The Garden Harvest: 11/28/25
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
Just a short update today as we ease into the Thanksgiving weekend. I hope you’re all enjoying the break, and that yesterday was filled with good food, good company, and a little time to breathe.
FRESH CLIPPING
The great convergence
As 2025 starts drawing to a close, it’s time to start thinking about where we’re headed into next year. Colin McRae breaks it down in his recent post.
The line between creators and traditional media is disappearing fast as we’ve been writing for the past 12 months. But the numbers point to 2026 as a potential tipping point.
Creator ad spend is exploding, growing four times faster than the rest of the industry. YouTube, TikTok, and Meta are on track to out-earn all of traditional media in ad revenue for the first time, and nearly half of advertisers now consider creators a mandatory buy (we’re far from them seeing creators as true partners, but one thing at a time).
Simultaneously, other formats are taking off. Live events, sports, real-time commerce, short-form storytelling, places where creators dominate. Studios are pouring billions into these areas too, not back into mid-budget scripted.
Investors are racing in as well: major raises, creator-focused M&A, and even back-catalog acquisitions treating creator libraries like long-term IP assets.
And as we’ve started to highlight in our new column, the rise of short dramas, a category that barely existed three years ago and is now a $3B+ market, shows how fast this hybrid space is maturing.
The takeaway from all this? The money isn’t gone in Hollywood. It’s moving.
It’s going toward creators, toward speed, toward participation.
Moving forward, traditional media will get more creator, and creator media will get more premium.
The real opportunity is in the middle.
GARDEN VIEW
Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon, put out a wonderfully funny NYT Opinion video making his case for a more “human algorithm” based on creativity.
Over time, it’s gotten so much harder to build community online. Back then, if you followed someone, you’d see all their posts and be able to engage easily with the creator’s work. Now? Wollowing someone means their content gets kinda lost with so many ads and new discovery mechanisms pushing us to stay glued to our screens.
This doesn’t make the experience better for viewers, and it certainly doesn’t make it better for creators.
So, what do we do about it? (No, this isn’t a Patreon ad).
The answer is simpler than you think: re-build algorithms that have creators and their fans at the center, not advertisers.
Perhaps a utopia, but given that we all now live online, perhaps it’s worth making it a place we truly enjoy.
Have a great weekend…
So accurate and thoughtful analysis ‼️
It really blows your mind about what is to come in the near future to make better content for all peoples