The Garden Harvest: Why Disney Put Experiences in Charge

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

FRESH CLIPPINGS

Content as the Top Funnel

By elevating Josh D’Amaro, the Head of Experiences, to the top job, Disney is making a clear business statement: the real, durable value is not in the content, but in what content unlocks.

That sounds familiar if you’ve been paying attention to creators.

In the creator economy, content isn’t the profit center. The biggest creators build audience through content, then capture value through products, live events, memberships, and IP extensions. Even MrBeast runs profit through commerce and experiences, not views.

Disney is doing the same thing at industrial scale.

Yes, movies and shows don’t account for the majority of profit on their own. But they remain the entry point into everything that does generate outsized value: theme parks, merchandise, live experiences, lifelong brand attachment.

This aligns with what Doug Shapiro has been arguing for a while. When one input into a value chain becomes cheap or abundant, value flows elsewhere. But that doe…