The Shape of What Works: Alice Ma, Mad Realities, and the Operating System for Internet-Native Entertainment
I first heard about Mad Realities a year or two ago. They called themselves the MTV of the internet generation, which sounds reductive until you actually look at what they’ve built — unscripted formats designed natively for social media platforms that generated over a billion views last year across just eight shows.
Eight shows. A billion views.
My first reaction to watching this kind of content was judgment. This isn’t storytelling. This has no substance. But I’ve learned to recognize that instinct for what it is — the defensiveness that kicks in after you’ve spent decades building a career and suddenly the skills and instincts you killed yourself to develop are being challenged and downgraded.
The work is pushing through that. Asking what I can learn from it instead of why it doesn’t meet my standards.
That’s why I launched this Substack. So that people like Alice Ma — who are building the systems that will define the next era of entertainment — can illuminate legacy storytellers like me. So we can understand where we still have enormous value and where we have to change. Where there is real opportunity, if we listen.
I reached out to Alice to understand how she’s thinking about all of this. Mad Realities had just brought on CAA as they position themselves as a bridge to Hollywood, working with unscripted divisions and production companies to help them figure out how to build content that actually works in a social-first environment.
After digging into her background and spending a long Zoom together, something else happened. Jeopardy announced they were launching a special YouTube version featuring creators on March 31.
So we ended up spitballing on how she would bring Jeopardy into the social media ecosystem — a thought exercise that turned into something like a playbook for any legacy format that wants to thrive in this era.
But before getting there, it’s worth understanding where she comes from, what she’s actually built, and the underlying principles that made a billion views from a handful of micro-formats possible.
The Bridge Builder
If you watch Mad Realities — poppy, unpretentious formats about bodega cats and pop culture trivia — you might be surprised by Alice Ma’s background. Computer science, political economy, and Arabic at Berkeley. Research in Jerusalem on how narratives coordinate human behavior across borders. The first published investigation into terrorist crowdfunding on Bitcoin. A social venture that earned a medal from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. A core role in ConstitutionDAO, which raised $53 million in seven days from thousands of strangers on the internet to try to buy an original copy of the Constitution at Sotheby’s.
That last one is the key.
ConstitutionDAO proved that decentralized communities could aggregate resources at a scale previously reserved for institutions and billionaires. Alice watched it happen from the inside — and then asked what that same coordination mechanism could do if you pointed it at entertainment.
That’s how Mad Realities was born.
Not a creator who got lucky with a format. A systems thinker who studied how decentralized networks organize capital and behavior and then built a media company on those principles.
Think about Hollywood at its pinnacle — it used to pull minds like this. Now someone with Alice Ma’s toolkit looks at the studio system and sees a machine built for a world that no longer exists. She’s not trying to get into that room. She’s building the next one.
The Team and the Machine
Today the company is Alice and five full-time employees — a head of content, a head of partnerships, two showrunners, and an operations manager. Six people. They’ve done over seven figures in ad revenue, already surpassing last year’s total in the first quarter of 2026, with a pipeline of brand deals that Alice can barely work through fast enough.
When I asked her what she’s building toward: “We’re making a new Hollywood ecosystem. And in the process, we’ll bridge over from previous Hollywood because the best resources, the best people, the best capital, the best know-how — everything is all there. Our strategy has been very deliberately to be the bridge.”
That’s why they signed with CAA. Not because Mad Realities wants to go to Hollywood. Because when a legacy studio calls asking how to evolve, Alice wants them to call her. “It’s less like we’re trying to go to TV. It’s more like we want to create a bridge for people asking, how do I transform in the digital era. We would like them to call us.”
Her ideal partnership: team up with Paramount to bring back MTV with social-first adaptations. Pimp My Ride becomes Pimp My Rideshare. Paramount puts up money and ad sales infrastructure. Mad Realities supplies the internet-native creative process. Both sides get something they can’t build alone.
The Business Model
The engine underneath is worth understanding. Mad Realities functions as a digital publisher. Brands buy across the entire network of shows. Mad Realities handles integration, guarantees views, delivers a predictable CPM. Gen Z sees through paid ads instantly. But a brand integration inside a show the audience loves — that’s a different animal.
The brands with the biggest budgets have a problem most people don’t appreciate: they physically can’t efficiently spend their marketing allocation. The channels they relied on are giving diminishing returns. They need new pipes. Mad Realities is building those pipes, one format at a time.
I wrote about Broadway Video building the definitive machine for comedy inside legacy media’s infrastructure. Alice Ma is building the equivalent for unscripted entertainment inside the infrastructure that replaced it.
Her priorities, in order: ad sales, live events, commerce, books, then TV. The “books” surprised me. A Shop Cats coffee table book isn’t merch. It’s brand permanence. “It lives on my coffee table,” she said. “It’s like I’m living rent-free in someone’s head. How do you make an IP long-lasting and enduring and iconic?”
Television sits at the bottom. Not because she doesn’t value it. Because she sees it as marketing for the IP, not the business itself.
The Gap Between Creators and Capital
Her vision at scale: 20 to 30 hit IP formats. Tentpole originals launching every spring and fall. The infrastructure to get bold ideas funded, even sight unseen.
“The curse of the creator economy is that no one has figured out how to fund a bold new idea,” Alice said. “You can be a guy in your room making vlogs for five years and become a big YouTube creator, but you can’t convince someone to give you a million dollars to try something different. And that limits what types of ideas it can be.”
The gap between what creators can do alone and what requires real capital is the structural problem she’s trying to solve. Not by raising venture money for its own sake. By building hit IP that makes the capital chase her. She watched the 2010s digital publishers raise enormous rounds and scale for scale’s sake without hits to justify the investment. They all flamed out. Her instinct runs opposite: stay efficient, keep ROI high, let hit IP attract capital on favorable terms.
But she’s clear-eyed about what neither side can build alone. In our conversation, I shared a core belief of mine: for the creator economy to really scale, it’s going to need Hollywood. Not Hollywood the system, but Hollywood the people and the knowledge. The best craft, the best production instincts — those still live inside legacy. What legacy doesn’t have is the internet-native creative process that makes content work inside discovery algorithms.
Alice agreed. But she also sharpened it: “My categorization of what we’re doing would be that we’re making new Hollywood. A new Hollywood ecosystem. And in the process, we’ll bridge over from previous Hollywood because the best resources, the best people, the best capital, the best know-how — everything is all there.”
The Shape of K-Pop
To understand how Alice builds anything, you have to understand the theory she’s building from.
“The shape of K-pop is interesting because it mirrors the shape of sports,” she told me. “It’s extremely participatory, and it’s very fan-driven. You stan a certain group, and you follow them, and they win awards, and they compete against other groups, and you care when yours wins over theirs. But then so much of it is fan-driven. People are constantly making fan videos, and that’s how people engage with and find out about and participate in K-pop. The audience is very deeply a part of it. And can go really deep.”
That depth is the key. The engine doesn’t run on casual listeners. It runs on people who are all the way in — making content, organizing, evangelizing — and then pulling new people into the orbit.
What makes K-pop structurally distinct is the infrastructure built around that depth. Agencies (as they are called) don’t just produce music and hope fans show up. They build proprietary platforms — like HYBE’s Weverse — designed as moats where every interaction is tracked, analyzed, and monetized.
Music functions as a marketing funnel. The real product is the parasocial connection itself. Weverse alone has over 113 million app downloads and roughly 10 million monthly active users, 90 percent from outside South Korea. It’s not a fan page. It’s a closed-loop operating system for fandom.
I’ve written about the difference between building a moat and building a wall. K-pop agencies are the best moat builders in entertainment — identity-driven ecosystems where the fan relationship itself is the product. Western entertainment is still catching up.
And then there’s the network layer. Agencies cultivate super fan nodes — individuals and pages with outsized influence — and intentionally disseminate information through them. Private groups, early access, built relationships. The nodes transmit to each other, and suddenly the entire global fan base knows that Lisa got a haircut. It functions like a distributed communications network, with the agency as the signal and the fans as the infrastructure.
How Alice Applies It
Alice is careful about where the analogy maps and where it doesn’t. Not every cultural property is a cult of personality. But the participation architecture translates everywhere.
“What you can apply from the K-pop analogy is the ability for anyone to play and participate,” she said. “In K-pop, people set up fan clubs. It’s actually very fan-driven marketing. They’re the ones doing the crazy stuff.”
This is the lens through which she evaluates every format Mad Realities builds. Not: will this get views? But: does this have a shape that lets the audience participate, go deep, and do the distribution work themselves?
I’ve written about the distinction between fans and community, between viewers and inhabitants. Alice’s version of the same insight is more operational. She’s not diagnosing the gap. She’s building the formats that close it.
The Shows and How They Work
Mad Realities targets subcultures with passionate, pre-existing fandoms and builds formats that channel energy that’s already there. They’re not creating demand. They’re giving it a home.
Alice’s language for this: “We love formats that are synonymous with an idea that a lot of people can experience.” Not a niche. Not a trend. An idea so universal that the format becomes the default expression of it.
Shop Cats is the breakout. Someone on the team noticed that across bodega content on the internet, the comments kept saying the same thing: stop talking, show me the cat. Nobody owned the category. They piloted it, it exploded, and now it’s bilingual — captioned in Spanish from the start. When TikTok faced its ban scare, they started posting on RedNote with Chinese captions and became one of the top creators on the platform. Families DM asking for a bodega cat walking tour map. They’re scrolling through episodes trying to find addresses. The show has escaped the screen and entered people’s physical lives.
That’s what “synonymous with an idea” looks like in practice. Shop Cats didn’t invent the love of bodega cats. It became the thing you watch when that love needs a format.
Hollywood IQ is pop culture trivia where the audience plays along. The format is the participation. People watch to the end because they’re competing in their heads. When you watch Hollywood IQ, you’re not spectating. You’re in the game.
Proof of Love — the origin show — was a live dating format where the audience voted on who appeared in the next episode. Art gallery tapings in Soho, word of mouth only, sold out Webster Hall for the finale. Live events and audience participation baked in from day one.
The live event muscle has only gotten stronger. Shop Cats Live is a spin-off comedy show where the audience can adopt actual cats between sets, featuring rising stand-up talent. Two hundred people bought tickets on a Wednesday night at the Georgia Room. “We are finding audiences crave live, real experiences,” Alice told me. “It is a key component of our flywheel.”
That flywheel — views attract brands, brands fund production, production generates IP, IP creates opportunities for live events and commerce, all of which deepens the fan relationship and drives more views — is the same architecture I wrote about with Teton Ridge. Each show is a digital vertical with its own ecosystem.
But the most interesting thing about Mad Realities isn’t any individual show. It’s the development system underneath all of them.
A pitch at Mad Realities is a name and a logline. Five loglines from a potential showrunner tells Alice whether they’re creatively sharp enough and chronically online enough to run a show. If someone can’t generate five good names and loglines on the spot, they’re probably a line producer, not a creative showrunner.
Before piloting a new format, the team creates burner accounts on social media and immerses themselves in the target community. If they’re considering a show about cats, they like cat videos until the algorithm drops them deep into cat-focused content. From there, they study what people are talking about, what the existing content looks like, where the gaps are, what’s popular, what behaviors define the community. It’s ethnographic research conducted through the algorithm itself. By the time they shoot a pilot, they already have a granular understanding of whether the format fits a real audience’s existing behavior.
A season is 20 to 30 episodes treated as a “public pilot.” They release and record new episodes in parallel, evolving the format live based on what’s working. The opposite of the legacy cycle where everything is shot before anyone sees a frame.
Out of 15 to 20 pilots, Mad Realities has two long-running hits and a half dozen more shows with growing communities. But Alice believes six or seven of those pilots could have been hits. They didn’t die from audience indifference. They died from resource constraints. Six people can only run so many shows. The bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s capacity. Six people can only run so many shows.
The entire development cycle that takes Hollywood two to three years — and a one-in-twenty shot at a greenlight — happens inside a single season. The ratio isn’t the point, the velocity is.
Alice put it plainly: “Not all stuff that is viral is good. But the stuff that is good and is viral, if you can figure out how to also make it good on TV, the flywheel is extra powerful. It compounds.”
She’s aware that the DNA of what works in short form doesn’t automatically translate into longer formats. I’ve written about this — in The DNA of a Hit I argued that digital blockbusters scale through an emotional core concept, a one-word DNA that everything grows from but that each format must bring something new and different while respecting that broadly appealing DNA.
Dude Perfect’s is wonder. MrBeast’s is survival. Chicken Shop Date’s is vulnerability. If you can pull any single moment from the thing and the whole world would regenerate from it, the DNA is strong enough to build an ecosystem around — to scale across formats, surfaces, and participation layers.
Alice operates from the same instinct.
The Charlie D’Amelio case is instructive. People liked Charlie because she was a normal girl in Connecticut. The Hulu show turned her into a Kardashian, and the audience rejected it because it violated the core of why she resonated. The internet version honored the DNA. The TV version screen-printed over it.
As Alice put it: it was “completely different from the core DNA of why it hit.”
Extension has to grow a different tree from the same seed. Not plant a different seed entirely.
The Keys: What Makes Social-First Formats Work
Here’s what sits underneath everything Alice builds. These aren’t her words exactly — they’re principles I’m extracting from watching how she thinks, how she evaluates formats, and how she talks about what works and what doesn’t. Call them the conditions that should be honored for a social-first format to have a chance at becoming a cultural property rather than disposable content.
1. Be synonymous with a category people already live in. Don’t invent a niche. Find the existing behavior and own it. Shop Cats didn’t create the love of bodega cats. Hollywood IQ didn’t invent trivia night. They became the definitive format for something people were already doing. When the format is synonymous with the idea, the audience doesn’t need to be convinced. They just need to be shown this is the version worth watching.
2. The audience is playing, not watching. Every successful Mad Realities format has a participation mechanic — voting, playing along, visiting locations, quizzing friends. The fan does the work.
3. Every touchpoint is part of the show. Social media isn’t the marketing for the show. It is the show. The Instagram grid, the pinned posts, the comment replies, the DMs, the coffee table book — that’s all the experience. If someone is following you, they’re a fan. Design every touchpoint to tell them what you want them to know. Then they’ll do the distribution work for you.
4. Protect the DNA. Every successful IP has a core identity — a reason people fell in love with it in the first place. Extending it into new formats only works if the new expression honors that core. The moment it violates it, the audience doesn’t just lose interest. They feel betrayed.
5. Characters, not influencers. The formats that cut through right now feature real people who are not performing their realness but simply are real. Alice points to Jury Duty — Gen Z loves it because the hero is a normal, genuinely good person, and that sincerity is the contrast to the cynicism everywhere else online. The moment your cast starts performing for the algorithm rather than being in the moment, the thing that made the format special dies.
6. Test fast. Evolve live. Film and release in parallel. Treat a full season as a public pilot. Post the pilot even if it bombs — accountability over preciousness. You don’t need to get it right before you ship. You need to ship so you can get it right.
These six conditions aren’t a recipe. Plenty of things that meet all six still fail. But I’d wager that things have rarely succeeded at scale on social media that violate more than a couple of these.
Which brings us to the structural problem that sits underneath all of this: the shift that makes these conditions necessary in the first place.
From Scarcity to Ubiquity
For most of Hollywood’s history, scarcity wasn’t just a constraint. It was the strategy. Shows aired at a certain hour, events happened once, and if you missed them, they were gone. That scarcity created value and ritual. It gave content weight simply by being hard to access.
That logic doesn’t hold in a system where attention is continuous and culturally mediated through feeds that never turn off.
In an interview published last week by Natalie Jarvey on Like & Subscribe, Jenny Storms, Chief Marketing Officer of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, described how even the Olympics had to confront this. What was once the ultimate example of scarcity had quietly become a liability.
“In the past, scarcity was its special sauce,” Jenny said. “But in the world where social is everything, being part of the cultural conversation every day is important. Only happening once every four years, it became out of sight, out of mind.”
The response was structural. NBC credentialed creators with real on-the-ground access and let them tell stories in their own voices. They helped Olympic athletes build their own social brands. And they stretched the franchise into a year-round presence — seeding content eighteen months before Paris and now operating on an 852-day calendar leading into LA 2028.
Scarcity built the value of the Olympics. But a participation-driven, creator-powered, year-round ecosystem is what now sustains it.
That same pressure applies to every legacy entertainment brand. A show built for scheduled viewing and clear boundaries between when it exists and when it doesn’t — that structure creates authority but also distance. In a social environment, distance becomes irrelevance.
This is where most legacy adaptations go wrong. They hear “be everywhere” and translate it into volume — more clips, more posts, more surface-level activity disconnected from the brand’s core identity. That’s not ubiquity. It’s dilution.
Ubiquity only works when it’s structured — when every expression of the brand shares a common DNA but expresses itself differently depending on the surface. Presence that compounds versus presence that fragments.
So when Jeopardy announced its YouTube launch while we were mid-conversation, the thought exercise wrote itself.
Jeopardy: A Thought Exercise
This isn’t a critique. Jeopardy is iconic, and Alice believes the younger generation genuinely thinks it’s cool. But iconic today doesn’t guarantee iconic in twenty years.
“I would actually say that Jeopardy is still iconic to a 25-year-old today,” she told me. “I just don’t know if they will still be iconic for the five-year-olds today when they grow up. And what a shame to have made something so ubiquitous and not keep it going.”
The question is not whether Jeopardy needs to change what it is. It doesn’t. The question is whether it’s willing to build an ecosystem around it.
This is the key distinction. The instinct most legacy brands have is to ask: how do we make the show work on social media?
That’s the wrong question.
The right question is: how do we take the DNA of this show and build a living, breathing universe of touchpoints around it — social, live, physical, interactive — where each one reinforces the others and the audience has a role to play, not just a seat to sit in?
That’s what Alice does for a living. So we applied her framework.
And when we looked at Jeopardy’s current digital presence through that lens — the touchpoints, the grid, the YouTube strategy, the brand identity across surfaces — what struck us wasn’t that they were doing it wrong. It’s that there’s so much available runway they haven’t used yet.
The DNA (What You Protect)
Jeopardy’s superpower is smart, normal people competing at a high level. Not celebrities. Not influencers. The anti-clout show. In a culture saturated with cynicism and performance, Jeopardy is increasingly rare — real people being genuinely brilliant. Alice compares it to Jury Duty, which Gen Z loves for the same reason: the hero is a normal, good person, and that sincerity cuts through everything else online.
This is the DNA. Any internet adaptation that violates it — random influencers brought on for follower counts, contestants performing for the algorithm — would, in Alice’s words, “desecrate the institution.” The rigorous casting filter isn’t a limitation. It’s a feature.
Everything that follows is designed to amplify that DNA, not replace it.
Phase 1: De-Slopify
Alice looked at Jeopardy’s digital presence and drew a sharp line: retro Jeopardy — the classic aesthetic, the iconic font, the game board — is cool. Young people respect the institution. But the current social presence doesn’t look like retro Jeopardy. It looks like generic television marketing. Her advice: “De-slopify your socials.” Keep the iconic parts. Strip the rest. Specifically:
YouTube thumbnails that actually compel a click (Alice’s verdict on the current ones: “They just aren’t anything”)
TikTok edits that show contestants’ faces in the first three seconds — split-screen, real humans, not just the game board
A community manager who actually responds to comments and builds relationships
A brand identity refresh that leans into the retro cool and strips the cheesy 2020s TV energy
None of this is expensive. Alice suspects it would multiply reach significantly from basic social-native standards alone.
Phase 2: Character-Forward, Not Influencer-Forward
Jeopardy already has what most internet shows spend years trying to build — genuinely compelling, relatable people doing something impressive. The digital strategy just doesn’t let you see them:
Weekly photo carousels of contestants — yearbook-style portraits, tagged, co-posted. Most of these people have modest followings and would be thrilled. Their friends and families amplify it organically.
When someone goes on a streak, treat it like a tentpole — surge social, push it into newsletters and substacks, make the streak a cultural event that draws casual viewers in
Guest appearances like the recent Rebecca Black episode — internet-literate, funny, and genuinely reverent of the institution. Not influencers chasing clout.
Alice is adamant on this last point: if she started seeing Jeopardy contestants trying to become influencers, the institution would feel corrupted. The casting filter that keeps the show full of normal, brilliant people is the thing that makes it special. The internet strategy should showcase that, not undermine it.
Phase 3: The Bar Trivia Play
The format is already synonymous with trivia. The question is why the brand isn’t everywhere trivia already happens:
Send Jeopardy trivia kits to thousands of bars. Original questions. Everyone plays the same game that week.
Tag Jeopardy if you win. Winners post, friends repost, people argue about the questions, more people show up next week. Every winning post is organic content.
Producers visibly scout from the tags — suddenly the path onto the show feels open and democratic. Golden ticket energy.
Take it further: city-by-city brackets. One champion per city. Bracket-style competition. A shot at the actual show.
The casting stays rigorous. The aspiration to get on becomes a participation mechanic that lives across the country, every week, essentially for free.
And make the front door visible.
Put the rules of how to get on Jeopardy front and center on Instagram and the website — make it a pinned post. People love open auditions. They love the chance to win a shot at being on the big shiny stage. Right now, most fans don’t even know what the path looks like. Let them see the door, even if the door is hard to walk through.
Phase 4: Expand the Universe Without Changing the Show
The core broadcast stays untouched. Around it:
A social-first spin-off format — bite-sized, phone-native, genuinely different from the broadcast show, not a confusing three-minute clip that lives in no-man’s-land
Behind-the-scenes content: hometown tours with contestants, “where are they now” with past champions, a documentary series about the clue writers
IRL pop-ups — Jeopardy on the road, live in bars, live on campuses
A Roblox game — fan-made versions already exist, so the demand is proven
Cultural artifacts for superfans — merch that signals belonging, not just consumption. A Jeopardy streetwear drop. The right collaboration with the right brand could turn the retro-cool institutional identity into something people wear, collect, and display.
Monetize social content directly — let brands participate in the social-native content even if the cable show keeps its own ad structure. The extra cashflow justifies the investment in quality and creates a self-sustaining loop: better social content attracts brands, brand revenue funds more social content, more social content grows the audience
One structural note across all of this: ubiquity is the baseline, but it needs spikes. One or two tentpole moments a year — not so many they cause fatigue, but real events that concentrate attention and give the always-on presence something to build toward. A live championship event. A celebrity tournament with real stakes. A bar trivia national finals. The tentpole gives the everyday content a reason to exist and gives casual fans a reason to pay attention right now.
“It’s not like we’re trying to turn it into the Bachelor,” Alice said. “I think people like that it’s normal people who don’t seem like they’re there for clout.”
That’s the DNA of the show. Every phase and touchpoint sprouts from it.
What Humility Unlocks
A caveat before the closing note.
Everything laid out here is a thought exercise, and thought exercises have the luxury of ignoring the walls that real operators hit daily. Jeopardy has contractual obligations, network relationships, union rules, and institutional dynamics that constrain how fast anything can change.
Mad Realities is six people generating a billion views across eight formats because they understand the shape of what works on the internet right now. Participatory. Identity-forming. Format-driven. Fan-powered. Every touchpoint part of the show. Every show synonymous with something the audience already lives in.
That shape is not proprietary. It’s what Alice is offering to build for every legacy company willing to walk across the bridge.
Jeopardy is one of the most beloved brands in American culture. It doesn’t need to change what it is. It needs to extend where it lives.
And here’s what I keep coming back to: talking to Alice, studying her work, it holds up a mirror. I look at what we’re building at my own company — the shows we’re developing, the communities we’re trying to grow, the relationship between our content and our audience — and I have to ask myself the hard questions.
How much of what we’re doing is built for the infrastructure that exists now versus the infrastructure we grew up in?
How seriously are we taking participation, not as a marketing layer but as an architectural principle? Are we building for fans or for inhabitants?
I opened this piece by admitting that my first instinct when I see content like Mad Realities is judgment. That’s the honest knee jerk reaction for a lot of us in legacy. But the opportunity on the other side of that is enormous — not to abandon what we know, but to combine it with what people like Alice understand.
The craft and storytelling instincts that legacy built over a hundred years are still valuable. They’re just not sufficient anymore.
The bridge goes both ways. Legacy has something she needs. She has something legacy can’t build alone. The question is whether enough people on both sides are willing to walk across it.
Someone is going to own the shape of what works.