A Decade After The Basement Ballroom, VidCon Has Become Essential In Influencer World

A decade ago, the biggest worry Hank and John Green had ahead of the first VidCon was whether they would cover the room-sales commitment they had made to the host hotel.

"In the first six hours, only two people bought tickets," said Hank Green. "I had a document saying I would sell out 2,400 hotel nights (during the conference). If I didn’t, I would have to go bankrupt, personally bankrupt."

As it turned out, 1,400 people showed up for that first gathering, in a basement ballroom of the Century Plaza hotel in L.A.'s Century City. That covered the Greens' costs. More importantly, after the show, a YouTube executive told Hank Green the company had made a mistake not sponsoring VidCon's first year, and would be present in a big way in Year Two.

"The second year was much less stressful," said Hank Green. 

YouTube has been there every year since, using VidCon – which opens Wednesday evening and runs through Sunday at the Anaheim Convention Center across from Disneyland – as a place for major announcements, pronouncements on the state of social media and the like.

This year, again, VidCon will be a chance for the madly proliferating social-media industry to talk about, celebrate and educate itself. YouTube Chief Product Officer Neil Mohan will take the stage, but so will dozens of other speakers at the sprawling conference, whose attendance organizers expect will surpass last year's 75,000.

Top executives from Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, LinkedIn, WWE, Complex Media and Edelman, and creators such as Hannah Hart, The Try Guys, Miles Jai and morewill all speak (I'll be moderating a fireside chat with Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, founders of World of Wonder, which produces RuPaul's Drag Raceand runs an SVOD channel and the live Drag-Con event among much else).

Also on the stage during that first VidCon was a pioneering online-video executive, Jim Louderback, then CEO of Revision 3. He was one of the few "business guys" speaking onstage during a conference mostly focused on the nascent industry's fans. Now, Louderback is VidCon's CEO, taking over when Viacom bought the event from the Greens in early 2018.

John Green – also the best-selling author of YA novelssuch as The Fault In Our Starsand Paper Towns,which both became movies – stepped back from the company's day-to-day operations, though he again will join his brother on stage this year. Hank Green continues (after stumbling a bit trying to remember what his title is) as "creative consultant," tending to the conference's creative community.

"When a creator is not feeling correctly served by VidCon, I step in," Hank Green said. "It’s important to us to not be an impenetrable wall. It’s always been important to me that VidCon comes from a place of being supportive of creators."

That mindset manifested most prominently this year with the handling of long-time YouTuber Tana Mongeau. Miffed at repeatedly not being named a VidCon "featured creator" despite her 4.6 million followers, last year Mongeau organized a separate "Tana Con" at a hotel near the convention center. Tana Con was an unmitigated logistical disaster, but it achieved what Mongeau said she really wanted: This year, she's a VidCon featured creator.

Louderback compared VidCon and the rapidly diversifying industry it represents to "the early days of cable because there was so much experimentation, because people were trying some things. One of the big things a decade ago was it was so under the radar. The other thing was it was all YouTube. Now, we’ve got 10 or so legit platforms where people are creating things, and a couple of others that could be there."

The hottest new site is TikTok, the Chinese-owned home for millions of 15-second karaoke videos. It has blossomed the past couple of years to more than 500 million users, mostly tweens and teens, and become a force in the music industry as well. It's only the latest in a string of new platforms over the decade that have emerged, found audiences and opened new opportunities for creators.

"If there is a cycle to this (process of new platforms coming along) – it's hard to say because we’re not that far into this yet – but we're still in the upswing on TikTok," Hank Green said. "That’s where all the new creativity is."

Because those platforms are busy making money for themselves rather than creators, many of the stars have diversified wildly into related opportunities, which is also reflected by some of the booths on display at the conference's exhibition hall. Merchandise fulfillment, stars' own product lines, video-creation toolmakers and similar companies feature heavily for creators trying to make a buck in lots of different ways.

"So they're writing books, doing beauty lines," Louderback said. "They're finding ways to identify their most passionate fans and use Patreon to make them feel more connected. There are certainly a lot more opportunities out there" than a decade ago.

"I thought what we were doing was a big deal," Hank Green said. "But what I didn’t get was that it hadn’t in any way grown into the complexity it now contains. Suddenly there was gaming, then some beauty tutorials, worlds of educational content. Then strange sub-genres came along. The audiences it was able to reach and to create content for, that’s the thing that’s actually the big change. There’s so many different kinds of content on the platform."

The sponsors and exhibitors have moved considerably beyond just YouTube too, many of them focusing on the tweens and teens who'll crowd the exhibit floor, attend concerts, and watch their favorite influencers speak or perform in some fashion. Now, more than 40 percent of attendees are under the age of 18, making the conference a prime way for brands to connect directly with audiences that aren't watching much traditional television anymore.

Mars and Mountain Dew, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Sta-Puft Marshmallows, Nerf and Invisalign will all be there, and as will many of Viacom's brands, including Awesomeness, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. Louderback said some 600 Viacom employees have passes for the event.

The growth of influencers and influencer marketing has spawned a host of smaller, more business-oriented shows in Los Angeles alone. Last month, theOpen Influence Summit featured speakers such as prominent digital-media consultant Brian Solis. Fittingly, the conference's sponsor, an influencer-marketing agency, is now creating an online version of the event with material gleaned from the gathering.

And begnning today, the three-day Influencer Marketing Conference and Expo, or IMCX, will debut at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Organizers told me it's focused much more on the business and marketing side of the influencer world (I'll be moderating a fireside chat withKym Nelson, the SVP of Sales for Twitch).

The new shows and VidCon's continued growth are all a marker of the maturing industry and the widening opportunities for millions of creators and their fans.

"To me, VidCon is not that much about video," said Hank Green. "It’s about people on the internet building communities." 

Source: Forbes.com

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