The Garden Harvest: 6/20/25
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
Welcome back to the Garden Harvest!
Each week, we gather and curate the freshest insights from the worlds of Creators and Legacy Media, so you can stay rooted in what matters and spot new opportunities where others can’t.
Let’s get into it…
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Kai Cenat, creator and… agent?
In what feels like the purest expression of an open garden, Kai Cenat has been helping Drake find 20 fans to direct the ‘Somebody Loves Me’ video. The way it works is pretty simple: Anybody can upload a 30-second to one-minute video with treatment ideas. Then, Drake and Kai will choose 20 individuals who will receive $15,000 each to bring their vision to life.
It feels kind of revolutionary, but it really shouldn’t. In the creator economy, anyone can be a director, or writer, or basically anything creative. That’s the whole point. But the reason it does feel seismic is because it’s Drake himself, a pretty legacy-encoded artist, who is deciding to bypass the traditional gatekeepers. No agencies, no industry vetting process. Just a creator to amplify and an open call.
The democratization of access is the basic lesson here, but look closer and you’ll find that the real takeaway is cultural powerhouses starting to lean into it.
Why do YouTube creator shows keep flopping in Hollywood?
This is a question worth pausing on, for everyone’s sake. So we have to thank Aden, the Director of Content Acquisitions at Viasat, for pushing the conversation forward. In his latest post, he zeroes in on a key section of the Looper Insights report on Youtube that has everyone buzzing (more on it below). He quotes: “YouTube stardom doesn't always translate to streaming success. Transplanting creators to Netflix and Amazon Prime risks losing the very thing that made them resonate.”
The reasons vary, but Aden boils it down to two main factors: audiences not easily migrating across platforms, and streamers overvaluing follower count and misjudging creative fit.
Not sure about you, but to us this sure seems like a challenge squarely aimed at legacy media. It’s easy to think that creators can simply be dropped into Hollywood and magically boost viewership, but it doesn’t work like that. We’ve spoken at length about potential playbooks in our long form articles. The creator strategy has to be thoughtful, intentional. And that starts with seeing creators not as tools, but as collaborators with their own ecosystems, rhythms, and rules.
People are increasingly seeing YouTube as a destination for long-form movies & TV
Last week we shared Joshua Cohen’s post about TV shows launching directly on Youtube thinking it was far away, but lo and behold, consumer sentiment might be shifting faster than anyone expected.
The same Looper Insights report discussed above (yes, you should probably just read the whole thing), highlights an underlying change in perception about the very nature of the YouTube platform. And no, this isn’t some wild prediction, it’s data.
According to the poll, 66% of consumers now see YouTube as a legitimate destination for long-form movies and TV. And nearly half, 47%, say the living room is their primary place for watching it.
Perhaps more notably, executives were also asked whether they’d consider releasing long-form premium content on YouTube themselves, and 86% of them said they’d consider it, while 30% said they were actively exploring the option.
Do we really have to say it?
GARDEN VIEW
Most people think of the creator economy as pure entertainment, but there’s a dark horse in this race that’s often ignored: Business to Business (B2B) creators.
You can learn all about it through this panel. They discuss key trends, challenges, and opportunities within the creator space with a primary focus on LinkedIn as a platform.
HARVEST QUOTE
“We’ve gone from the era of peak TV to the era of personalized TV.”
- Tubi Content Chief Adam Lewinson in conversation with Puck’s Julia Alexander, in which they discussed (among many topics), the nature of fandoms.
In a landscape where audiences are more fragmented than ever, it’s refreshing to hear someone in legacy media speak this way. Adam pushes back on the idea that niche means small. These fandoms might seem tiny from the outside, but within them lie massive devoted audiences that lead to major wins… and that’s not “niche” at all.
See you next week…