Jessica Ryan

It’s not just that creators use the internet

It’s that they were raised by it.

Their feedback loop is instant

They understand internet culture

They publish, adapt, and evolve in real time.

They’re more attuned to thinking like product designers than studio executives

They test ideas, respond to feedback, and ship what connects.

They understand momentum.

They’ve already absorbed the logic of bottom-up SaaS, intuitively.

This is why the next great storytellers won’t come from film school.

They’ll come from YouTube, Discord, & Substack

All thats missing is proper infrastructure.

Hollywood used to be run by folks that understood that a successful film, or character, or auteur is more than first weekend box office revenue — it is the most valuable asset ever, that is built over time and lasts for decades. Bob Evans was driven by taste and instinct, and used capital to back people, repeatedly — Coppola, Polanski, Friedkin — not just “big IP”. He understood that cultural value compounds around unique voices in ways financial models can’t predict.

The service is currently available to about 10,000 libraries, or 40 percent of North America’s libraries, as well as about half of high-end colleges in the country. Kanopy houses roughly 35,000 titles with 150 more coming each week. Some standouts on the service include newer films like “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird,” as well as older classics like “Rashomon” and “Chinatown.”

But its five-second intro, a post-toke cough followed by a throaty scream, had popped up in a few TikToks of MMA fighters pummeling each other and weightlifters grunting beneath squat bars. Experience had taught 25/7 Media that when brief “recreates” of these kinds of songs burble up in those particular TikTok communities, virality can soon follow. When the number of recreates climbs into the tens or hundreds of thousands, Magana told me, two of 25/7’s core tenets become germane. The first: Once a social media user hears an audio snippet nine times, it gets stuck in their head to some degree. The second, which Magana has dubbed the Ten Percent Rule, is that 10 percent of those earwormed users will end up tracking down the snippet’s original source. 

Rather than pay one or two famous influencers to use the “Toxic” intro in the hopes of producing a trickle-down effect, the firm appealed to scores of MMA and weightlifting TikTokkers whose followings rarely top more than a few hundred. (Some were given small payments to push the song, but others were happy to do it for free.) Flooding the zone this way caused TikTok’s algorithm to funnel posts featuring “Toxic” into the feeds of users who consume gym-centric content. Inevitably, some of those users were creators themselves, and they began to weave YoungX777’s clip into videos targeting related subcultures—like the region of TikTok obsessed with highlights of soccer players bursting past hapless defenders.