — why not try it? Why not run a raise to accelerate where we were headed: podcasting, more social media, expanded output — and whether we hit the goal or not, share the whole process openly so everyone learns?

So next week, we’ll deep dive on OverSubscribe — and why I think it might be the bridge legacy and creator worlds have been waiting for.

Stay tuned.

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I occasionally write a deep dive called Nobody Asked Me, where I pitch big ideas to companies that did not invite me into the room, have no obligation to listen, and are more than successful enough to ignore me entirely. Still, the ground under all of us is moving.

Almost a year ago I published a thought exercise about Miami Vice, exploring what I might do with a legendary legacy brand in the open garden. At the time it was purely speculative because nobody was actually rebooting Miami Vice.

Lately, while working through marketing plans on some of our own shows, I’ve been thinking about that piece again. The more I do this, the more it feels like marketing isn’t separate from the show anymore. The DNA of the story starts showing up everywhere in different ways. It’s really just the same creative process expressed across different platforms, each one expanding the world of the story and growing a community at the center of it.

Now someone is rebooting Baywatch, and the choices they’re making deserve attention.

Fox Cast the Internet

Fox has assembled what may be the most internet-native cast in the history of broadcast television. Shay Mitchell and Noah Beck lead the charge with 35 million Instagram and 33 million TikTok followers respectively, with Beck also holding the distinction of starring in Tubi’s most-watched original film franchise. Livvy Dunne brings more than 15 million combined followers as a former LSU gymnast and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover model. Brooks Nader and Stephen Amell round out the ensemble, with Amell anchoring the show as the lead, Hobie Buchannon. Their combined social reach now exceeds 112 million. With McG directing the pilot and the original creators returning as executive producers, the series begins filming in Venice Beach this month.

On paper this may be the most ambitious legacy reboot strategy television has attempted in years. It combines a globally iconic brand with a cast that carries its own distribution and a network that has already tested its lead actor inside its own streaming ecosystem. But television history is full of social media castings that did not convert. Followers are rented attention. When the credits roll, they return to their feeds.

The real challenge isn’t casting, it’s infrastructure.

Baywatch once reached more people every week than any show in television history. That kind of audience doesn’t exist anymore. What exists now is a completely different distribution system and a new set of opportunities to build not just a show, but an ecosystem. The internet isn’t where you market culture. It’s where culture is made.

The way Fox has cast this reboot suggests they know that. It signals a more innovative approach than most legacy reboots attempt. So I’m going to offer a few ideas about how that world might actually get built. Even though, obviously… nobody… ahh, you get it.

But before getting into what the future of the show might look like, it’s worth remembering how unusual its past actually was.

The Biggest Show Nobody Fully Understands

Greg Bonann was a Los Angeles County lifeguard when he conceived the show. His connection to the material wasn’t theoretical. He had spent years working the beaches and believed the world of lifeguarding — the rescues, the training, the strange mix of danger and beauty — could translate to television.

The idea took shape after Bonann rescued two children caught in a riptide whose father happened to work in television. That moment opened a door. Over the next decade Bonann kept refining the concept, originally titled A.C.E.S. (Aquatic Corps for Emergency Service) before eventually renaming it Baywatch after the rescue boats that patrol Santa Monica Bay.

(Full disclosure: Greg is an old friend and a reader of the stack. He had no idea I was writing this and is probably discovering it right now.)

NBC picked up the show in 1989 and canceled it after one season, where it ranked 73rd out of 103 programs. The production company behind the series collapsed soon after. By every traditional measure the show was finished.

What happened next is the part that matters.

The Creator Economy, circa 1991

Bonann and his partners regained control of the rights and rebuilt the show independently. They cut the production budget, financed the next season largely through international pre-sales where the show was already performing, and sold the series directly into first-run syndication across the United States. There was no network and no guaranteed slot, only a bet that the global audience already watching the show would finance the next wave.

They were right on a scale nobody predicted. (And because of this innovative structure, they own the show.)

By 1996 Baywatch had an estimated weekly audience of roughly 1.1 billion viewers across 142 countries, a figure that led Guinness World Records to name it the most-watched television series in history. The show ultimately aired in 148 countries and was translated into 44 languages.

One data point reframes everything about the brand. The audience was roughly 65 percent female, and the number-one demographic was women between 18 and 34. Years of focus groups revealed that the appeal was not what the jokes suggested. It was that the women were strong, independent heroes who were saving lives.

The DNA of Baywatch was sincere heroism. Aspirational, physical, sun-drenched, and globally legible. Rescue. Beauty. Danger. Belonging to something bigger than yourself.

A creator bought back his own IP from a network that didn’t believe in it and built the most-watched show in the world which they still own.

That’s not really a legacy media story.

It’s a creator-economy story decades before we called it that. The original “F*ck it, if we build it they might come” attitude.

Fox Has the Lifeguards. Now It Needs the Rescue Plan

The producers instincts here are good. Filming in Venice Beach preserves the authenticity of place that defined the original series, and the production secured a $21.1 million California tax credit to make it happen.

The return of the original creators as executive producers provides institutional memory. Matt Nix, who ran Burn Notice for seven seasons, understands ensemble procedural storytelling. McG directing the pilot brings visual energy. A 12-episode straight-to-series order signals real commitment.

The casting strategy is also informed by data Fox already owns. A Wattpad web novel, The QB Bad Boy and Me, became a Tubi original film. Sidelined, which attracted roughly 20 million viewers, generated billions of social impressions, earned a sequel, and ultimately helped turn Noah Beck into a Baywatch cast member.

Casting the Internet Is the Easy Part

Social media casting has also produced a long list of disappointments. Studios cast for reach, the reach does not convert, and everyone concludes the talent was wrong. The real lesson is infrastructure. Followers belong to the creator, not the show.

Unless the show builds a world that competes for daily attention rather than weekly appointment viewing, the reach advantage disappears.

Fox has cast the internet. The real question is whether they will build for it.

It’s also worth noting that Fox has been moving deliberately in this direction. The company recently hired Billy Parks to lead a new division called Fox Creator Studios, a digital-first initiative designed to work directly with creators and develop formats and IP that can move fluidly between social platforms, streaming, and television. That effort sits alongside other bets Fox has already made in the creator economy, including its investment in the microdrama platform Holywater and its use of Tubi as a testing ground for new talent and formats. In other words, many of the ingredients for a modern entertainment ecosystem already exist inside the company.

Which is what makes the Baywatch opportunity so interesting. Fox already has many of the pieces.

The BaywatchVerse

Take the TV show away for a moment and look at what Baywatch actually is. A beach. Lifeguards. Physical culture. Ocean rescue. Sun, fitness, and first responders. A team of people whose job is running toward danger while everyone else runs away.

That combination travels easily because it already exists in the real world. Millions of people surf, train on the beach, follow lifeguards on social media, or watch the creators who document that life every day. Baywatch didn’t invent that culture. It tapped into something that was already there.

The opportunity now is not simply launching another season of television. It is building the infrastructure around that culture so the audience can move through it across platforms, between episodes, and long before the broadcast premiere arrives.

And the order matters.

Layer 1 — Build the Lifeguard Tower

Before any ecosystem spins up, Fox needs to capture the audience.

Legacy television marketing is built around awareness. The modern internet runs on ownership. The difference is first-party data.

Baywatch has a rare advantage here because the culture around it already exists. There are millions of fans of the original show scattered across YouTube comment sections, nostalgia forums, TikTok edits, and Facebook groups dedicated to the series. Those people should be found and recruited early.

Not as viewers. As ambassadors.

Fox could identify the most active fans of the original show across social platforms and bring them into the ecosystem before the reboot even premieres. Invite them into private communities. Give them early access to behind-the-scenes content. Let them help shape the conversation around the new show.

At the same time, every real-world activation should double as a data engine. Beach events, creator workouts, lifeguard demonstrations, and programming can all capture first-party audience relationships through sign-ups, exclusive drops, and access to content that only exists inside the Baywatch community.

Television ratings measure attention for a moment.

First-party data builds a relationship that lasts for years.

If Fox wants Baywatch to become a modern entertainment ecosystem rather than just another reboot, that relationship has to be built before the first episode ever airs.

Layer 2 — The Story Behind the Red Swimsuit

Before any ecosystem spins up, the most obvious content already exists: the making of the original Baywatch.

It’s as dramatic as the rescues in its most popular episodes. A network cancellation. A bankrupt studio. A group of creators buying back the rights. International sales financing the resurrection. A show mocked by critics quietly becoming the most-watched series on earth.

Then there is all the behind the scenes, E! True Hollywood story fodder…

That lore alone is a fun, fast paced ripped from the headlines docu-series. And they should produce one…

A ten-episode series featuring writers, lifeguards, stunt coordinators, and cast telling the real story. The fights with NBC. The syndication gamble that saved the show. Hasselhoff putting his own money and salary on the line to keep it alive. The strange moment when Germany fell in love with Baywatch before America did. The sudden global fame that turned the cast into tabloid fixtures. On-set relationships, Pamela Anderson dating world-champion surfer Kelly Slater, and the cultural chaos of the Tommy Lee era. The challenges of filming rescues in real surf where the crew occasionally had to respond to actual emergencies. The behind-the-scenes stories of a show that somehow became the biggest thing in the world.

TV Studios often resist ambitious projects like this because they are not structured to pay for them out of their marketing budget. But this is not promotion. It is a business. Build it for Tubi. Sell advertising around it. Let the mythology of the franchise reintroduce itself before the reboot arrives.

Layer 3 — The Beach Goes Digital First

Fox has months before the premiere. The traditional move for networks is to go quiet during production and drop a trailer shortly before launch. A better approach would be to start now.

Short-form platforms should be flooded with the feeling of the show rather than clips from the show. Modern beach culture cut against classic Baywatch imagery. The tower. The red suit. The sunset. Contemporary music and fast edits bridging nostalgia and modern rhythm.

Then go deeper. Partner with actual LA County lifeguards for documentary-style content showing training, rescues, and the reality of the job. This becomes the credibility layer that earns the reboot the right to tell these stories.

Most importantly, activate the cast’s existing channels. Not with scripted promotional posts, but with permission to document their entry into the world of lifeguarding. Noah Beck learning rescue drills. Livvy Dunne training physically for the role.

The audience does not want polished marketing. They want the process.

Layer 4 — The Creator Coastline

Fox has cast social media stars in the show. The next step is building a creator ecosystem around the franchise.

Fitness creators designing Baywatch-inspired workouts. Surf and beach lifestyle accounts integrating the aesthetic into their feeds. First-responder creators reacting to rescue sequences. Fashion creators breaking down the wardrobe.

Pay them. Give them access. Let them keep their voice.

When dozens of creators across fitness, surf culture, fashion, and rescue communities are all engaging with the same world, the audience begins to perceive something larger forming around it.

That shift is the difference between awareness and culture.

Layer 5 — The Holywater Wave

One of those pieces is Holywater, the microdrama platform Fox invested in to experiment with serialized mobile storytelling.

This is where Baywatch could expand its universe quickly and inexpensively.

Imagine a sixty-episode microdrama telling the origin story of Livvy Dunne’s character. Training. Rivalries. Early rescues. Small character stories that deepen the world and introduce the audience to the ecosystem before the broadcast show even arrives.

Microdramas typically cost between $150K and $250K to produce for roughly sixty episodes, plus marketing. In television economics that’s almost negligible. They can monetize through ads and sponsorship while quietly building intrigue around the main series.

One executive at the microdrama platform ReelShort told me something interesting: when they release microdramas based on books, the book sales often spike dramatically, even when the microdrama itself isn’t a major hit. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s a useful signal. These formats don’t just tell stories. They activate audiences.

Instead of waiting for viewers to form an attachment after the broadcast premiere, microdramas allow the world of the show to start expanding before it even arrives.

Layer 6 — Bring the Show to the Sand

Baywatch has a structural advantage almost no legacy IP possesses. Its setting is real.

Beaches already exist. The event does not need to be invented. It only needs to be claimed.

Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Huntington Beach, Miami Beach, Waikiki. Lifeguard demonstrations, fitness activations, cast appearances, creator meetups.

The key partner should be the lifeguarding community itself. Many lifeguards already post regularly on social media about training, rescues, and ocean safety. These programs may be some of the best recruitment material the profession could ask for.

Fox also has a physical piece of creator infrastructure sitting just blocks away. Through its advertising division the company invested in The Lighthouse in Venice. That campus could easily become a pre-launch activation hub for Baywatch, bringing beach culture, creators, and the show’s cast together before the premiere even arrives. Imagine a few days of programming built around beach life. Surf sessions. Lifeguard demonstrations. Training challenges. Creator-led workouts. Events flowing between Venice Beach and the Lighthouse.

It also opens the door for the most natural sponsors in the world of the show. Sunscreen brands like Sun Bum, Supergoop, or Banana Boat. Swim and beachwear brands like Speedo, Billabong, Roxy, or Vilebrequin. Wellness and fitness companies like Alo Yoga or Vuori. Hydration brands like Liquid I.V. or Gatorade. Surf companies like Hurley or Quiksilver.

The activation becomes a living version of the Baywatch world, where brands, creators, and the cast are all participating in the same culture before the series even premieres.

Fox does not operate a global broadcast network, so the show will ultimately be sold territory by territory to international buyers. A strong U.S. cultural launch gives those partners momentum to build from.

Layer 7 — The Red Swimsuit Economy

The red Baywatch swimsuit is one of the most recognizable costumes in television history.

That recognition can extend far beyond traditional licensing. Instead of simply reproducing the suit, Fox could treat it as a design language and invite fashion creators to reinterpret it in collaboration with major swimwear and lifestyle brands. Surf designers, fashion TikTokers, and beachwear creators could develop limited drops that remix the iconic silhouette for modern beach culture. Different creators. Different aesthetics. Different audiences discovering the brand through the people they already follow.

The result isn’t just merchandise. It’s a creator-driven fashion ecosystem orbiting the show.

The fitness layer is equally natural. The training regimens of the cast could evolve into a Baywatch Training Program, developed with fitness creators who already specialize in beach workouts, ocean swimming, and lifeguard-style conditioning. What would normally be promotional content becomes something the audience participates in.

The show runs once a week. The culture around it runs every day.

The Second Rescue

None of this guarantees success. Social media followers do not automatically convert into broadcast viewers, and building ecosystems requires alignment across divisions that were never designed to work together.

But the opportunity is real.

Baywatch once reached more people every week than any show in television history because its premise traveled everywhere.
The premise still works.

In my own work producing television, I’ve often pushed for experiments like this. Building ecosystems instead of just shows. Starting the audience before the premiere. Letting creators, events, and commerce live alongside the story.

The reality is that networks and platforms have not traditionally been structured to finance that kind of holistic approach. And honestly, I understand why. These companies are large ships. Changing direction requires new incentives, new departments, and a willingness to fund pieces of a system that don’t always look like television.

It’s easy to say they can’t afford not to do it. In practice, the turn is much harder than that.

But Baywatch may be one of the rare brands where the pieces already exist.

The beach.
The culture.
The creators.
The audience.

The question is whether Fox builds the system around it.

Nobody asked them to. But the beach is right there

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You don’t have to be as interested in Brazil or Mexico as I am to find this story useful. What I’m really looking at here is structure, how creator economies get built and why some ecosystems mature faster than others. Brazil just happens to offer a case study with lessons that can be applied almost anywhere in the world.

One of my predictions for 2026 is that the creator economy is about to get a lot more international.

That observation is both analytical and a little self-serving. My company produces a lot of content for Spanish-speaking markets, particularly Mexico, and recently we’ve been spending more time thinking about how creators fit into that ecosystem. But it’s also a fairly predictable pattern. As the U.S. creator market matures, capital and opportunity will naturally start looking for less saturated markets.

As I started digging deeper into Latin America, one comparison kept bothering me.

Brazil and Mexico are often treated as economic twins, even though Brazil has nearly 80 million more people. And by some measures Mexico’s economy is actually bigger. But in many ways the two countries look remarkably similar.

Both anchor the region’s economy and both spent decades shaped by television monopolies that wrote the cultural playbook for their countries. Brazil has Globo. Mexico has Televisa. For years those institutions weren’t just media companies, they were cultural power centers. Both countries are also among the most socially connected populations on the planet. Brazilians spend roughly 3 hours and 40 minutes a day on social media, while Mexicans average three hours and 15 minutes a day, placing both near the top globally for social media consumption.

And yet Brazil’s influencer economy is estimated at roughly $1.65 billion. Mexico’s sits closer to $480 million.

WTF?

I kept asking people in my orbit who supposedly understood the Latin American creator economy. No one had an answer.

Then a Brazilian friend of mine offered simple advice:

“You should talk to Bia Granja.”

He connected us. Bia is living in LA after selling her company youPIX in Brazil and thinking more about the future than her prior accomplishments but she was open to chat.

We zoomed. Then we zoomed again. We met for lunch in Los Angeles. We talked again. Eventually we found ourselves sitting together at the Lighthouse in Venice continuing the conversation.

And the more I learned about what she has been building for the last two decades, the more the Brazilian ecosystem started to make sense and why it well outperforms Mexico.

The Godmother of the Brazilian Creator Economy

Bia Granja would never call herself that.

She’s far too humble to make a claim like that about herself (she prefers the user-friendly moniker ‘hippiepreneur’), and Brazil is obviously far too large and chaotic for any one person to claim they built an entire industry.

Fair enough.

But when you start lining up the structural problems that still slow the creator economy in Mexico with the infrastructure Bia spent the last twenty years building in Brazil, the comparison becomes hard to ignore.

Mexico struggles with creator education.

Brazil built it.

Mexico lacks credible market data.

Brazil has it.

Brands in Mexico still tend to treat creators like talent instead of businesses.

Brazil has tons of significant Creator Entrepreneurs.

Much of that infrastructure traces back to youPIX, the organization Bia co-founded and spent years turning into one of the connective tissues of the Brazilian creator ecosystem. Conferences, education programs, research partnerships, platform training initiatives—over time it became one of the places where the entire market learned how to operate.

Which is why, before getting into the playbook that eventually emerged from all of this, it’s worth rewinding a bit and looking at how Bia got there in the first place.

Because like a lot of revolutions in media, this one didn’t begin with a strategy.

It began with curiosity.

Phase 1

The Early Internet Awakening (2000–2009)

Bia’s entry into the internet world started almost by accident.

In 2000 she was studying tourism and working at an internet incubator in Brazil. At the time she didn’t even have a computer at home. The web still felt like something abstract, a tool mostly used by engineers and early adopters. Then someone introduced her to Google.

The experience changed the way she thought about knowledge almost immediately.

“Before Google,” she told me, “my answers came from my parents, my teachers, maybe an encyclopedia. When I discovered I could have a hundred answers to one question, it blew my mind.”

She started searching obsessively.

“I was asking stupid things,” she said, laughing. “Like how worms mate.”

But what fascinated her wasn’t just the information itself. It was the structure behind it. For the first time information didn’t have to flow through a handful of media institutions. Anyone could publish something. Anyone could distribute it. The web felt decentralized.

By the mid-2000s Bia and her collaborator Bob Wollheim (who would eventually become her husband) began noticing a new kind of media creator emerging online: bloggers. They weren’t backed by media companies. They had no studios, no budgets, and no distribution deals. But they were building audiences.

To celebrate that culture they launched PIX Magazine, a small pocket-sized publication that curated the most interesting things happening on the internet. It was distributed for free in cinemas, bars, and universities across Brazil.

It sounds strange today—a physical magazine pointing readers toward websites—but it served an important function: it connected a scattered community of early internet creators.

On Orkut, Brazil’s dominant social network before Facebook, people even began trading different issues of the magazine the way soccer fans trade sticker albums during the World Cup.

For Bia, that moment revealed something fundamental. Information and entertainment were no longer flowing only from the top down.

They were starting to move sideways.

Phase 2

The Party Era (2009–2014)

As Brazil’s internet culture matured, PIX evolved into something much larger.

In 2009 Bia and her team launched the youPIX Festival, a live gathering dedicated to internet culture and online creators.

The relatively small event quickly exploded. Within a few years the festival was attracting nearly 20,000 people, turning it into one of the largest celebrations of internet culture anywhere in the world.

For many attendees it was the first time they had seen digital creators celebrated on stage the way musicians or television personalities had been for decades. But the economics of the ecosystem hadn’t caught up yet.

“Being famous online was like being rich in Monopoly,” Bia told me. “For a long time the money wasn’t real.”

Creators had attention but very little infrastructure around them. Brands were curious but confused. Most companies still treated the internet as a novelty rather than as a serious media environment.

During this period Bia began playing an unusual role inside the ecosystem: Translator.

Creators needed brands to understand their value. Brands needed someone to explain how internet culture actually worked. So she began informally advising companies trying to understand the strange new world of online influence.

Then in 2013 something happened that changed how people thought about social media entirely.

Massive protests erupted across Brazil, many of them organized and amplified through digital networks.

The internet was no longer just a place for memes. It had political and cultural power.

The creator economy needed to grow up.

Phase 3

The 2015 Pivot and the Adult Phase (2014 - 2024)

This is the most consequential phase. Bia’s coming of age, and it’s worth spending a bit more time on it.

By 2015 Bia realized something important: the party was over.

For years the youPIX Festival had celebrated internet culture and helped creators find each other. But as the audience grew she began to notice a mismatch between the energy of the community and the maturity of the market. Creators were becoming famous and even signing brand deals, but the infrastructure around them didn’t exist yet.

“I rapidly understood that the B2C part wasn’t the most important anymore,” Bia told me. “The audience became much bigger than the business.”

So she made a radical decision. She shut down the consumer festival and rebuilt youPIX as something entirely different: a B2B ecosystem builder focused on professionalizing the creator economy. This marked what she calls the “adult phase.”

The first step was education, but not only for creators.

In 2016 youPIX launched the first Influencer Marketing Program in Brazil designed specifically for brands and agencies. Most companies were still trying to understand what creators actually were and how they fit into marketing strategies.

The program helped brands understand how creator collaborations worked, how to structure partnerships, and how to evaluate the results.

But brand education alone wasn’t enough. If the creator economy was going to mature, it also needed legitimacy. Brands were curious about creators, but they didn’t fully trust the market because there was almost no credible data behind it.

So Bia added another layer to the ecosystem: research.

Through partnerships with organizations like Nielsen and Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), youPIX began producing some of the first serious studies on Brazil’s creator economy, tracking how brands were spending money and how creator partnerships were performing.

As she put it to me, “everybody loves a paper.”

At the same time, Bia realized that creators themselves needed a different kind of support. Many had large audiences but very little business infrastructure. So in 2016 youPIX launched Creators Booster, a program that functioned as both an incubator and an accelerator for creators.

Participants worked with mentors, platforms, and brands to develop sustainable business models beyond advertising. The program focused on everything from pricing and contracts to product development and long-term strategy.

The goal wasn’t simply to help creators grow audiences. It was to help them build companies.

According to Bia, the results were significant. Many of the creators who went through the program doubled or even tripled their business revenue, reinforcing a realization that became central to the ecosystem she was building.

“They were like, ‘Fuck… I’m not a talent. I’m a business.’”

What made this work wasn’t any one program by itself. It was the way the pieces reinforced each other.

The Influencer Marketing Program educated brands and agencies on how to work with creators. The research partnerships produced credible market data that gave companies confidence to spend real money. And the Creators Booster incubator and accelerator helped creators build the kinds of businesses those brands could actually partner with.

Each layer solved a different problem in the market, but together they formed something closer to an ecosystem.

Brands learned how to buy.

Creators learned how to build.

And the data helped both sides trust the system.

When you step back and look at what Bia was building during this period, a pattern starts to emerge.

Which brings us to the Bia Granja Playbook.

The BG Playbook

If you strip away the details, the playbook is surprisingly simple.

Rule 1: Turn creators into businesspeople.

Teach them how to operate like founders, not talent.

Rule 2: Educate the buyers.

Brands and agencies need to understand how creators actually work.

Rule 3: Replace vibes with data.

Research and credible market information turn curiosity into real spending.

Rule 4: Build the ecosystem with the platforms.

Don’t treat them as distribution. Make them participants in the market.

Rule 5: Recognize what a creator actually is.

Not a media channel. A vertically integrated company.

“A creator gives you everything,” Bia told me. “They create the idea, produce the content, distribute it, own the audience, and analyze the data.”

Once you see the system this way, the evolution of Brazil’s creator economy starts to make a lot more sense.

And it becomes easier to understand why I’m comfortable calling Bia Granja something she would never call herself—

The Godmother of the Brazilian Creator Economy. BOOM!

Case Study: The Itaú Creator Academy

The most ambitious attempt to operationalize everything she had been building came through a partnership with Itaú, one of Brazil’s largest banks.

At first glance it seemed like an unlikely collaboration. Banks are not usually known for cultural experimentation. But Itaú’s marketing leadership understood something important: the creator economy wasn’t simply another advertising channel. It represented a fundamentally different way of building relationships with audiences.

Together with youPIX they designed a program that treated creators not as influencers, but as collaborators.

The structure worked almost like a venture funnel. It began with Creator Academy, an open program that reached thousands of creators and focused on the fundamentals of the creator economy, from business structure to brand collaboration.

From there a smaller group moved into Creator Lab, where selected creators participated in mentorship sessions and creative challenges designed to explore how brand storytelling could integrate more authentically with creator communities.

Finally, a handful advanced to Creator Ventures, a year-long collaboration where they worked directly with Itaú’s internal teams on campaigns and cultural initiatives.

In other words, the program brought together everything Bia had been building for years: creator education, brand education, professionalization, and real experimentation.

For many of the bank’s executives, it was the first time they had ever spoken directly with creators.

The results surprised almost everyone involved. Across two cycles of the program in a single year, more than 7,700 creators signed up.

From that pool, 670 participated in the initial classes, 100 advanced to the next phase, and 20 were ultimately selected for the final squad working directly with Itaú.

The program was overwhelmingly well received, with 99% of participants rating it as excellent or very good. And the organic impact was remarkable.

In just one phase of a single cycle, creators generated 1,450 posts about the program, producing roughly 3 million impressions and more than 500,000 engagements, all centered on a bank. Similar waves of organic content repeated across each phase of the program.

As Bia joked to me, “Have you ever seen people loving a bank?”

And that’s really the point.

If something as institutional and traditionally boring as a bank needs creators to help make it culturally relevant, then the implications are obvious.

Every business will eventually need to figure out how to work with creators.

What makes this story interesting far beyond Brazil is the structure underneath it. The ecosystem Bia built—educating creators, educating brands, producing credible market data, and incubating new business models—created the conditions for an experiment like this to happen.

Most companies today experiment with creators at the campaign level. Bia built the structural foundations.

And that’s why the Itaú case study matters. It suggests a model that could be replicated anywhere—in any country, and in almost any industry—if companies are willing to build the ecosystem deeply enough.

THE NEXT PHASE FOR BIA: CREATORECONOMY.ROCKS

After two decades building the connective tissue of Brazil’s creator economy, Bia sold her business and the school and moved to Los Angeles to launch new ventures. Most people would treat that as the end of a career chapter. For Bia it looks more like the beginning of another one.

She’s now launching a far more ambitious venture built on the same instincts that made youPIX influential.

The platform called Creatoreconomy.rocks begins as a free intelligence layer. An AI system trained on two decades of her pattern recognition scans hundreds of sources across the creator economy and surfaces the signals that actually matter.

It acts as a public dashboard of the most relevant shifts shaping the industry, designed less as a media product and more as a funnel into the real business.

That business is a series of highly curated “immersions.”

Small groups of senior executives and investors are brought together to spend a week inside the creator economy, meeting the operators and companies building the most successful creator-led businesses.

Instead of panels or conferences, participants study real systems, frameworks, and monetization models alongside the people running them.

The result is a compressed learning environment where decision-makers can understand in days what might otherwise take years to piece together, while simultaneously opening the door to partnerships and investment.

WHY I’M TELLING THIS STORY

What Bia built in Brazil wasn’t a media company. It wasn’t a festival. It wasn’t even really a business, at least not primarily. It was a set of conditions — education, data, professionalization, trust — that allowed an entire market to grow up.

That’s the harder and less glamorous work. And it’s almost always invisible until you look back and ask why one market outperformed another.

Mexico is still early in that arc. The raw materials are already there — massive audiences, some of the highest social media engagement in the world, extraordinary creative talent. What’s missing is the plumbing. Legacy media still captures most brand budgets and Televisa’s gravitational pull on the advertising system hasn’t fully broken yet. But it will. It always does. Once brands start demanding measurable ROI, money moves toward the channels that can actually deliver it. And no television monopoly has ever won that fight in the long run.

When that shift accelerates in Mexico — and it’s already starting — the market that’s waiting on the other side could be enormous. It just needs someone willing to build the ecosystem, not just ride the wave.

The creator economy will keep expanding into new geographies. Capital will follow attention, and attention is already everywhere. But markets don’t mature on their own. They mature when someone decides to do the structural work.

The Bia Granja playbook isn’t a Brazilian story. It’s a structural one. And structures, unlike trends, tend to travel.

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At the end of 2022, we decided to explore selling our company, 3Pas Studios.

At the time, the decision was not driven by panic or pessimism. We were still technically in Peak TV. There was still some optimism that mid and lower budget films could recover real theatrical value post-pandemic. And my partner, with close to 90 million followers, remained one of the most powerful names in U.S. Hispanic and Latin American entertainment. The traditional system was still working, and in many ways working very well.

The market reinforced that confidence. Celebrity-driven production companies were being rewarded with valuations that had little to do with near-term cash flow and everything to do with perceived leverage and future optionality.

Hello Sunshine. SpringHill. (Remember that media moment? Feels like a lifetime ago).

We brought in a bank and went to market. After more than a year of meetings, we had three bidders. We went exclusive with one of them, an international media company, and entered diligence. And then we walked away, for reasons not worth getting into here.

What stayed with me was not the deal we did not do, but what the process revealed.

The traditional media system still had demand, capital, and credibility. But the logic underneath how value was being assessed felt increasingly strained. The questions buyers were asking did not always line up with how audiences were behaving. And the metrics that had guided decades of deal-making were starting to feel incomplete.

You could sense that something was shifting. Not a clean break, but a misalignment. The old structures still worked, but new ones were forming alongside them, faster than the valuation frameworks could keep up.

That tension is what led me to start Open Gardens.

I was trying to understand what happens after the gates loosen but before new systems fully harden. How value actually accrues when distribution is no longer scarce. And how legacy operators can translate what they already know into a landscape that rewards different kinds of ownership, risk, and durability.

Because once you understand how creator businesses are really being valued, a path forward becomes visible. Not an abstract one. A practical one.

That path is what led me to Chris Erwin, founder of RockWater Industries.

The Core Problem No One in Legacy Media Knows How to Answer

Legacy media is built on structure.

There are accepted financial models, clear inputs, familiar risk profiles. You can argue about multiples, but everyone is speaking the same language. That is also why the decline of legacy media is relatively easy to chart. The metrics still work, even as the business erodes.

The creator economy is the opposite.

There are no real barriers to entry. But there is almost no shared structure underneath it all. Revenue is volatile. Talent risk is concentrated. Metrics vary depending on who you ask. Projections often feel closer to intuition than to models you would want to underwrite with conviction.

As Chris put it to me:

“Deal making in the creator space is more informal, faster, and looser than traditional media. But without proper frameworks, that actually holds the industry back.”

That is the gap RockWater exists to fill.

From MCNs to M&A

Why Chris Was Early to This Problem

RockWater is a financial and strategic advisory firm focused on media, agencies, and the creator economy. The company makes a lot more sense once you understand where Chris came from.

He started in traditional finance and M&A, then moved into digital media as COO of Big Frame, one of the early YouTube-era talent companies that eventually sold to AwesomenessTV. That experience put him right in the middle of the first serious attempt at scaling creator-led businesses.

What he saw was not a lack of demand. It was a lack of infrastructure.

MCNs chased scale without unit economics. Traditional bankers struggled to understand social-native distribution or audience ownership. Everyone was measuring the wrong things, often with a lot of confidence.

RockWater was founded to sit between those worlds.

As Chris framed it, RockWater’s role is to educate the market on how the industry is maturing, what fundamentals actually drive it, and how to value companies so capital can move intelligently.

The Sophomore Year

One of the more useful frameworks Chris uses is thinking about the creator economy in terms of school years.

Before 2022, it was effectively in its freshman year. Speculation. Growth at all costs. Venture money chasing attention with very little discipline. From 2022 to 2024, the hangover set in. Bankruptcies. Fire sales. A brutal reset in expectations.

What Chris calls the sophomore year is the phase that comes next. It is the moment when an industry is no longer new, but not yet fully mature. The hype has worn off. The easy money is gone. And what is left has to start proving it can actually stand on its own.

What has changed is not attention. Attention never left. What has changed is clarity.

“Going into 2026, the conversation has shifted from growth at all costs to durable businesses,” Chris told me.

Investors are now focused on profitability, margins, IP ownership, revenue diversification, and defensible moats. That shift is why deals are happening again. The bid-ask spread is narrowing. Buyers and sellers are finally speaking the same language.

This is what industrialization actually looks like when it is real.

That shift has also changed how capital behaves. The market is more conservative now, not because opportunity has shrunk, but because expectations have reset. Proof increasingly precedes funding. Early-stage creator businesses are expected to demonstrate traction, revenue, and operational discipline before institutional capital shows up. Venture money has largely moved toward technology and infrastructure, while service and media businesses are pushed to bootstrap longer or rely on insiders and strategic partners.

This is not 2019. Capital is still available, but it is more selective, more structured, and far less forgiving of models that rely on momentum alone.

What RockWater Actually Optimizes For

Strip away the jargon and RockWater is focused on a handful of fundamentals.

• Revenue diversification.

• Low concentration risk.

• Real margins.

• Repeatable systems, not personalities.

One of the biggest red flags they see is businesses built entirely around a single talent or a single platform. If one relationship breaks, the entire company collapses.

To counter that, RockWater pushes creators and operators toward something closer to a studio model. Not just content, but IP. Not just sponsorships, but products. Not just reach, but ownership.

That is how you move from being hired to being institutional.

Education as a Bridge Phase

One under appreciated layer in this transition is education.

Before capital moves meaningfully, understanding has to catch up. Brands, agencies, and legacy media operators are still navigating a fragmented landscape of platforms, tools, and creator-led models. That confusion has created a temporary but necessary consulting layer, part advisory, part translation.

Influencer marketing may be a $30 billion industry, but global advertising spend is closer to $800 billion. The gap between those numbers is not a lack of demand. It is friction.

Helping brands understand where value is actually created, how campaigns should be structured, and which tools matter is often the step that unlocks larger, longer-term capital commitments. In the near term, confusion itself is an opportunity. Over time, it hardens into infrastructure.

The Deals as Signals, Not Case Studies

One useful way Chris breaks down the creator economy is into three broad business models.

1) Service businesses— including agencies, talent management, and representation. These are human-intensive and evaluated on scale, margins, and recurring revenue.

2) Social publishers— modern media companies built for social-native distribution, where IP quality, audience composition, and revenue diversification matter most.

3) Tech and tooling— where buyers look for recurring revenue, retention, distribution advantage, and large addressable markets.

Each attracts different types of capital, is evaluated on different KPIs, and carries different risk profiles. Much of the confusion in the market comes from treating these businesses as interchangeable when they are not.

RockWater’s deal history maps where power is moving. Here are a few landmark deals:

Night / Bottle Rocket Management
Night’s acquisition of Bottle Rocket signaled that creator-native companies are now large and mature enough to consolidate without Hollywood or agencies in the middle.

Feedfeed / People Inc.
People Inc.’s acquisition of Feedfeed showed legacy media buying social-native paths to purchase and first-party data, not just content brands.

Bounty / gen.video
gen.video’s acquisition of Bounty highlighted the rise of infrastructure businesses that monetize influence repeatedly rather than one campaign at a time.

Collectively, these deals signal a shift from experimentation to structure.

Creators Are No Longer Talent. They Are Holding Companies.

In his newsletter Chris wrote about the Steven Bartlett deal. That transaction crystallizes this shift.

Steven.com’s valuation was not about a podcast. It was about funnel ownership, audience control, and a flywheel that turns attention into multiple high-margin businesses. Bartlett retained majority ownership. That alone says a lot about how far the power dynamic has moved.

As Chris sees it, the most valuable creators now own distribution and use it to launch everything else. Media is no longer the end product. It is the acquisition channel. Community sits at the center.

That is a fundamentally different model than the one legacy Hollywood was built around.

What Legacy Media Should Actually Be Doing

Chris is blunt. In his view, the period of observation has passed.

Some companies are getting this. Fox, People Inc, Ad holding companies buying influencer infrastructure instead of just agencies.

What legacy media often misses is not just speed or proximity to audience. It is that many companies already began building digital-native muscles a decade ago, then abandoned them. During the Netflix arms race, capital and attention were pulled back into high-budget content, and early experiments in social, direct-to-consumer, and audience-owned media were deprioritized.

Now those same companies are being forced to relearn capabilities they once partially had. The challenge is not creativity. It is alignment. Cost structures, decision cycles, and greenlight logic are still calibrated to a market that no longer matches where demand is forming.

The opportunity is not to control creators. It is to finance them, syndicate them, and professionalize what already works.

What Chris Looks For

And What That Means for Legacy Operators

When you strip it down, Chris’s view of creator businesses is practical, almost conservative.

Over time, a few clear patterns emerge.

Concentration kills value.
If a business depends on one person, one platform, or one revenue stream, it is fragile.

Distribution is no longer the moat.
Owning the relationship matters more than owning the channel.

Media is the top of the funnel, not the business.
Content acquires customers. Value shows up downstream.

Systems beat personalities.
Talent matters, but infrastructure scales.

Durability beats speed.
Margins, ownership, and resilience matter more than being first.

The path from legacy media to the creator economy is not about abandoning what you know. It is about understanding where value accrues now.

Understanding how creator businesses are valued does not just explain the new world. It gives legacy operators a map forward.

If you are trying to make sense of where the creator economy is actually heading, Chris’s free newsletter is worth your time. It is practical, unsentimental, and anchored in how capital really moves.

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As a legacy producer running a legacy-focused production company, I’m constantly asking a simple question:

Where do we actually have leverage in the creator economy?

In a recent conversation, RJ Larese, who runs one of the top creator management firms, Sixteenth, told me something both surprising and inevitable. Because studios and platforms are aggressively pursuing creator talent, he has opened a division dedicated solely to packaging and selling projects into the traditional system. They already have projects set up at streamers.

This will not be an isolated move.

The simple reaction from legacy producers is to chase one-off deals with individual creators. Attach one to a show. Adapt a channel. Test a collaboration.

But there may be a larger structural play.

The most future-proof production companies won’t behave like mini-studios.
They’ll behave like creator management agencies, run by producers who already possess the core skills required to build them: packaging talent, developing formats, structuring deals, protecting ownership, allocating capital, scaling production, and thinking in franchises instead of one-offs.

Because creators are no longer just talent.

They are vertically integrated IP. In many cases, they are the franchise, the distribution channel, and the marketing engine, all anchored to a direct audience relationship.

Building durable value around that requires more than sponsorship revenue. It requires formalizing the asset around attention, structuring ownership correctly, systematizing production, extending into adjacent businesses, and managing long-term value creation.

That is not a new discipline. It is producer logic applied at a different entry point.

In traditional media, we build the asset and then search for an audience.

In the creator economy, the audience often exists first. The opportunity is to formalize the asset around that attention, protect it, and expand it across platforms and businesses.

The producer function has not disappeared. It has moved upstream, closer to distribution and ownership.

So I asked to dissect six creator management companies operating with distinct theses. What they are actually building. How they structure ownership and revenue. And what their models suggest about where this infrastructure layer is heading.

If you are a legacy producer or executive trying to determine where you fit in this shift, this may be one of the more practical bridges.

Take it away Mitch…

A Shift In Perspective

When I started in the music business, one lesson stuck. If you want to understand how a career actually moves, follow the managers. Agents negotiate deals. Managers shape trajectory across touring, partnerships, release timing, merchandise, and brand. They see the whole board.

For a while, I assumed creator management was a lighter version of that role: Sponsorships, contract protection and basic business hygiene.

I had been watching the space without fully connecting the dots. It was only when I sat down to systematically break these firms apart, to examine how they are structured and what they actually build, that the pattern became clear.

Every creator business feels bespoke from the outside. But beneath that surface, these management companies tend to fall into a handful of recognizable models.

Underscore Talent: The Institutional Builder

The team behind one of the first major creator networks came back and built it again, this time with corporate architecture from day one.

Underscore is a large-scale creator management company organized into formal divisions: gaming, beauty, culinary, comedy, and public personalities transitioning into digital. Beyond digital-native creators, they also represent established stand-ups, writers, actors, and directors. Rather than running a single flat roster, they operate each vertical with its own leadership, strategy, and brand partnerships. They also run Shorthand Studios, a production and distribution arm that handles content strategy, editing, and cross-platform publishing for their creators.

They represent major digital-native franchises like Vlad & Niki and structure licensing deals, toy lines, publishing, podcasting, and film packaging. Cross-roster collaborations are intentional. In the case of the Brooklyn Coffee Shop collective, they treat the group as expandable scripted IP rather than just viral sketches. The goal is not just content volume. It’s about format ownership for their clients.

After TheSoul Publishing acquired a majority stake, Underscore gained global capital and production infrastructure. TheSoul operates one of the largest content networks in the world, giving Underscore a distribution backend most management firms do not have.

Clients: Vlad & Niki, Alan Chikin Chow, Bailey Sarian, Noah Beck, Kareem Rahma, Elyse Myers, CelinaSpookyBoo, Pooja Tripathi, Dylan Carlino, David Sidorov, Dylan Guerra and others across comedy, beauty, culinary, gaming, kids, and lifestyle.

Legacy crossover: Division structure, cross-roster packaging, consumer licensing, production development, corporate transaction management.

Underscore represents institutionalization.

Flywheel: The Franchise Builder

Most creator managers broker deals. Eyal Baumel builds franchises.

Flywheel is a boutique management company that helps creators turn their brands into multi-format businesses. Think licensing, live experiences, consumer products, and international distribution, all built around a single creator’s identity.

Baumel got here by running Yoola, a YouTube network with thousands of channels. That experience showed him that scale without ownership does not compound. The inflection point came working closely with Like Nastya, one of the largest children’s brands on YouTube. Instead of spreading attention across volume, he focused on a single global IP and built outward from there.

It starts on a whiteboard. The creator sits in the middle, and the team works outward like they’re diagramming a company. Not just videos, but characters, products, licensing lanes, live extensions and international rollout. The assumption isn’t that the channel is the business. The assumption is that the channel is the ignition point.. All of it enters the conversation early. Longer bets are structured as joint ventures with creators maintaining meaningful ownership.

This is studio-style franchise planning applied to a human IP.

Clients: Like Nastya, Rebecca Zamolo, Jordan and Salish Matter, The Royalty Family. Baumel has worked with MrBeast on expansion and strategy as part of his broader creator work.

Legacy crossover: Franchise mapping, licensing strategy, equity structuring international expansion, long-term asset development.

Flywheel treats creators as franchises from the beginning.

Fixated: The Vertically Integrated Engine

What happens when the former president of FaZe Clan teams up with the architect of a TikTok creator house and then raises $50 million from the investor behind A24 and the Los Angeles Dodgers?

You get Fixated.

Fixated is a management company that runs content production and distribution in-house for its creators. Where most firms outsource or leave creators to figure out production on their own, Fixated built an internal engine that handles the entire pipeline.

Founded by Zach Katz and Jason Wilhelm, the firm runs ideation sessions, shapes recurring formats, manages production crews, oversees editors and thumbnail teams, and optimizes distribution in real time. Every creator on their roster gets treated like a media company, not a talent booking.

Then comes amplification. A network of more than 25,000 micro-creators clips and redistributes content across their own feeds, turning one viral moment into a coordinated surge. When they applied this to podcast host Cono from Craft Culture, his YouTube revenue moved from roughly $5,000 a month to multiples of that number in weeks.

Fixated has begun acquiring other firms. In January 2026, it acquired gaming-focused agency Ellify. This is not traditional representation. It is infrastructure paired with capital and consolidation.

Clients: Sketch, The Botez Sisters, Zach Justice, Sofie Dossi, Cono, among others.

Legacy crossover: Development pipelines, production oversight, creative iteration, distribution strategy, capital deployment.

Fixated resembles a media studio built inside the algorithm.

G&B Digital Management: The Hollywood Bridge

Kyle Hjelmeseth founded G&B Digital Management in 2015, when representing bloggers and social creators still felt peripheral to much of Hollywood. He recognized early that audience-native talent needed long-term positioning, not just campaign negotiation.

G&B is a full-service management company for digital creators. They handle career strategy, brand partnerships, product development, editorial placements, and content across podcasting and television. What sets them apart is the depth of the operation and where their leadership comes from.

Today G&B represents more than 100 creators and has driven over $80 million earned for talent. They have appeared on the Inc. 5000 list twice. They negotiate multi-year partnerships with Dior and Nike, structure capsule collections, and launch direct-to-consumer brands. Seventy-five percent of their roster growth has come through referrals.

Leadership includes executives with deep legacy television experience. That background shows up in how they architect careers across multiple years and formats.

On top of that core business, they built College of Influence. Flipping the Script runs masterclasses at Soho Works for Academy and guild members trying to understand creator economics. The sessions filled quickly. Business Insider published their deck. The education layer works because the management business underneath it is real and profitable.

Clients: David Suh, Léanne Ansar, Noelle Downing, Cogey Marx, Eva Amurri, and others across fashion, beauty, lifestyle, food, and design.

Legacy crossover: Long-term talent positioning, brand architecture, complex deal negotiation, cross-platform packaging, industry fluency.

G&B looks like traditional management recalibrated for audience-owned IP.

Genflow: The Manufacturer

Every management company talks about building brands. Genflow builds and sells the actual products.

Genflow is a creator management company that also operates as a manufacturer. They do not just help creators land brand deals. They design products, make them in-house, sell them through their own e-commerce platforms, and ship them globally from five distribution centers. Their team sources sustainable textiles from Portugal, develops supplements, designs packaging, and builds proprietary fitness and membership apps.

One of those apps, Shreddy, reached #1 globally in the App Store. Across their portfolio, they have launched more than 50 DTC brands and generated over $100 million in lifetime revenue. Shan Hanif has publicly stated that this includes roughly $23 million in 2024 alone.

Their model is simple: Own the margin.

Genflow began by helping creators sell digital fitness programs. Hanif realized that the real leverage was not in brokering deals between creators and brands. It was in owning the brand, the product, and the supply chain.

If this section reads less like Hollywood and more like a direct-to-consumer playbook, that is the point.

Clients: Grace Beverley, Mike Thurston, Ali Abdaal, Iman Gadzhi and others across product and operational buildouts.

Legacy crossover: Vertical integration, operational oversight, margin discipline, capital allocation, long-term brand construction.

Genflow represents the own-the-stack thesis.

Nine Four / Skybound: The IP Incubator

Nine Four is a creator management firm that focuses on building businesses around creators, not just managing their deals. The firm co-founded creator-owned brands like Eamon & Bec’s tea company Habit, Jacksfilms’ newsletter Credit the Creators, and Markiplier’s clothing line Cloak. It structured equity-driven growth rather than one-off monetization.

In 2025, Skybound Entertainment acquired Nine Four. Skybound is the studio behind The Walking Dead and Invincible. They did not buy Nine Four for the roster. They bought it for the model. Skybound already runs a franchise doctrine across comics, television, games, and merchandise. Nine Four brought creator-native business infrastructure into that system.

The timing of this deal was important. The same week Skybound closed that deal, Propagate acquired Parker Management in an eight-figure transaction. Two legacy studios buying creator management firms within days of each other signals something structural. Infrastructure is being consolidated.

Clients: Jacksfilms, I’m Dontai, Jennelle Eliana, Eamon & Bec.

Legacy crossover: IP incubation, franchise expansion, strategic acquisition, integration planning, long-term brand compounding

Nine Four signals that legacy now sees creator management as strategic infrastructure rather than talent brokerage.

Building the Machine

Across these six companies, the models differ. But the underlying logic is familiar. It’s franchise planning, production oversight, licensing strategy, capital allocation, long-term talent stewardship. None of that is foreign to legacy producers. The creator economy didn’t invent those muscles. It simply moved them closer to distribution and closer to the audience itself.

Where legacy tends to struggle is on the digital side: understanding algorithmic distribution, optimizing natively for platforms, running direct-to-consumer businesses, managing supply chains, building community at scale, and using real-time data to inform creative decisions. Those aren’t Hollywood reflexes. They’re digital ones.

This infrastructure layer is no longer experimental. It is already influencing how capital flows, how IP is valued, and who controls long-tail revenue.

The choice is not whether to participate. It is how. Legacy producers can build these new capabilities internally or bring in operators who already have them. Either way, this is not a lateral move. It is a structural shift.

And for those looking for leverage, the blueprint is visible.

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For those of us who grew up before the internet flattened everything into clips and feeds, NFL Films felt almost magical. It was hypnotic. Seductive. Myth-building in the purest sense. You didn’t have to love football to fall under its spell. You just had to watch.

An NFL Films documentary could make you care about teams you’d never seen play, players you’d never heard of, seasons that ended decades before you were born. It made football feel important in a way that went far beyond the game itself.

That feeling has been on my mind lately as the season ends.

I’ve been spending time with a friend who works as a content strategist, and our conversations keep circling the same reality: most brands know they need to behave like media companies, but very few actually do. Some dabble. Some commission a campaign here or there. Some think hiring a couple of creators is enough to check the box. But the brands that are winning aren’t treating content as decoration. They’re being aggressive. They’re building real narrative engines.

She made an observation that stuck with me. Over the next few years, there’s going to be a genuine gold rush around helping brands do this well. Not just producing ads or social assets, but building storytelling systems that actually create emotional connection and long-term loyalty.

Last week I wrote about Pufferfish, a creator-led agency built for brands that win through speed, social fluency, and cultural proximity. That represents one end of the spectrum. The fast, social-native side of brand storytelling.

What’s funny is how often these conversations treat brand-as-media as a recent invention. Red Bull gets cited constantly, and for good reason. It’s a great example. But it’s not the first one.

While nerding out on the NFL in the run-up to the Super Bowl, and mentally preparing myself for the emotional hangover of the post-season, I fell down a rabbit hole I had never paid attention to: a small, mostly forgotten chapter of NFL history involving a man named Ed Sabol and the birth of NFL Films.

Looking back now, it’s clear NFL Films was one of the earliest examples of a brand deliberately building power through a strong content strategy. And it did so through a cinematic, emotional approach to storytelling that aligns almost perfectly with the skill sets legacy filmmakers already have, and that I believe will be in increasingly high demand as more brands build content strategies and look for ways to differentiate.

Forgotten, maybe. But it explains a lot about how the NFL became what it is today.

A Small Bid That Changed Everything

In 1962, the NFL quietly put the rights to film its championship game up for bid. The year before, those rights had sold for $1,500. This wasn’t considered a meaningful asset. Games were broadcast live and then effectively disappeared. Tape was reused. Archiving wasn’t a priority. History, as a concept, barely existed.

Then Ed Sabol bid $3,000.

Sabol wasn’t a television executive or a sports journalist. He was an overcoat salesman in Philadelphia who hated his job and happened to be a frustrated artist. His real passion was filming football, specifically his son’s high school games, where he had been quietly sharpening his instincts and developing a thesis about how sports should be filmed.

He didn’t pitch better coverage. He pitched emotion.

He talked about getting close to the players. About faces instead of formations. About sweat, breath, exhaustion. He talked about slowing the game down so people could actually see what effort looked like. He believed football deserved to be filmed the way movies filmed war, not as information, but as experience. And then there was the “voice of God” narration… Game changer. (You gotta love Leiv Schrieber channeling the OG voice, John Facenda, in recent years).

Pete Rozelle, a former PR and marketing executive who had recently become NFL commissioner, listened. And then he took a chance on a guy with no professional credentials, just a point of view.

That decision would end up changing the league far more than anyone realized at the time.

Filming Football Like It Was Cinema

What Sabol delivered didn’t look like sports television. It looked like something else entirely.

Cameras were on the sidelines, not floating safely above the field. Slow motion lingered on collisions, not just touchdowns. Music replaced crowd noise. Narration turned games into stories with beginnings, middles, and endings.

Football stopped being information and started becoming memory and mythology.

The result wasn’t just a better highlight reel. It was a different emotional contract with the audience. Viewers weren’t being told what happened. They were being invited to feel what it meant.

Rozelle immediately understood the implication. This wasn’t promotion. This was identity.

When the League Became Its Own Storyteller

A few years later, the NFL bought Sabol’s company and renamed it NFL Films. On paper, this looked like a modest production acquisition. In reality, it was one of the most important brand decisions in modern sports.

The NFL decided it would no longer outsource its story.

Every game would be archived. Every season would be shaped. Heroes and villains wouldn’t emerge accidentally. They would be framed, contextualized, remembered. Music, narration, slow motion, and access weren’t aesthetic choices. They were tools of meaning.

NFL Films didn’t sell tickets or merchandise directly. It did something more powerful. It taught fans how to feel about the league.

Teams became archetypes. Players became characters. Even failure was dignified. Even losing seasons had narrative weight.

This is the part that’s easy to miss in hindsight: NFL Films didn’t document popularity. It created the emotional conditions that allowed popularity to compound.

It has never been and never will be a huge revenue driver. Its the fuel that powers the NFL revenue engine.

The Funnel Before Funnels Had Names

Long before marketers talked about funnels, the NFL had one.

NFL Films sat at the top, pulling people in with meaning rather than messaging. It made casual viewers curious. It gave fans language for their obsession. It turned Sunday games into rituals and off-season content into anticipation.

From there, everything flowed naturally.

Games weren’t isolated events. They were chapters. Teams weren’t local businesses. They were symbols. Fans weren’t customers. They were members of a tribe.

Television amplified reach. Merchandise monetized loyalty. Ticket sales benefited from emotional investment. But the engine that powered all of it was story.

The NFL didn’t just win attention. It sealed a relationship.

Why This Worked When Other Sports Didn’t

Baseball had history but no unified narrative voice. Boxing had stars but no continuity. College football had tradition but little central control.

The NFL had something different: a single, coherent way of telling its own story across decades.

By owning its archive and its tone, the league created consistency. Fans knew what the NFL felt like, even when teams changed, stars retired, or seasons disappointed.

That consistency is what brands today struggle to manufacture after the fact.

The Lesson Brands Keep Missing

Most brands today focus on distribution first. Platforms, algorithms, reach. Story is treated as a layer that sits on top of marketing.

The NFL flipped that order.

Story came first. Distribution followed.

Ed Sabol wasn’t thinking about funnels or engagement metrics. He was thinking about dignity, struggle, and memory. He understood that if you could make people feel something consistently, everything else would take care of itself.

That’s the part worth revisiting now, as brands try to build communities instead of campaigns.

You don’t start by asking where to post. You start by asking what story you’re willing to tell, repeatedly, for years. Football was played on the field. The NFL was built in the editing room.

Most brands are still trying to learn the difference.

A Final Thought on Prioritizing Community

There’s a whole other layer to the NFL story that sits underneath NFL Films, and it’s easy to miss because we usually talk about it in business or competitive terms rather than emotional ones.

From very early on, the league made a series of structural choices that quietly prioritized the health of the community over the dominance of any single team. Revenue sharing. The draft. Salary caps. Constant rule tweaks. All designed to keep competition as even as possible, even when those decisions frustrated owners, fans, or stars in the short term.

This wasn’t about fairness in a moral sense. It was about faith.

By constantly pushing new teams toward the top and preventing dynasties from becoming permanent, the NFL trained its audience to believe that every season mattered. That hope wasn’t abstract. It was rational. Next year could be different. Your team was never truly dead.

That belief creates steadiness. Not boredom, but trust.

Fans don’t drift away when their team loses for a few years, because the system itself promises renewal. The league isn’t just staging games. It’s protecting the long-term emotional investment of the people watching them.

NFL Films amplified this in a crucial way. By treating every season as part of a larger epic, and every team as worthy of myth-making, the league avoided over-identifying with a small handful of winners. Even losing teams were given dignity, context, and a place in the story.

You really could write an entire separate piece about this. About how the NFL’s evolving rules and structures are less about optimizing competition and more about preserving belief. About how parity isn’t a side effect. It’s the product.

Put differently, the NFL didn’t just build a funnel. It built a reason to keep believing in the funnel.

That combination, competitive balance on the field and narrative balance off it, is what allowed the league to grow without fracturing its audience. And it’s the part most brands miss when they talk about community.

Community isn’t built by rewarding the loudest winners forever. It’s built by creating a system where people believe they’ll matter again.

A New Era of Brand Builders

Which brings me back to that feeling from the beginning. Sitting on the floor as a kid, watching an NFL Films documentary about a team I didn’t root for, in a season I didn’t remember, and somehow caring anyway.

The NFL understood early that if you combine cinematic storytelling with systems that protect belief, you don’t just create fans. You create continuity. You create trust. You create something people come back to, season after season, even when their team lets them down.

As more brands realize they need to build emotional relationships, not just run campaigns, it’s worth revisiting this little chapter of NFL history. Not because football is special, but because the lesson is portable.

The opportunity over the next few years isn’t just to help brands make more content. It’s to help them build meaning. To treat storytelling not as decoration, but as infrastructure. NFL Films did that decades ago, before anyone used the language we use now.

What’s different today is scale. As brands rush to become content creators, the demand isn’t just for more content. It’s for better content. Cinematic content. Emotional content. Storytelling that builds myth, memory, and belief rather than filling feeds.

That’s where the real opportunity is.

Because this next phase won’t be won by tools or platforms. It will be won by people who already know how to do what Ed Sabol did instinctively. Turn effort into meaning. Turn moments into stories. Turn audiences into communities.

And I think there’s a real business in that. In handpicking the right legacy storytellers, not to make thirty-second spots, but to help build the myths around certain brands.

For the storytellers paying attention, this moment isn’t about reinvention.
It’s about recognition.

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For nearly a century, advertising agencies occupied a privileged position in the cultural supply chain.

They sat between capital and culture. Between brands and audiences. Between money and meaning. Institutions like WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, and Dentsu built global empires by controlling access to scarce media inventory and arbitraging attention at scale. If you wanted to reach people, you went through them.

For filmmakers and creative talent, advertising became a parallel ecosystem. A place to experiment, pay overhead, and stay sharp between projects. At the highest level, it monetized reputation. Martin Scorsese and Alejandro Iñárritu used commercials to cash in on their names while keeping their tools sharp. For others, it was structural. Brady Corbet directed commercials to afford The Brutalist. Producers built commercial companies that later leveraged talent into film and television. Anonymous Content became the clearest expression of that model, a proving ground for directors with the Oscars and Emmys to prove it.

That world still exists. But it no longer sits at the center of gravity.

The problem is not that advertising lost its creativity. It’s that the structure that once gave it power no longer maps to how culture moves.

Attention is no longer scarce. Relevance is. Media inventory is infinite. Trust is not.

And culture no longer waits for permission.

This is the context in which a small, creator-led agency called Pufferfish, co-founded by Anthony Potero (aka AnthPo) and Talia Schulhof, becomes interesting. Not because it is clever or young or disruptive in the Silicon Valley sense, but because it represents something more fundamental: virality itself becoming infrastructure.

How I Stumbled Into This Thread

Like anyone paying attention to the creator economy, I listen to the Colin and Samir podcast. It’s one of the places where creators talk seriously about process, not just output or growth.

That’s where I first heard Anthpo.

I was trying to figure out how to describe this guy. He reminds me of the best music video directors of the 90s. Michael Gondry. Spike Jonze. Chris Cunningham. But if they were gonzo performance artists. It would be banal and misrepresentative to call him just a creator. He is an online provocateur.

On the Colin and Samir podcast, Anthpo talked about experiments he had run outside his main channel. Anonymous projects. IRL moments. Things designed to exist without his face or his name attached.

One of those was the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park. Another was the Crocs-on-statues project across New York City. Both happened before Pufferfish existed. They were Anthpo solo projects.

What struck me wasn’t the cleverness. It was the architecture.

These weren’t content drops optimized for distribution. They were environments. Situations people could stumble into. Each one created dozens, sometimes hundreds, of parallel narratives. The kid who didn’t look like Chalamet. The girlfriend who convinced him to go. The bystander cutting through the park who suddenly found herself inside an internet moment.

When the real Timothée Chalamet showed up, it didn’t end the story, it multiplied it.

Then Open Gardener, , wrote a piece reframing MrBeast as the modern equivalent of Hollywood’s mailroom. A place where people learn by doing, at speed, in public, with real stakes.

That article sent me down a different path. Who was coming out of that ecosystem? What were they building next? That’s when I realized Anthpo had partnered with someone named Talia Schulhof to start Pufferfish.

Former MrBeast creative strategist. Producer. Northwestern journalism grad. TikTok creator in her own right. Someone who had moved fluidly between internet culture and traditional media spaces.

I reached out directly on LinkedIn.

We scheduled a ninety-minute Zoom to talk about why they formed Pufferfish and where it was headed.

Whip smart. Driven. Open. The conversation with Talia was as illuminating as it was fun. You can find the full conversation here.

The Slow Collapse of the Legacy Advertising Model

But before getting into Pufferfish, it’s worth naming the broader shift.

The traditional advertising industry is not collapsing because it lacks talent. It’s collapsing because its core structure is misaligned with reality.

The signs are everywhere. Revenues contracting. Retainers evaporating. Layoffs accelerating. The Omnicom–IPG merger in late 2025 wasn’t a show of strength. It was a defensive maneuver. A consolidation of desperation.

For decades, the holding companies were stabilized by competition among giants. The moment two of them fuse, it signals not dominance but fragility.

At the same time, generative AI has hollowed out huge portions of the value chain. Strategy decks, copy, even visual concepts are now cheap and abundant. The result is not better advertising. It’s a sea of sameness.

Consumers feel it instinctively. They scroll past it. They mock it. They block it.

Trust has eroded. Authenticity has become the only remaining currency. And legacy agencies, staffed by people structurally removed from the cultural frontier, are bad at producing authenticity on demand.

Into that vacuum stepped creators.

From Influencers to Operators

The creator economy didn’t replace agencies overnight. It evolved in phases.

First, creators were distribution.

Then creators became talent.

Now we’re in a third phase. The interesting one.

Creators are becoming operators.

They don’t just distribute messages. They design moments. They don’t optimize for polish. They optimize for participation. They don’t ask what the brand wants to say. They ask how culture wants to play.

This is the era of the creator-led agency.

And this is where Pufferfish sits.

Anthpo: Not a Personality, a System

From early high school videos built on absurdist public interaction to college-era ensemble storytelling, Anthpo’s work consistently does one thing well. It creates conditions for other people to become part of the narrative.

His college videos weren’t just vlogs. They introduced a recurring cast. A loose universe. Watching them now, it’s clear he was learning how to build narrative ecosystems, not just grow an audience.

Then came the pivot.

In 2023, Anthpo stepped back from his main channel and began experimenting anonymously. Cheeseball Man. John Chungus. The Crocs statue project. The Chalamet contest.

These were not brand deals. They were stress tests.

The question he was asking was simple and profound: can internet culture be engineered without a central personality?

The answer, repeatedly, was yes.

That insight is rare. Most creators hit a ceiling because everything runs through them. Their face. Their availability. Their personal brand.

Anthpo was deliberately testing how to remove himself from the equation.

That’s the sign that creator agencies can scale.

Talia Schulhof and the MrBeast Mailroom

Talia’s background explains how that intuition becomes a business.

Right out of Northwestern, she faced a choice many young creatives still face. Traditional media or the creator economy. The mailroom or the unknown.

She chose MrBeast.

“If I had gone to the mailroom, I’d probably still be an assistant.”

Instead, she entered an environment where production is relentless. Ideas are tested in public. Failure is fast. Success scales immediately. Generalism is assumed.

What matters is the fluency she built across the creative stack. Strategy, producing, editing, distribution. Not to personally do every job, but to understand how decisions in one layer shape outcomes in another.

She describes picking up hands-on creative skills as part of that fluency, not as a pivot or a correction.

“I didn’t know how to use Premiere until about a year and a half ago, and now I use it every day.”

That fluency changes how feedback is given. How collaboration works. How leadership shows up.

This isn’t an outlier. Creator-led companies are increasingly run by leaders who look less like traditional executives and more like creators with managerial range. The ability to conceptualize, execute, and distribute is becoming a baseline requirement to participate in this new order.

What She Took. And Where She Wants to Differentiate

It would be easy to frame MrBeast as a finishing school for the creator economy. In some ways, it is. But what matters more is not just what people learn there. It’s what they decide not to carry forward.

Talia is clear-eyed about what that environment gave her. Scrappiness. Speed. A deep understanding of retention, metrics, and the psychology of a single view.

“I learned the power of scrappiness,” she told me. “I learned the power of exhausting all of your possible options.”

But she’s equally clear about where she wants to differentiate: focusing less on the raw number of views and more on the quality of those views. The priority is understanding what kinds of storytelling and creative choices make a view meaningful and turn a viewer into a fan.

Those distinctions explain why Pufferfish doesn’t feel like a growth-at-all-costs shop.

And when you look at how online behavior and trends are shifting, this approach reflects the moment. Depth over width.

When Metrics Become Identity

For all the talk about virality, Talia is unusually candid about its emotional cost.

“The value of a view is different now,” she said. “And the term ‘viral’ has lost its meaning.”

A MrBeast video and a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest are both called viral, despite operating on completely different cultural planes.

Treating them as equivalent has consequences.

“It’s really difficult to be in a job where your perceived self-worth is directly attached to a number,” she said. “How many views is the project getting.”

The feedback loop is immediate. Public. Constant.

“You could resonate with one person on such a deep level,” she said, “and that so greatly outweighs resonating with a hundred people at a surface level. And the numbers don’t reflect that.”

This perspective sits at the core of Pufferfish’s work. It explains why their campaigns optimize for participation rather than reach. Why they prioritize physical reality over digital abstraction.

Why Pufferfish Exists

After Anthpo appeared on Colin and Samir, brand inbound exploded. Not for ad reads. For campaigns.

He didn’t want his personal channel to become a brand feed. He also recognized that what brands were asking for required infrastructure.

So he called Talia. They knew each other from the days when they both worked for MrBeast.

Pufferfish was born with a clean division of labor. Anthpo as creative gravity. Talia as operator.

Lean team. Project-based. Everyone creative. Everyone capable of execution.

And a focus on IRL reality.

In an internet saturated with AI-generated sludge, physical reality has become premium. Billboards. Crowds. Objects in space. Things that can’t be hallucinated.

That focus would define their first real campaign.

Launched with a Big Kock Kampaign

Pufferfish’s first major campaign was for Airlearn, a language-learning app entering an already crowded market.

Instead of promising fluency or productivity, they focused on something more basic. Language is funny.

They put up high-visibility billboards in New York with single words that looked crude in English but mean completely innocent things in other languages:

Kock
Pussi
Dik

Each billboard carried the same line: Learn a new language with Airlearn.

The ads weren’t designed to explain themselves. They were designed to be completed by the audience.

Why “Stunt” Is Still the Wrong Word

Calling this work a stunt misses the point.

As Talia put it:

“The value of a view is different now, and the term ‘viral’ has lost its meaning.”

Depth beats reach. Resonance beats frequency.

The Economics of the Displacement

What’s happening here isn’t just cultural. It’s economic.

Legacy agencies are high-fixed-cost institutions. Creator-led agencies are low-overhead, project-based, and fast.

The middle layer is being hollowed out.

What remains are two poles. Technocratic giants handling infrastructure. And creative militias handling culture.

My Prediction

Within the next few years, a Fortune 500 consumer brand will appoint a former top-tier creator or creator-operator as Chief Marketing Officer.

I don’t know that much about advertising but I’d bet on it.

Why This Matters to Legacy Media

This isn’t just a story about advertising. It points to where legacy media can go next.

If you want to be the Anonymous Content of the future, it’s no longer enough to manage directors who make great films. You also need to work with creators who understand how culture moves today. People who can design moments that live beyond the screen and spread across the internet through participation.

That doesn’t mean chasing virality for its own sake. It means recognizing that film and television can’t live in isolation anymore. They need to become part of larger cultural moments that travel through feeds, group chats, and remixes, the way Anthpo’s work does.

Legacy media already sees this. The Severance campaign that rebuilt the show’s office inside Grand Central Station worked because it invited people into the world of the show and let them carry it online.

That’s the shift. Not promotion alone, but integration.

Pufferfish isn’t a replacement for legacy media. It’s a glimpse of how creative fluency and cultural participation can help film and television live more fully inside the internet.

For the next film or television project I take to market, I’d want to bring Pufferfish in as a creative partner. Not to run a campaign, but to help extend the storytelling itself. Not after the show is finished, but while it’s being made. Designing moments that live alongside the work and travel through culture in real time.

Imagine what that could unlock.

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Sundance and the creator economy come from the same place, even if some people still resist the idea.

I once suggested in a Garden Stack about film schools that they should require students to open a YouTube channel. That suggestion triggered immediate pearl clutching in parts of the indie film community, including a film school head who seemed genuinely offended by the notion.

And yet, some of the most interesting and formally inventive work I encounter today is being born on YouTube. Work made outside traditional systems. Work that finds its audience before it finds permission.

There remains a reflexive discomfort in parts of the film world with the idea that independent art can live on the internet. A filmmaker with a YouTube channel. A series financed outside traditional lanes. For some, that still reads as dilution rather than continuation.

That reaction misses the point.

Independent filmmaking has always been about working outside the system to make work that does not fit neatly inside it. It has always been about reaching specific audiences instead of everyone at once, and about using whatever tools are available to get the work made and seen. The internet did not break that ethos. It amplified it.

I have been to Sundance twice with films that, without the festival’s spotlight and the awards they received there, would not have found distribution or meaningful exposure. Sundance mattered.

But if I were a young filmmaker starting today, I would be looking first to the power of the internet, not as a fallback, but as a primary path. Increasingly, Sundance itself seems aware of this tension.

The more Sundance recognizes this and invites real convergence with the internet, the more it is not reinventing itself, but returning to its roots.

Apologies we are a day late! Open Gardener was on the ground at Sundance, observing this convergence, and its limits, in real time. Below are those observations.

Notes From Sundance

Sundance was created to give independent storytellers a place to be seen, to offer new voices a platform outside the studio system and a chance to connect with niche audiences rather than chase mass appeal. From the beginning, the festival’s purpose was to elevate work that did not fit neatly inside existing commercial lanes and to protect the space where experimentation and specificity could survive.

Creators were never part of that original foundation, and that distinction matters. The filmmakers Sundance championed in its early years were operating outside dominant systems in ways that closely resemble how creators operate today, using whatever tools were available to make work, find audiences, and build momentum without waiting for permission. The tools have changed, but the impulse has not.

This year, it became clear that while the creator economy is present at Sundance, it is still not foundational to how the festival understands itself. Creators are visible, invited, and increasingly relied upon for reach and cultural relevance, but they remain largely external to the festival’s creative core, even as the need for that convergence has grown.

2026 marks the final year of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City before the festival relocates to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. Park City has never just been a backdrop, but part of the mythology shaped by isolation, friction, and the feeling that you had to really want to be there.

I went to Park City to understand what the festival feels like right now, at a moment when the industry it helped build seems to be pulling itself in different directions. With the passing of Robert Redford in 2025, the timing carried additional weight, as the institution he helped shape moves into a new chapter whether it wants to or not.

Arrival

The first thing I did when I arrived was go see a movie.

I had tickets for the late night screening of The Disciple, directed by Joanna Natasegara, at the Eccles Theatre. The film follows Cilvaringz, who was in the Wu-Tang Clan’s extended orbit, as he becomes increasingly consumed with the idea of making something singular during the period that led to Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the single-copy album designed to reject the idea of music as disposable content and to argue for art as something scarce, intentional, and valuable.

As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that this is not a story about access so much as escalation. Cilvaringz is not trying to enter the room; he is trying to convince the room that protecting value matters more than reach. His fixation on creating something that resists mass distribution, even at the cost of misunderstanding or alienation, feels uncomfortably close to the position independent filmmakers occupy now. The film is less about Wu-Tang itself than it is about what happens when artists, already inside a system, attempt to push back against the incentives that system rewards.

The following thought came to mind: Creators aren’t replacing independent filmmakers. They’re becoming what independent filmmakers used to be.

That tension stayed with me throughout the rest of the festival.

Moving through Main Street made the scale of Sundance immediately apparent. Lines wrapped around brand houses and alumni cafés, and without a badge I hustled tickets through Reddit and a WhatsApp group run by Sean Glass of Reunion, which has become an informal but essential layer of festival infrastructure. Demand far outpaced access, and even ticket holders were often unsure whether they would get into screenings.

The mood, however, was not hostile. The phrase I heard most often was that people could not believe the festival was moving. With Robert Redford’s passing, the idea that Sundance was leaving Park City carried emotional weight, and many people had returned knowing this was a final chapter in a place that defined their relationship to independent film.

Filmstack, Saturday Morning

Saturday morning, Filmstack gathered at the Yoga Studio. The room held filmstackers, writers, educators, and students, including , , , and Susan Brewer Busa from Texas State, whose class I had spoken to the previous year about alternative pathways into a modern film career.

What connected the room was not job title but shared concern and curiosity about where independent film goes next. The conversation was open and informal, built entirely around people talking to one another rather than presenting ideas at one another. There were no laptops open and very few phones out, as the focus stayed squarely on face-to-face exchange.

spoke briefly to acknowledge the gathering and the importance of keeping this community connected, but the real substance lived in the conversations that followed. What stood out was the way the room functioned as a shared space for exploration, as people who think seriously about independent film found community with one another while informally circling how the pursuit continues to move forward.

The filmstack meetup mattered because it revealed something structural. These were some of the most urgent conversations about independent film happening all weekend, and they were happening outside Sundance’s official programming, even though they were deeply aligned with its original mission.

BrandStorytelling

BrandStorytelling is a Sundance-adjacent event focused on brand-funded films, documentaries, and series, positioning brand financing as a legitimate production model rather than a compromise.

I did not go there to attend the event itself, but to meet a friend who is a social-native filmmaker working in microdramas. We had crossed paths digitally many times but had never met in person, and BrandStorytelling happened to be where they were based that afternoon.

The contrast with Main Street was immediate. The space was quiet and unhurried, and the conversations felt removed from the scramble for access downtown. From what I could see, the focus remained on brand-backed projects supported by companies like Yogi Tea, Lenovo, Intel, Sephora, and Accenture, and on treating brand funding as a viable and scalable way to get work made.

Our conversation centered on microdrama as an emerging form, on story structure in vertical formats, and on how financing models shape creative risk. We talked about when the first million-dollar microdrama might arrive, or when an A-list actor might participate not as a novelty, but as a serious creative experiment. What stood out was how open the exchange felt, especially compared to similar discussions I had attempted in more traditional film contexts prior to Sundance, which often stalled or turned defensive.

BrandStorytelling did not feel oppositional to Sundance, but it did feel like parallel infrastructure, operating quietly alongside a festival still oriented around legacy financing paths.

Creators at Sundance

Creators were present at Sundance this year, but they were not foundational to the festival’s structure.

What made that absence more noticeable was the contrast with last year. In 2025, Sundance made a more explicit effort to integrate creators through an invite-only Creator Day. That event was Sundance-sanctioned and brought leading creators into direct conversation with industry, brands, and filmmakers, not simply as marketing partners but as cultural operators in their own right.

Participants included creators such as Sean Evans, Rhett McLaughlin, Link Neal, Michelle Khare, and Kinigra Deon. The presence of creators like Deon, whose work is built entirely through direct audience relationships outside traditional Hollywood systems, made the intent of the event clear. Sundance was acknowledging that creators were not adjacent to independent storytelling, but part of its present and future.

This year, that layer was noticeably absent.

Creators were still present, but primarily through marketing, amplification, and adjacent programming. TikTok made their presence known by inviting film-focused creators to Park City, including Louis Levanti and Kit Lazer, embedding creators into the festival’s outward-facing ecosystem through coverage, interviews, and red-carpet content. Sundance’s marketing reflected that shift, with Charli XCX becoming one of the festival’s most visible cultural figures through her appearances in multiple films.

Creator-adjacent conversations also appeared at the Impact Lounge, Sundance’s hub for social impact and narrative change, where digital-native voices were framed around audience reach and cultural influence rather than as part of the festival’s creative core.

Creator-informed infrastructure showed up more quietly in the lineup through If I Go Will They Miss Me, directed by Walter Thompson-Hernández and produced by Further Adventures. Further Adventures, founded by YouTube veteran Steven Beckman and producer Ben Stillman, works with independent filmmakers and creators to develop and produce projects, applying creator-era audience strategy to long-form storytelling. Further Adventures have a second film in the festival, from filmmaker Ramzi Bashour, titled Hot Water. Like Thompson-Hernández, Bashour’s previous short demonstrated his ability to connect with audiences.

Beckman’s background in representing creators at YouTube informs that approach. The company’s goal, in addition to helping creators elevate their storytelling and transition into film, is also to apply lessons from creator-native ecosystems, such as direct audience relationships and sustainable creative businesses, to support filmmakers with singular voices. Thompson-Hernández’s film embodies that model, expanding on his Sundance-winning short from 2022 while retaining its intimacy and specificity.

The clearest convergence moment for me came in the midnight shorts block, when Homemade Gatorade, an animated short by Carter Amelia Davis, played to one of the strongest audience reactions of the weekend. Davis already had an active Patreon community and an online audience before Sundance programmed the film, underscoring that the festival is already selecting work shaped by direct audience relationships, even if it does not yet talk about it that way.

Taken together, these moments suggest that creators are present, visible, and increasingly important to Sundance’s ecosystem, but they are still not embedded as a central organizing principle.

Leaving Park City

Getting to Sundance has always been the dream, both for me and for nearly every filmmaker I spoke to during my short time there, and it remains my dream to have a piece of work play at the festival, no matter where it is held.

Sundance understands that it needs creator-native voices to help extend its community and reach, and that process is already underway through partnerships and marketing. The deeper opportunity, however, feels structural, not simply using creators to push the festival outward, but inviting creators who already have communities into the creative fabric of the festival itself.

Boulder represents a real opportunity in that regard. Unlike Park City, it is a college town with tens of thousands of students and emerging artists living there year-round. That environment has the potential to reconnect Sundance with the kinds of new voices and niche audiences it was originally built to serve.

The ethos that made Sundance essential does not belong to a town. It belongs to the belief that new voices are worth the effort it takes to hear them.

It is simply waiting to be made foundational again.

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This is not just a feel-good story about resilience. And it’s not just a case study in how one producer survived a canceled TV show.

It’s a blueprint for what legacy media keeps getting wrong, and what the next generation of producers, executives, and marketers will need to relearn fast. The shift from audience to community is no longer theoretical. It is operational. And the people who understand that are already building on the other side of the collapse.

Before going further, it’s worth being clear about the scale of this story. What this producer built is small by Hollywood standards. Tens of thousands of people, not millions. A show that on good days reaches around 100,000 views, not something that moves markets or stock prices.

That’s exactly why it matters.

I came across this story because a legacy unscripted producer, Jeff Kmiotek, who is also making interesting moves in the creator space, flagged something unusual to me. A longtime unscripted field producer whose National Geographic show ended after a long run didn’t move on to the next gig. She went somewhere else entirely. She went to the fans. Specifically, to a Facebook community that had quietly formed around the show over years and was largely ignored by the network that benefited from it.

That community helped her buy new gear. Supported production. Followed her as she rebuilt the series independently on social platforms. No network. No greenlight. Just trust, continuity, and ownership.

Her name is Mickey Ramos.

What she did sharpened something I’ve been feeling for a while. In legacy media, we obsess over reach, ratings, and consumption. We rarely talk about participation. Identity. Stewardship. On more than one show I’ve produced, I begged platforms to do the obvious, gather the superfans, give them content between seasons, let cast speak directly to them, turn viewers into advocates. The answer was always the same. Great idea. Our system doesn’t support it.

This story isn’t really about unscripted television. It’s about what happens when a legacy system breaks and the people inside it are forced to improvise. Still, unscripted is where Mickey comes from, and it’s worth remembering what’s happened to that sector of our business.

Unscripted TV isn’t in a slump. It’s in structural decline. Since the streaming bubble burst, U.S. unscripted production has fallen off a cliff. ProdPro data shows a 40 percent drop in U.S. film and TV production versus a 20 percent global decline, making the pain disproportionately American.

In Los Angeles, reality TV shoot days collapsed more than 56 percent in a single quarter in 2024, effectively wiping out the category as a reliable employment base.

This isn’t about changing tastes. It’s about capital retreating. Conglomerates like Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount are prioritizing debt reduction and free cash flow over volume, cutting the mid-budget unscripted shows that once sustained a middle class of freelancers. What was once the industry’s most dependable engine has been reset into a smaller, risk-averse, globally outsourced business. The volume era is over.

Mickey Ramos rode the entire arc of that wave.

She didn’t come up through a polished pipeline or a studio track. She was waiting tables at Gladstones on Sunset when she stumbled into public access TV and realized how little permission it took to make something. She created a live show, cast other waiters and neighborhood kids, and let them swear on air because no one was stopping her. The show cost nothing but her tips, and Venice kids became local celebrities.

With no family in the business and no safety net, she brute-forced her way in by making herself indispensable one relationship at a time. That led to ComedyWorld.com during the dot-com boom. The project failed, but it bought her access. From there, she entered the unscripted ecosystem through sheer volume and endurance, working on shows like Paradise Hotel 2, Floor Is Lava, Dr. Pimple Popper, and 1000-Lb Sisters. She stayed a field producer by choice. Boots on the ground, talent-facing. For a long time, the system needed people like her.

Along the way, Mickey picked up a kind of cultural résumé that only exists in the margins of Hollywood. She was part of the South Park crew, was the voice of Tammy Warner, and got to kill Kenny. (This didn’t change her career trajectory. It just makes her cool.)

Then came Life Below Zero.

Life Below Zero rose because it perfectly matched both the moment and the medium that produced it. Premiering in 2013, it arrived after the first wave of Alaska-branded reality shows like Gold Rush, but distinguished itself by rejecting spectacle in favor of rigor.

Produced by BBC Studios, it applied a documentary-grade approach to subsistence living, prioritizing authenticity, cinematography, and patience over manufactured drama. That discipline paid off. The show became a cornerstone of National Geographic’s cable identity, ran for more than a decade, spawned multiple spin-offs, and won nine Emmy Awards, largely for cinematography and editing. It thrived in a cable ecosystem that rewarded volume, loyalty, and repeatability.

Mickey joined that universe in 2018 as a field producer on Life Below Zero: Port Protection. Unlike other spinoffs, Port Protection focused on a single village in Southeast Alaska. Everyone lived in one place. Survival was communal. The cast relied on one another to get through the year. That concentration mattered. The show built unusually deep relationships with its audience. Over seven seasons, it routinely beat the ratings of other spinoffs and sometimes outperformed the flagship. Viewers responded to the lack of manipulation. Cameras followed life as it unfolded.

Then the system changed.

Disney acquired National Geographic. Strategy shifted. The network moved toward fewer, celebrity-driven, high-concept travel and documentary events designed for streaming. Alaska-based, location-heavy unscripted content no longer fit the model.

Port Protection was canceled in 2023 despite stable performance. Contracts expired quietly. Spin-offs fell one by one. By early 2025, the entire Life Below Zero universe was dismantled. The show did not fail. The economics around it did.

By the end of 2023, Mickey was back in the freelance market. She landed work on 1000-Lb Sisters, but the larger realization had already set in. The way she had been working was no longer sustainable.

This is where most people stop. Many did. Many left the business entirely.

Mickey did not. She believed in the show. More importantly, she believed in the audience.

What surprised her was how many of those fans felt abandoned. Not confused. Not indifferent. Angry. They had invested years into these stories and communities, only to watch them disappear without explanation. That sense of abandonment was not theoretical. It was loud, emotional, and constant. And it was something legacy media almost never measures.

Years earlier, a resident of Port Protection had created a Facebook page for the town. Fans of the show found it and stayed. When Mickey joined the series, she began contributing behind-the-scenes photos and context. Not as a strategy. As instinct. Over time, the page became the community hub for fans. When the page’s creator died in 2023 without naming an administrator and scammers took over, Mickey saw something fragile about to vanish.

On January 1, 2024, with few jobs available and a canceled show behind her, she launched a new Facebook page from scratch and asked the community to follow her. They did. Within weeks, it crossed 10,000 followers. It now sits around 17,000.

Mickey understood something many legacy producers still miss. Communities that form in digital spaces can be currency, even before you know how to monetize them.

National Geographic still had episodes in the can and planned to roll them out slowly to preserve continuity. Mickey used that window. Every week, she hosted live watch parties from her bedroom in Venice. She streamed episodes, provided behind-the-scenes context, and talked directly with fans. The streams were not monetized. She used the moment to reconnect fans directly to the people behind the work.

At first, this was emotional. A refusal to let the community die. Then it became practical. A former assistant camera operator reminded her of something obvious. She already had the relationships. If she could get back to Alaska, she could make something new. The only obstacle was money.

She solved that the same way she solved everything else. Chutzpah.

She asked the audience for help. Not cash. Equipment. Amazon wish lists. Fans bought everything. Cameras. Gear. Supplies for cast members. Mickey had spent months giving before asking. When she finally did, the audience responded.

In May 2025, she flew back to Alaska. Alone. She shot everything herself on iPhones. One story per episode. One day of shooting. No scripts. No crew. Alaska-Vibes launched June 1. The channel monetized in six days. The first month earned a few hundred dollars. Modest, but real. Revenue was shared using a model the cast understood. Like a fishing boat. Captain. Boat. Deckhands. A portion was set aside to fund future travel.

Today, the channel has more than 18,000 subscribers, over 70 videos, and multiple episodes with more than 100,000 views. The audience skews older. Roughly 55 and up. The same audience legacy media stopped prioritizing. YouTube noticed and invited Mickey into a creator boot camp focused on long-term growth and memberships.

Measured by traditional industry metrics, this is modest. But it’s also the wrong lens. What Mickey built isn’t powerful because of its size. It’s powerful because of its density. The ratio of trust to scale. These aren’t passive viewers. They show up. They fund. They participate. They followed a producer, not a platform, and helped keep a story world alive when the system around it collapsed.

Mickey does not see a single show. She sees a universe. An opportunity to rebuild the Alaska unscripted ecosystem that once thrived on cable, this time owned by its creators and sustained by its audience. She is exploring FAST channels, syndication, brand partnerships, and commerce. She does not want to return to television.

Mickey Ramos did not pivot because it was fashionable. She moved because she had to. What she built instead is something legacy media has struggled to do. She migrated a story world she helped build. She brought the audience with her. And she proved that when systems collapse, producers who understand story, community, and grit still have leverage. They just have to use it somewhere new.

There is a bigger lesson here, and it is not really about Alaska.

For decades, Hollywood has been trained to see audiences as consumers. Ratings. Reach. Broad but shallow metrics designed for mass distribution. What Mickey stumbled into is the thing the system has consistently undervalued. Community. A smaller group of people who do not just watch, but stay. Who organize themselves. Who show up weekly. Who buy gear for a show they want to exist.

A consumer disappears when the product goes away. A community tries to save it.

Legacy media is structurally bad at this. The incentives were never built for it. Ownership lived at the network level. Relationships were mediated by platforms. Engagement was something marketing handled after the fact. Mickey inverted that order. She led with the relationship, not the rights. She had trust. And that turned out to be enough to rebuild the show in a new form.

It makes sense for studios and platforms to focus real energy on the biggest film and television spectacles. Those projects still have a moat. They are expensive, hard to replicate, and not about to be replaced by AI, no matter what, IMO, the loudest acolytes claim.

But there is another layer the industry keeps ignoring. Building around communities, not just hits. Thinking beyond a single show or movie and toward an ecosystem. If every time National Geographic made a show like Life Below Zero it invested in the community forming around it, not just the episodes themselves, those projects could live far longer and travel in more directions. The flywheel would not stop when a season ended.

The playbook does not have to be scale at all costs. Dozens of durable communities, held together by content you created and monetized across multiple surfaces, may ultimately be more resilient than a handful of massive bets. Mickey didn’t invent that idea. She just proved it still works when someone actually shows up to tend it.

As I suggested at the top, this is also a quiet blueprint for producers paying attention. The opportunity is not just to invent new IP from scratch. It is to look sideways. To find dormant audiences left behind by canceled shows, closed verticals, or strategic pivots. Communities that still exist, still gather, still care, but no longer have a steward.

In the old model, those audiences were written off as churn. In the new one, they are starting points.

Mickey’s story works because she understood something simple. When systems shrink, relationships matter more than scale. And small, committed communities can outlast very large, indifferent ones.

The producers who survive the next chapter and thrive in the new world order will be the ones who know how to find those communities, earn their trust, and make work with them instead of for them.

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Community is the single biggest thing legacy media still does not understand.

Not how to market it. Not how to label it. How to actually build it. How to maintain it. And why it matters more than any distribution strategy now on the table.

I had spent the last few years thinking about community through decks, case studies, creator economy conversations and the way my production companies is producing our content.

But I understood it more clearly after my house burned down.

Open Gardens is about exploring the convergence of legacy media and the creator economy. But to start this year, I want to step back and reflect on 2025 through an experience that fundamentally sharpened how I think about community, not as a buzzword, but as infrastructure. Next week we will jump back into more practical case studies and observations. Today— Im going personal.

On January 6th, 2025, just a year and one week ago, my house and my community burned down in the Palisades fires. For me, and for many others, the Palisades and Eaton fires altered our lives so quickly and so completely that it is impossible any of us have fully processed what happened or how our lives have changed and will continue to change.

But the decision my wife and I made in the days that followed reshaped how I now understand community more than anything I have read from a social media pundit or any case study about Taylor Swift.

We decided to move to her hometown of Manizales, Colombia. I knew I would live on airplanes and occasionally in the pool house of close friends in LA to keep work moving. Still, after so much trauma, retreating to family felt necessary. My kids speak Spanish and know the city well from Christmases and summers there. This felt like a chance to give them a deeper, more rooted experience of a place that already mattered.

I did not know it would alter my thinking so profoundly.

I grew up with a Colombian family in the US and moved to Bogotá in my 20s, where I got my start as a journalist and eventually as a screenwriter in the 1990s. That is a story for another time. I met my wife years later in Miami and first came to Manizales 17 years ago, when I met her family.

Manizales, high in the Andes, shaped by coffee and mountains.

Manizales sits high in Colombia’s central Andes, in the heart of the coffee region. It was founded in 1849 by Antioquian settlers pushing south, part of a broader migration that shaped much of western Colombia. Coffee built the city. Risk did too. Fires, earthquakes, and the constant presence of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano forced Manizales to rebuild itself more than once. What emerged was a place defined by resilience, education, and civic life.

Today, Manizales has roughly 460,000 residents across the city and surrounding metro area. It remains a mid-sized city with outsized influence, known for its universities, cultural life, and role in Colombia’s coffee economy.

Colombia is one of the most singular countries in the world. Gabriel García Márquez did not invent magical realism. He observed it. Here, it is simply reality. The country is born of passion, of what they call 'berraquera’ (what in Yiddish would be called chutzpah). It is shaped by violence and tragedy, yet somehow that history has produced warmth, a hunger for life, and a sharp sense of humor.

But Manizales is not the hard-edged, metropolitan Bogotá that shaped my 20s. Manizales is something else. It was recently voted the best city to live in in Latin America by the United Nations for quality of life. I have traveled all over Colombia. Manizales operates on a different frequency. I never understood why until I lived here.

It comes down to community. And that community is deeply wired through an equally deep relationship with the Catholic Church.

Let’s pause here. If you are like me, that thought probably short-circuited your brain a little. Organized religion. Worse, the Catholic Church, with all of its very real transgressions. I am agnostic at best. On bad days, I drift fully into existentialism.

But religion here functions differently. And this is not about Colombia as a whole. It is about how Manizales has been built. The city had the capital from its coffee trade to form a strong middle class and, with seven universities, became a center for education and independent thought. It is also physically isolated. The closest international airport is in Pereira, an hour and a half away through winding mountain roads.

And then there is Catholicism.

Colombia has always wrestled with its religious identity. The country has long been shaped by a tension between conservatism and liberalism, with the Church at the center. Conservatives pushed for church and state to function together as the moral backbone of society, while liberals argued for secular government and civil liberties. That divide fueled civil wars, ‘La Violencia’, and decades of instability. The 1991 Constitution formally separated church and state, but the legacy remains. Colombia is legally liberal, culturally conservative in many regions, with faith still acting as social glue.

And Manizales, conservative to its core, is held together by that glue.

None of this should be surprising. We have always understood the power of religious communities to hold people together. They have done it for centuries. I had simply never witnessed it up close. Living in liberal cities, the religious underpinnings that once structured communal life had long since been replaced. In many cases, including my own, our belief systems were forged in explicit rejection of those structures. Faith became something private, or suspect, or irrelevant. What I had not fully appreciated was what disappears when those shared frameworks disappear with it.

It was my idea to move back to Manizales. My wife is the rock of our family. It did not take much logic to see that if the rock had been destabilized, the path forward was to stabilize it.

But when I suggested it, she pushed back. You won’t be happy there. She knows me. She knows a small, conservative city creates friction for me. She said she would not agree unless her brother was on board. So we called him. This was four days after the fire. A Thursday night. I remember it clearly.

“Hermano,” he said. “We are sitting here right now as a family planning for this. We already have a house for you. It will be furnished before you arrive. We have spoken to the international school and your kids have a spot waiting. You just need to tell me what time to pick you up at the airport.”

It was the first time I cried since the fire. I had been in producer mode, solving problems. There was no time to feel anything. That level of humanity and readiness broke through everything.

It was also the beginning of understanding what real community actually looks like.

We moved into a house provided by family. It was already furnished with everything from frying pans to silverware to sofas and beds to televisions mounted on the wall. All new. All gifted.

That was family helping. But then came the larger community.

Neighbors showed up with fruit from nearby farms. The car we bought at a steep discount turned out to be owned by friends of my brother-in-law. The dealership owner later called him to say thank you for allowing them to help.

The more I observed the people close to me, the more I understood how this place works. Mass was only the visible layer. Beneath it were retreats, marriage seminars, and constant, quiet support for people who needed help. No visibility. No credit.

If God is the Creator with a capital C, God is also the center of the community.

The local priest oversees a parish of tens of thousands, while constantly raising money for clothing, food, and emergency aid throughout the city. Not seasonal charity. Ongoing work. And then there are people like my brother-in-law and his wife, operating as connective tissue. Organizing family and friends. Carrying the same values forward without visibility or applause.

Manizales holds together because it is built around shared values. And yes, it excludes others.

That exclusion is not loud or punitive. Nearby cities have been hollowed out by narco-culture and crime. Manizales resists that. Outsiders can come, but on the city’s terms. You do not have to be religious, but you do have to respect the principles.

As a producer trying to understand community, I had always approached it transactionally. How do I get someone to watch a movie or a show. How do I turn attention into loyalty, and loyalty into something that scales. Community, in that framing, is something you build in service of an outcome.

What confused me in Manizales was that none of this logic applied.

What I was watching had nothing to do with conversion, incentives, or visibility. People gave without signaling. Help arrived before it was requested. There was no scoreboard, no recognition, no branding of generosity. And yet the system worked. Better than anything I had seen professionally.

Slowly, I realized the missing ingredient was emotional value. Belonging itself was the asset.

At its core, this community runs on genuine give and take, but not in any linear or traceable way. You contribute without knowing how or when it comes back. Or if it comes back at all. That leap is faith. Not faith in doctrine, but faith in people.

As someone wired more scientifically than spiritually, that was the unlock. This was not sentimental. It was belief in human wiring. That people thrive in communities. That investing in the whole eventually supports the individual.

That curiosity led me backward through the earliest digital communities in the creator economy, long before platforms and playbooks. And that path led me to David Spinks.

Spinks is one of the first people to treat community as infrastructure rather than marketing. He founded CMX, helped professionalize community building, and wrote The Business of Belonging, which became a field guide for understanding why some communities endure and others collapse.

At the center of his work is the SPACES model, which defines six kinds of value communities create. Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success.

Reading it after living in Manizales was jarring. Because it all mapped perfectly.

Support as infrastructure. Contribution without applause. Engagement enforced socially. Success defined by collective health. Exclusion as clarity, not cruelty. A real cost to leaving.

Spinks did not invent this. He named it.

Manizales did not need a framework to work. But the framework helped me understand why it does.

Of course, there is an absurdity in comparing a city bound together by shared spiritual beliefs to modern communities organized around entertainment, hobbies, or fandom. A parish is not a bowling league. A faith tradition is not a Discord server. The stakes are different. The depth is different. The cost of leaving is different. But the underlying mechanics are not. In both cases, communities only endure when people feel responsible to something larger than themselves and to each other.

Losing our home taught me many things. But the deepest lesson did not come from loss. It came from landing somewhere that knew how to hold people when things fall apart.

Manizales did not save us. It absorbed us.

Legacy media talks about community endlessly, but confuses attention for belonging. What Manizales made clear is that real communities are slow, values-based, specific, and durable.

Belonging is not a tactic. It is a belief system.

The fires took our house. But they dropped us into a living example of what holds when everything else burns.

As our lives pull us back to the US, I will be forever grateful to this place. It brought us in and took care of us. We are part of its community. And I feel, without ever being forced to, a profound need to give back.

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Happy New Year to the readers of Open Gardens!!!!

We are off this week, but I couldn’t ignore the end-of-year announcement about the Academy Awards moving to YouTube. Every media and creator economy Substacker, pundit, journalist, podcaster and group chat has already weighed in, so there is no need to relitigate it here.

But YouTube is about width. Maximum reach. The biggest possible audience watching the show, or at least consuming pieces of it in clips, highlights, and reaction videos. That matters. Meeting audiences where they already live matters. As an Academy member, I’m proud of the decision. Every movie today depends on social platforms, YouTube included, to find an audience. Bringing the Oscars into that ecosystem feels both practical and overdue.

But width is only half the game.

Where real monetization and durability are happening right now is depth. Identifying the people who care the most, pulling them closer, and building experiences, access, and value around that relationship. That work does not require waiting for 2029.

And to be clear, the show will not actually move to YouTube for another three years. In media time, that is an eternity. Platforms will change. Formats will shift. Today’s hot takes will age poorly.

Which is why I wanted to resurface an article we wrote back in March of 2025. It argued that the more interesting opportunity for the Academy lives beyond distribution deals and broadcast platforms.

That still feels like the right swing to take right now.

Reposting it below for anyone who missed it the first time. And we will start posting new articles next week!

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