Dispatches from VidCon — what’s working, what’s collapsing, and the split in the creator space nobody wants to admit.

Here’s a number that should rearrange your whole strategy: you’ll make more money mailing an offer to 1,817 people on your email list than you’ll earn from a social media hit that gets five million views. Really.

I’m writing this from Anaheim, surrounded by a couple thousand creators at VidCon 26. And the longer I’m here, the clearer one thing becomes: the creator economy is splitting in two. Most of the herd is sprinting toward the cliff — AI content, shortform, vanity metrics, rented platforms. The real money, the real freedom, is in the exact opposite direction.

Let me show you what I’m seeing — along with a few truth bombs, some whimsical reflections, and the occasional snarky comment.

First, the good news

I’m surrounded by people between the ages of 8 and 25, and they are a delight. The passion, the creativity, the drive — it makes me feel our future is in great hands. Some of these creators are 8, 10, 12 years old, chaperoned by a parent who traveled here because they believe in the kid’s dream. That’s a beautiful thing to witness.

But beautiful talent can still be pointed at the wrong target. And a lot of it is.

Attention is the currency — not content

In case you forgot: attention is one of the most valuable currencies on Earth right now. Which means your job is not to produce content. Your job is to create attention, build trust, and create a relationship. Content is just the vehicle.

I’ve been talking on my recent podcasts about how powerful it is to think like a YouTuber. Take the principles — a strong opening hook, catching attention with the visual, earning the click, inserting open loops — and they improve the performance of almost everything. Emails. Book chapters. Speeches. Blogs. Boardroom presentations. Even thank-you notes.

But here’s the fork in the road. You’re probably not a YouTuber or a TikTok star, and you have no desire to be. Chances are you use social the way I do — to build signal, create market gravity, and generate business for your “day job.” A traditional content creator is an entertainer. Your job is to be entertaining — but not to be the entertainment.

Yes, you can rack up massive views filming how many golf balls it takes to fill a swimming pool, or wearing a gorilla suit at the flea market. And those views are meaningless to your brand and your business. (Unless you’re chasing brand sponsorships — in which case you’re outsourcing your income to something you don’t control. We’ll come back to that.)

Drill down to what actually matters — money — and the math is brutal: one subscriber on any platform is worth 100,000 random views. You’ll earn more mailing an offer to 1,817 people on your list than from a clip that goes to five million. That’s not a typo. That’s the whole game.

Stop renting your business from Zuck and Elon

People here are just now learning something I’ve been preaching for fifteen years: migrate your followers to a platform you own and control — an email list, a text list. Algorithms change overnight. Platforms go down. You can be delisted or demonetized while you sleep. Don’t hand your income to Zuck, Google, Elon, or anyone else who can switch you off without warning. Always keep a direct line to your tribe.

Horizontal is the new black

If you’re chasing vanity metrics, vertical is where it’s at. But if you want a relationship with your tribe and an actual business, horizontal is winning — and it’s not close. The percentage of people watching video on their TVs is mind-blowing.

Out in the real world, everyone’s chasing shortform on TikTok, YouTube, IG, and Snap. My longform stuff — the blog, pod, and YouTube channel — is crushing. One of my goals coming here was to figure out how to do more shorts. Then I talked to the creators actually living in that world. Every single one doing short vertical clips — even the ones averaging ten million views — told me they’d crawl naked over broken glass to have my subscriber base and relationship with my tribe.  And the broader signal: videos are getting longer, not shorter.

Hollywood is coming here — hat in hand

In mid-2024, TV overtook mobile as the primary viewing device, and the gap widens by the day. This convention is packed with refugees from TV and film studios, because most of the top creators here pull multiples more viewers than a network producer could dream of. There’s real buzz about replacing the Hollywood infrastructure entirely.

Remember Backrooms and Obsession — the two low-budget horror films directed by YouTubers that crushed at the box office? Mark this prediction: next year, this topic will have a bigger buzz than AI does this year.

The AI mirage — and what beats it 

The biggest theme across the panels, keynotes, and exhibit hall is AI. Vendor after vendor promising software that tracks every twitch your audience makes, tells you exactly what content will addict them, and — allegedly — produces your content for you, without you.

This makes me sad. Creators who follow that lead are going to get disastrous results. (I have strong feelings about how AI is quietly killing brain cells for a lot of people. I’m writing about it in my next book, on Sovereign Operators. More on that soon — and trust me, you’ll want to be paying attention when it drops.)

Here’s the antidote: live. Livestreaming is your best defense against AI slop — it can’t be faked in real time. And live, in-person events and experiences aren’t just making a comeback; they’re becoming bigger than ever. The more synthetic the world gets, the more people will pay for what’s unmistakably real.

The framework every marketer should steal: Core, Casual, New

There’s a framework creators use that every marketer should pay attention to. You have three audiences:

Core — the people who love everything you do.

Casual — they know you, like you, and drop by occasionally.

New — they just discovered you.

Serve only the Core, and you turn into a caricature of yourself; growth stops. Pander to the Casual, and the Core feels abandoned while New people never find you. Chase only the New, and you fail to retain anyone. The magic is in the balance.

A few other things I noticed

X is deader than dead. Most creators here have a primary platform, maybe two, and keep a token presence everywhere else. In this community, X doesn’t even warrant a mention. If they have an account at all, the last time they posted was the Obama administration.

This is a community of builders. It's kind of surprising how many trans people, neurodivergent people, and trans neurodivergent people are creators.  Very cool to see a community that is so accepting and evaluates people by the work they produce, not what boxes they check. 

The hamster wheel is real.  Not sure if it’s related to the paragraph above, I’m also surprised how many sessions and vendors here are offering advice on burnout, depression, and other mental health issues.  A LOT of talk from stages about the hamster wheel prison of constantly getting out the next post. 

And one rant, because I earned it

I’ve been speaking professionally since 1991 — more than two million people across 50+ countries. No event I’ve ever attended has been as poorly run as VidCon 26. On day one, somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 people had to funnel through a single metal detector just to register — even if you’d pre-registered the day before. I showed up two hours early and it still took fifty minutes. People behind me waited two to three hours. Then another line for your badge. Then a 25-minute line if you’d pre-ordered a lanyard. Then the line to actually get into sessions. Easily a four-hour process, with speakers unable to reach their own panels.

This was the fifteenth VidCon. There’s no excuse. The only reason I stayed is I couldn’t get a flight out — and honestly, that worked out, because the rest of the event was worth it. But if you know how to run events, there is a massive opportunity sitting in this market.

So pick your side

Here’s where it all lands. The herd is optimizing for a number that will never love it back — views, likes, follower counts on platforms they don’t own and can’t control. You can rent attention, or you can own a relationship. You can chase the algorithm, or you can build the kind of trust no algorithm can switch off.

The gap between those two camps is the widest it’s ever been. And it’s still widening. Choose now — because the people who choose wrong won’t realize it until the platform changes the rules and the views evaporate overnight.

That’s what I’ve got so far. There’s a part two coming — and one piece of it is going to make some people very uncomfortable. Tell me what speaks to you, and what you’re learning along the way.

Peace,

- RG

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