If You’re Building a Media Company in 2026, Read This: RockWater and the New Rules of Value
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.
Incredible article. Thank you for writing. Really informative. Let’s connect
Great stuff Ben, Chis Erwin at Rockwater seems on it.