As we count down the final days of 2025, the Open Gardens team looks back fondly on the past 12 months. What started out as a thought exercise rooted in pure curiosity has grown into a blossoming community eagerly looking towards the future.
We want to thank you for taking the ride with us.
It’s no secret that as a whole, the industry at large has experienced a major disruption. With Open Gardens, our solution to that disruption was not only looking ahead but framing these changes in a positive way. Not harping on what’s gone, but to focus on what’s coming and how we can stay ahead of the curve.
Without our faithful readers, there wouldn’t be an Open Gardens. So, a massive thank you is due!
So with that, we’ve decided to compile a list of 10 holidays reads for our newly joined Gardners or those of you that are looking for key insights that you might have missed throughout the year.
Grab a hot cocoa, pull up a chair and dive in.
We’ll resume our Deep Dives on January 12th. See you in 2026!
Enjoy!
Open Gardens Archives
The DNA Of A Hit: The Hidden Code Behind Digital Blockbusters
In the legacy media playbook, everyone was chasing the same thing: the blockbuster.
In the digital era, “blockbusters” are built by creators who discover a clear, emotionally resonant, repeatable core idea (their “DNA,” often reducible to one word) and then scale that feeling across formats, platforms, and products, rather than relying on traditional IP portfolios.
Cowboy Boots, Rodeo, and the Future of Film
There are certain patterns forming in our business that truly excite me. The more I study them, the more I see opportunities everywhere to build. In fact, we are building some right now. But I digress…
The piece argues that the next wave of entertainment companies will be built by capturing a thriving subculture (like modern Western/rodeo), then turning it into a flywheel of IP, distribution, live events, and commerce, with film and TV becoming downstream outputs of an already-activated community.
From Fear to Fascination: The Legacy Media Mindset for a Creator World
I didn’t mean to become a creator. I launched Open Gardens as a personal push—a way to hold myself accountable to exploring what’s next. If I committed to publishing every week, I’d be forced to read more, watch more, dig deeper into the shifts happening around us: AI, short-form storytelling, audience migration, creator ecosystems.
The piece lays out a set of mindset shifts for legacy media in a creator-first world, where creators operate like full-stack studios, attention and community come before distribution, and the winning play is to experiment fast while building repeatable systems that connect content, community, and commerce.
In a world where content is endless and tools make “good enough” cheap, DJ culture shows the way forward: turn your work into a remixable engine, make real-world moments the payoff, and win on taste, timing, and craft.
From Napster to Netflix: What Hollywood Can Learn from Music’s Comeback
While we’re all freaking out about disruption, maybe we should take a page from the music industry.
After Napster shattered music’s old business, the industry survived by turning artists into full ecosystems and monetizing every fan touchpoint, and the article argues Hollywood needs the same creator-first rebuild across community, commerce, live, and multi-format IP, not just films and shows.
Suggested Additional Readings
Doug Shapiro’s keynote that frames GenAI as the next media earthquake, shifting disruption from how content gets distributed to how it gets created, and laying out the core forces and open questions that will decide who wins when content becomes effectively infinite.
Evan Shapiro’s furious, clear-eyed dispatch on the Media Apocalypse that argues layoffs are being driven by spreadsheet culture, not necessity, and then pivots into a practical seven-step playbook for laid-off creatives to regain control by defining what they want, naming their value, expanding beyond legacy media, investing in themselves, stacking small wins, and rebuilding real community.
Sandra Lehner’s piece kicks off a Creator Economy series by arguing the new media advantage is not owning distribution but earning proximity, and it promises a pattern-driven playbook to help brands and legacy teams operate at the speed of culture in 2025.
Jim Louderbacks article frames the looming Netflix vs. YouTube showdown as a clash of worldviews, with Netflix doubling down on consolidation and owned franchises while YouTube compounds by nurturing a creator ecosystem (with MrBeast’s business momentum as the proof point), and it argues the winner will be whoever thrives in an infinite-content, AI-shaped future.
Reed Duchscher makes the case that YouTube is quietly outflanking everyone by building for creators first, rolling out tools that help them earn more, protect their likeness, localize faster, and get smarter about what to make next.