In a video posted to his YouTube channel in 2009, the popular YouTube creator Hank Green had a big announcement to make.
“A couple of months ago, [my brother] John and I decided that we were really interested in the possibility of getting a real life online video conference happening, in order to get all of the best online video creators together in one place,” Green said, explaining why he thought an online video conference made sense. “Online video is a really huge deal now, we have people on YouTube that have a bigger audience than Oprah or Anderson Cooper.”
The first VidCon was held in the summer of 2010 in Century City, with speakers that included the Green brothers, Shane Dawson, Autotune the News, and Philip DeFranco, among others.
It may have been ahead of its time.
While everyone could see the vibrant communities forming through online video, the creator economy was still so nascent that its ambitions remained somewhat muted. A 2018 sale to Viacom kept the convention going, and last year its successor company Paramount sold VidCon to Informa, which will now operate it through Fan Expo, the operator of events like Megacon and Toronto Comicon.
The creator landscape has changed dramatically over the last 15 years, with YouTube now the dominant video platform, social platforms like TikTok and Instagram still surging, and creators now building out a professional studio system of their own. In other words, the time may be right or VidCon to make another expansion push.
So for the first VidCon under its new ownership, Fan Expo wants to set the stage for what it thinks can be a new period of growth and expansion for the brand, one that can live up to the original hopes of the Green brothers.
“We really want to set the foundation for the future. We have a lot of big, exciting things that we have planned,” says Aman Gupta, Fan Expo’s president. “Honestly, we want to bring VidCon to the world. What that means is still to be determined, there’s still lots of work to be done in this space. But what excites me the most about adding VidCon to our portfolio is, I look at at this as the Super Bowl for creators, for the online community, and to be able to have an event of this prestige in our portfolio is amazing.”
Of course, first they have to execute on this year’s convention, which kicks off June 19 in Anaheim. This year the convention will add industry and community tracks that will lean heavily on the business of the creator economy, and the communities and brands sparked by digital media. There will be an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of YouTube, and an inaugural VidCon Hall of Fame, meant to honor and celebrate the pioneers of online video (the inaugural list of honorees includes Hank Green, Grace Helbig and Rhett & Link) “because of the impact that they’ve had on the digital ecosystem,” according to Sarah Tortoreti, vp of VidCon.
“The confines or boundaries of traditional entertainment are now completely blurred at this point, and creators are coming to the forefront of entertainment,” Tortoreti says. “Creators are at the center of all culture and commerce right now, and VidCon has been recognizing that that was going to be the future for quite some time.”
VidCon is unique not only due to the participation of the digital and traditional media companies — “All of the big platforms show up,” Tortoreti notes, including YouTube, TikTok and companies like NBCUniversal — but the active participation from attendees.
It is a convention of content creators, after all, and VidCon seeks to encourage them to create content or seek out collabs from the Anaheim Convention Center floor.
“They get an experience with each other, something that you cannot do online, it can only happen in person,” Gupta says.
“We give creators as much flexibility as we can in terms of filming content,” Tortoreti adds. “We want that to happen, that’s part of the experience. The creators themselves also come not only to do business, they meet with friends, they meet with sponsors, they meet with the industry executives, because they get business done at VidCon.
“But they also come to meet their fans, and they love to capture that content because it’s fun for them too,” she says. “They build these online communities, and they feel like they have a one-to-one relationship with so many people, and then this is the only place really that they get the chance to actually have that one-to-one relationship come to life.”
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