The Garden Harvest: 11/21/25

Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.

FRESH CLIPPINGS

The new buyers

This week, while talking with a legacy veteran about a potential book to series adaptation, I floated the idea of activating the author’s strong fan base, bringing them into the mix à la Robert Rodriguez or Eli Roth.

The response was: “We might alienate some of the buyers.”

But as Evan Shapiro points out so clearly in his latest note, there’s a new buyer in town: all of humanity.

In today’s market, those of us who create content can’t survive by relying solely on legacy buyers (if you were at AFM this year, or even just heard about how rough it was, you know exactly what I mean.)

This is what the creator economy is built on, and at this point it’s more than obvious how powerful a direct connection to your audience can be. So, why haven’t more legacy players shifted their focus toward selling directly to consumers?

The creator as CEO myth

Jim Louderback recently dropped a sharp reminder that cuts through all the recent noise around “creator MBAs” and accelerato…