When Mary Ellen Coe was a child, she saw her father constantly pivoting his plumbing and heating business to meet his customers’ needs. “It really shaped my views in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation,” she says.

That education translates surprisingly well to Coe’s current role, which involves a temperature-raise of a different sort. As chief business officer of YouTube, the executive does everything from provide tools to Alex Cooper to negotiate rights deals with the NFL — a linchpin of our newly techified entertainment world.

Hollywood kingmakers are increasingly joined by executives at social platforms. In an age when YouTube is the new TV — and when many of us spend more time on Instagram and TikTok than we do on our favorite shows — they shape the landscape as never before. People like Coe, Instagram’s Claudine Cazian and TikTok’s Dawn Yang, along with many others, are not only deciding what gets seen but building an entirely new content architecture.

“The thing I’ve loved about working in tech is the power within one person to create and communicate on their own; you no longer have to wait for gatekeepers to give you the green light,” Cazian tells THR.

The executive knows the Hollywood of which she speaks. Currently director of strategic partnerships at Instagram and Meta, Cazian worked for Ryan Seacrest’s production company for 15 years, helping to launch American Idol and working on Seacrest’s takeover as host of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. She says her epiphany that it was time to hop the divide came when standing one day at an Idol finale after a new winner was crowned: “I could see the tide changing and that storytelling and narrative creations were moving to digital.”

Among the feathers in her Silicon Valley ball cap are the launching of Instagram Teen Accounts (it recently revamped standards to align with Hollywood’s PG-13 rating) and landing Kris Jenner for Meta’s 2025 Ray-Ban Super Bowl commercial. Both she and Coe immediately answer The Morning Show when asked their go-to binge-watch, name-checking a show in which female executives deploy power and grapple with strategic choices.

And then there’s Yang, who five years ago jumped from a career at Paramount to TikTok, where she serves as global head of entertainment partnerships. That’s a sneakily powerful role in the entertainment firmament, as the USC MBA and her team do everything from creating a Squid Game video game to working with studios so creators have the right to use official IP from new shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty (or older shows like Girls), driving their 2025-era virality.

As the worlds of social and Hollywood become more entwined — Coe believes YouTube creators will be nominated for Emmys as early as September — these women’s influence on entertainment will only grow.

This story appeared in the Dec. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.