The Creator Economy has spent two decades moving through media distribution and retail. Industry veteran Bia Granja argues the next frontier is intellectual property, and Hollywood is still figuring out what that means.

Bia co-founded YOUPIX in Brazil in 2006, just one year into the YouTube era, when the Creator Economy was still a loose collection of bloggers writing about whatever interested them. She ran the company for nearly two decades, building it into a consultancy, event platform, and creator school that influenced how Brazilian brands and media companies navigated the digital shift. She relocated to Los Angeles in 2022 and launched Creator Economy Rocks in early 2026, an intelligence platform delivering market signals, research briefs, and curated immersions for industry leaders.

The thesis driving her current work is a framework she calls the “three gatekeepings.” The Creator Economy first cracked the media industry by giving anyone with an internet connection the ability to distribute ideas and build audiences without a publisher. Then, it disrupted retail, becoming a commercial layer between products and consumers and launching its own product lines. 

“The third gatekeeping that we’re starting to crash very elegantly is IP,” Bia says. “It’s Hollywood.”

That convergence is the subject of HollyTube, a four-day immersion she is running in Los Angeles from May 18-21. Limited to ten participants and structured around private company visits and candid conversations, the program is designed for executives, operators, and senior creators who are already operating between Hollywood and the Creator Economy.

The ‘Third Gatekeeping’ Creators Have Not Cracked Yet

Bia traces the current moment to structural pressures on both sides of the divide. She notes that Hollywood is undergoing a production crisis, with work migrating to cheaper international markets and legacy revenue models under strain. Meanwhile, creators are hitting what she describes as a ceiling on social media. 

“They’re starting to bring that huge parasocial relationship they built with their audience and community to newer forms of content,” she says. “Long-form and Hollywood.”

The timing has created unlikely alliances. Top creators are hiring writers and producers from traditional entertainment to develop serialized, long-form IP. Studios and streamers are issuing mandates to commission projects with creators. The arrangement runs in both directions, and neither side has fully learned the other’s language. 

“I was talking with people from Hollywood that are experimenting with AI, and I said, ‘Guys, you should start pitching creators,'” Bia notes. “You understand Hollywood, and they need that right now. But creators have the community, the IP, the relationships.”

The microdrama format is one visible signal of the collision. After originating in China, short vertical serialized content has arrived in the U.S. entertainment market, with creators and studios both experimenting with different models. Bia recently interviewed Dhar Mann, who struck a deal with Fox to produce 40 microdramas, an arrangement she sees as representative of the broader structural shift underway.

Photo credit: Margaret Lefton

A Fundamental Difference in How IP Gets Built

Despite the convergence, Bia is direct about the friction slowing it down: Hollywood and Creator Economy operators approach IP creation in fundamentally different ways, and neither side fully recognizes the gap.

“Hollywood is more top-down,” she says. “I’ll create this beautiful IP, movie, whatever, and then I’m going to promote it, put a lot of money into marketing, and spread it everywhere.” The creator model works the other way. “Creators co-build the IP with the community. It’s less top-down, it’s more co-created. And that’s a fundamental difference.”

That tension shapes how brands should approach convergence as well. Large IP partnerships, like the collaboration between F1 and Barbie, capture headlines but represent only one model. Bia argues that most brands operating in the space do not need blockbuster IP deals. What they need is world-building: developing the lore, the recurring characters, the layered storytelling that turns a campaign into a durable ecosystem. 

“Not all brands need to do the big Barbie move,” she says. “There are a lot of things happening in a less mainstream kind of IP that really make a difference for the connection people have with brands.”

She points to gaming as the industry most worth studying for its approach to world-building. Creators and brands alike, she argues, should be paying attention to how game developers build participatory universes rather than relying on the Hollywood broadcast model.

Why Events Stopped Being Enough

Bia has spent twenty years attending and curating industry events, including VidCon and Cannes Lions. She still sees value in them. But she argues that the speed of change at this moment has outpaced what panels and keynotes can deliver.

“At an event, there’s a lot of media training,” she says. “You can’t really go deep and open the door to your kitchen.” Events need recognizable names to sell tickets, and those names are often the ones least able to speak candidly about how things actually work. “The head or CEO of a big platform, the amount of things he’s going to share is going to be limited.”

HollyTube’s format is designed as a corrective. Participants spend four days traveling to companies and individuals Bia has identified as doing meaningful work across Hollywood and the Creator Economy, regardless of whether they carry well-known names. Confirmed visits include Netflix, TikTok, and Red Bull. Sessions are structured as exchanges rather than panel discussions, with design thinking exercises built into the schedule to help participants translate what they hear into decisions for their own organizations.

The group is capped at ten for practical reasons. “We all need to fit in a meeting room,” she says. “It’s not supposed to be an event.” She has run immersions of 15 people before and found the dynamics less useful. At ten, she says, everyone can track the conversation, relationships form, and exchanges stay productive.

Multiple Playbooks, No Clear Winner

One of the more honest admissions Bia makes about HollyTube is that she is not organizing it around a settled answer. The questions driving the program are genuinely open ones.

Who controls IP in the new system? Where does the money come from? Is the audience going to pay directly, the way it did when creator Markiplier released a film straight to theaters and his community showed up? Or does the model require studio partnership, brand sponsorship, or platform backing?

“We have so many different playbooks and ways of doing things,” she says. “Maybe we don’t have one playbook for Hollywood. Maybe we have many, and maybe that’s the revolution.”

That uncertainty is part of the value of the format. Participants are not coming to hear a thesis confirmed. They are coming to map a territory that is still being drawn. Bia plans to run future immersions on creator commerce and eventually take the format to China, where live commerce and microdramas originated and continue to move ahead of Western markets.

Building the Room Before the Playbook Exists

HollyTube represents Bia’s first public product launch in the U.S. market after four years in Los Angeles working as a consultant and strategic advisor following the YOUPIX sale. For her, the timing is personal as much as strategic.

“What drives me is curiosity,” she says. “After 20 years and a lot of weird things happening, this ability to move through the changes and stay open and curious, that’s still exciting for me.”

Her broader argument is about urgency. The Creator Economy moves faster than most industries, and that speed makes compressed, high-quality learning more valuable than waiting for a conference in two months or completing a slow-moving online course. “If you’re already operating in this and you’re really confused about where to place your bets, the immersion expedites your learning,” she says.

The format will expand. Creator commerce, live shopping, and the global dynamics of a market shaped significantly by Brazilian and Chinese innovation all feature in her plans for future programming. For Bia, the convergence of Hollywood and the Creator Economy is not a trend to observe from a distance. 

“I didn’t want to launch a course,” she says. “I just wanted to go inside and do it fast. Let’s build that room. Let’s make it happen.”

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