👥 Content isn't the product anymore

What’s most important in the creator economy, the content or the eyeballs? Neither. It’s the belonging. Communities are becoming the main game. A community of fans is self-reinforcing, and an advocacy engine. Brands that can align with a creator’s community stand a much better chance of their message being absorbed and adopted. Why? Because you’ve become part of the tribe. Happy Thursday, Simon.

Subscribe here.

At a recent conference executives from dentsu, NFL Mexico and Warner Bros. Discovery argued that content, the thing their entire industry sells, isn’t enough any more. The panel’s verdict: audiences don’t want more stories, they want to belong to one. Fandoms (think Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, the NFL itself) aren’t audiences so much as social structures. Fans generate content, build shared codes and create entire economies around what they love. For creators, this is what matters. Reach gets you in the door, but community is what keeps you there. The role shifts from distribution channel to something closer to cultural interpreter, co-creating with existing fandoms rather than just amplifying a brand message.

Private equity is buying meme IP while studios are being built around YouTube libraries. Horror films Obsession and Backrooms have now earned USD 780 million combined. Hollywood has never paid more attention to creators. But there’s a limit. “Christopher Nolan is never gonna hire a chick-flick horror guy creator,” said one exec. Creators can corner specific genres like horror, comedy, true crime, food and travel (even Skibidi Toilet has reportedly picked up a $25 million investor). Studios are mainly after speed, since a creator can iterate a concept for a fraction of what a studio spends developing one. Prestige Hollywood remains out of reach for most though, but in fairness it’s not like creators are attempting to recreate a Nolan epic.

Associated Press CEO Daisy Veerasingham has spent the last five years negotiating AI licensing deals that protect AP’s journalism from being scraped for free. Her argument is, if models are trained on content without fair compensation, the economics that make quality content possible collapse. In a recent interview, she extended that argument beyond news organisations to creators. “Value has to be put against people who create content,” she said. “They also have a societal role to play. They are responsible for the information society is going to see, interact with, and make decisions on.” When the CEO of a 180-year-old institution starts making the case for creator compensation in the same breath as press freedom, something has shifted.

I've been surprised by how much weight the market now puts on AI release timing, and this week was a good example. Alphabet dropped 4% after news that Gemini 3.5 Pro is months late, with coding performance in particular not hitting internal targets. It was unveiled at I/O in May and meant to ship in June. OpenAI and Meta have since released models that outperform Google's on code, which won't have helped.

Editing on a mouse and keyboard is fine, but nothing about it feels like editing used to. Ulanzi's D100H puts a weighted metal dial back on the desk, so scrubbing a timeline or nudging a grade becomes something you turn. It's a small change and a slightly nostalgic one. I hadn't realised how much I missed this tactile feeling until I saw it in use.

There's a reason everyone suddenly wants to be a creator. When AI can produce endless competent content, the thing people actually pay attention to is a genuine point of view. A creator broke down how to turn yours into something that pays, and the logic is sound. Your perspective isn't a nice extra anymore, it's the differentiator. Worth a look if you've been figuring out where your work fits.

Nolan's Odyssey is finally out, and predictably the internet has spent the week relitigating every adaptation that came before it. I've enjoyed the arguments more than I expected to. But the thing I keep going back to isn't the film or the debate, it's a clip someone posted from the set. A full day with the DP and Nolan directing, out on the black sand beaches of Iceland, wrestling those enormous IMAX cameras around a beach standing in for the underworld. I could watch that kind of footage all day and often do.

Some of the most enjoyable days on set are the ones where everyone ends up in front of the camera. Our new behind-the-scenes from a recent client reel shows a few of our team doing exactly that, roped in as extras and clearly enjoying it. The whole point was making the client's work look as sharp as possible.