As always, POST CREDITS airs on Bloomberg TV Tuesdays at 6pm ET & 10pm ET, and full episodes go live on our YouTube channel at 6pm ET on Wednesdays: youtube.com/@postcreditstv.

This week’s guest was Christian Tom, CEO and co-founder of AND Media, a new media venture building a values-aligned, digital creator-led studio system

Christian Tom spent a decade inside the machines that used to decide what you saw: Twitter, NowThis, YouTube, and then the Biden White House, where he ran digital strategy. He left all of it to start AND Media, a for-profit venture studio that writes checks into creator-owned shows.

I ended the episode with a rapid-fire round, and the answer that has stayed with me all week was to the question of what part of the old system is most broken. He didn't say distribution. He didn't say talent. He named the thing nobody puts on a panel agenda, and it reframes everything he said before it. It's near the end of the episode and it's worth getting to.

Hold that thought, because Ryan Clark spent this week demonstrating it. More on that in a bit.

I spent a chunk of the conversation trying to pin down what AND Media is actually buying when it does a deal with a creator. Not the person. Not their back catalog. Something narrower than either, and the answer surprised me enough that I made him say it twice.

What I can tell you is the shape of the deals: bespoke, built out of revenue shares, minimum guarantees, and options on additional seasons. What AND Media does not take is editorial control. Their pitch to talent is that they absorb everything that isn't creating — production, financing, publicity, some development — and leave the creative decisions alone.

The structural point underneath it is the one every studio executive should sit with. In a traditional Hollywood studio, you finance a project and assemble a team around it. With a creator, the actor, writer, producer, and director are one person who already has the audience. You are not funding a production. You are funding something that has already proven demand.

If you're a CMO: the entity you sponsor now has a cap table. That changes what you can ask for.

Christian brought up the historian Heather Cox Richardson, one of Substack's top-grossing writers, by way of an anecdote from Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie. Nearly everything Richardson publishes behind the paywall is also sitting on Facebook for free. Same words, same day. Tens of thousands of people pay anyway.

If you've been assuming that paid media means gated media, that should bother you. Christian's explanation for it is one sentence long, it has nothing to do with the writing, and once you hear it you'll start seeing the same mechanic in every creator business you evaluate. I'd rather you hear him say it.

We got into the definition of trust, because the word is doing too much work in this industry. There's trust that someone will tell you what's accurate, and there's trust that someone will reliably show up in a format you like. Christian's view is that the successful creators have to clear both bars: the person in the frame isn't a plant, and the host keeps the faith with the way he examines the world. His example was creator Hunter Prosper, who has roughly 10 million followers and is moving "Stories from a Stranger" into long form with the team behind Armchair Expert; and it only works if both are true.

He also has a firm view on the biggest misconception about creators working in the political space, and it undercuts the brand safety arguments you’re used to. If your team has a blanket rule about political content, that answer is the ninety seconds of this episode to play in your next meeting.

Here's the original thought, and it's the reason this episode landed the week it did.

ESPN let Ryan Clark go this summer, after more than a decade, reportedly while a live edition of NFL Live was on the air. Seven weeks later he is back, on his own terms, and the way he got there is the whole argument.

The Pivot signed a multi-year deal with Netflix, announced at the end of August, with two episodes a week and a first-look arrangement for Clark's Pivot25 Productions, plus Netflix-exclusive bonus episodes. [NBC Sports] Then on Monday he launched The Pivot Sports — a weekly live football show with Channing Crowder and Fred Taylor, Mondays at 2 p.m. ET on The Pivot's YouTube channel, built with NFL Films footage and touchscreen breakdowns. [Barrett Media]

Look at what he assembled and what it replaced: A network used to bundle money, distribution, archive footage, and a time slot into one employment contract: Clark went out and bought each of them separately. Netflix for scale and premium association. YouTube for the weekly habit. NFL Films for the footage that used to be the moat. His own production company for the IP.

That last piece might be the most interesting; NFL Films licensing its archive into an independently owned show means the league's film vault is now a supplier rather than a gate. When the most protected asset in sports media starts selling to creators, the distinction between a network show and a creator show stops being about production value. It's about who owns the file at the end.

And it maps cleanly onto my “two clocks” thesis. Netflix is the appointment clock: the thing an audience makes time for. The Monday YouTube live show is the ambient clock: the thing they pass time with. Clark now owns inventory on both, which is something ESPN could only give him half of.

What Christian's model is for: Ryan Clark could finance his own pivot. He had 14 years of equity in his own name, a podcast with real revenue, and two partners with the same. The thousand creators behind him can't do that, and they are exactly who AND Media is capitalized to serve. The funding model broke for the incumbents first. The people replacing them still need one.

Watch the full episode now on YouTube: youtube.com/@postcreditstv. Subscribe so you don't miss who’s next.

Post Credits airs Tuesdays at 6pm ET on Bloomberg Originals — streaming on YouTube TV, Prime Video Channels, Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels, and Tubi — and again at 10pm ET on Bloomberg Television.

Until next time, Ian Schafer, Ensemble, and the POST CREDITS team.

— Ian

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