From left: Kareem Rahma, A.J. Daulerio, Hunter Prosper and Matt Buechele Bryan Bedder/Getty Images; Courtesy of AND Media (3) Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment The creator economy is booming and growing, but there is a feeling that many left-leaning creators are falling behind many of their counterparts on the right, at least in terms of financial stability, if not influence. So a new "venture studio" called AND Media is betting that it can fill in those gaps, bolstering creators and shows in a bid to help them fulfill their destinies of becoming the next culturally relevant independent studios. "We believe that the value in digital media, cultural, monetary and otherwise lies in the scalable formats, stories, franchises, IP born from creator-led brands," says Christian Tom, AND Media's CEO. "And we think that is the tectonic shift that is happening in culture today and, in our assessment, is increasingly shaped by digital creators, as opposed to kind of traditional institutions, and that's kind of the foundational thesis for the company itself." Related Stories News Nicki Minaj Bashes Gavin Newsom, Takes Aim at His Support for Trans Kids Music Why Beats Is Betting on the Creator Economy With Its New Ad Campaign The founders, who include Tom, Aisha Shah and Landon Morgado, are veterans of the world of technology and public policy, having worked at Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, GoFundMe, Twitter, NowThis and the White House, and see AND Media as a way to connect the dots of what they have seen within those other institutions. The initial slate includes a variety of shows from established video creators, to others seeking to get into the space for the first time. It includes the return of Kareem Rahma's Keep the Meter Running (Rahma, of course, is best known for his Subway Takes series), Hunter Prosper's expansion of Stories From a Stranger to YouTube, the creation of the video podcast The Small Bow based on their highly engaged newsletter "THAT SOUNDS LIKE A LOT" and an all-new current events video podcast from comedian, writer and composer Matt Buechele. "Creators on the left are powerful, but they're really unsupported," Shah says. "So what we're building here, as far as the model, is ensuring that we can provide the infrastructure to creators who are basically running full-on production companies kind of by themselves. What that means is that we meet creators at the idea level, and we help them vision what they want to do next. That's different for each creator." Shah says that AND Media's services are similar to what an operating partner at a VC firm might bring to the table, with Morgado citing production support and monetization support being the two biggest pieces of the equation. "We provide a team that brings a lot of different expertise depending on where they are, so that could be expert production support. It could be editorial strategy. It could be additional brand partnerships that they weren't able to secure beforehand," Shah says. "But in addition to that, it's some of the unsexy, unglamorous stuff too that takes time, like legal and accounting and stuff like that, so that creators are actually able to focus on creating and are able to focus on their work." "Creators and the creator economy are obviously at the forefront and the future of content," Morgado adds. "I've gotten to see the evolution of the creators grow from influencers doing small brand deals to literally becoming huge studios themselves. And we are sort of jumping on to that train and making sure we provide creators with the infrastructure that they need to do that, and we've spent the past six months meeting with creators and seeing what this infrastructure looks like and what kind of support they need to sustain this type of content, AND Media is sort of the culmination of that." The founders are betting that their company can not only ride the creator economy wave but also help build out infrastructure for left-leaning creatives to help them compete in a landscape where it sometimes seems as though right-leaning programs are winning the larger battle. "I think of this work as as much an infrastructure project and a culture project as anything," Tom says. "Our goal is to identify, fund, support in the ways that Aisha described, addressing specific needs and scale the left-adjacent or left-leaning, left-coded, use your terminology de rigueur, but the creators who exist in this culture-first non-political spaces into even more prominent media brands than they are now. We want to grow with them as business partners, we want to invest with them and grow with them in the long term." THR Newsletters Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day Subscribe Sign Up hallmark Cruises, Comedy and Christmas: Hallmark's Plan to Make Its Fans