If the creator economy has grown more competitive, and generative AI has only fanned the flames, in-person events are more valuable to the industry than ever.
Nothing beats face-to-face conversation and collaboration. Events are also a product creators can build themselves — we're throwing our first alongside ElevenLabs in New York next week.
To expand on the topic, this week we spoke with Jacques Keyser, VidCon’s Programming Director.
In this episode:
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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The new economics of creator events
Over the past eight years, Jacques Keyser has programmed VidCons in eight cities, from London to Abu Dhabi to Mexico City. These experiences gave him a front-row view of how the creator economy’s development has varied around the world.
In Mexico, for example, Jacques estimates that some 80% of the local creators he and his team booked hadn't been on his radar at all before he began programming the event. Once he dug into their businesses, he found creators building "huge, multimillion-dollar businesses and infrastructures that rival [those in] the U.S."
The discovery helped turn globalization into a bigger programming priority at the flagship event in Anaheim, as he realized how much creator businesses in international markets had to teach the American market.
Back when Jacques joined VidCon in 2018, the creator-event calendar was sparse. Fewer creators operated full-fledged businesses, so there were fewer major conferences, and VidCon occupied a category it had largely helped create (the first edition took place in Los Angeles in 2010).
Today, the creator-event calendar is much more crowded.
Jacques says 55,000 people attended VidCon Anaheim in 2025, down from its pre-pandemic heights (around a reported 75,000 in 2019). Some of that attendance drop, he says, reflects consumer habits changing post-COVID. But there's also simply more choice — large creator events now stretch across the year, alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller gatherings built around specific niches and communities.
We asked which other events he's been impressed by. He named South by Southwest's creator programming, VidSummit, and the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, arguing that spreading tentpole moments across the year serves the industry better than one.
As of our interview with Jacques, VidCon was back to one show: Anaheim. Then, two weeks ago, news broke that VidCon would be merging with LIONS, the Cannes Lions parent, to become a Cannes Lions creator offshoot. The calendar had become too crowded.
Hank and John Green founded VidCon in 2010; they sold it to Viacom in 2018 (which later became part of Paramount Global). In 2024, Informa, a London-based events and publishing company, bought the business.
Informa also owns The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which historically takes place around the same time as VidCon and has begun to cannibalize the event’s attendees as its own creator programming grew.
The shape of the event may change post-merger, but one thing won’t — a belief Jacques has formed over his near-decade working on VidCons: For brands and creators both, in-person is moving from nice-to-have to must-have.
A few notes on getting more out of creator events ✍️
When Jacques started at VidCon in 2018, creators made up a small share of the speakers. Today, they make up the majority of the lineup, as more are building agencies, production companies, products, and other businesses the industry wants to understand — and there are more creators with more to speak about.
How do you get booked for one of these speaking slots? Or any other industry event?
Having a large following is one credential. Having built something with a system, strategy, or result other people can learn from gives the organizer something to program around.
And when you pitch yourself, pitch beyond just your bio — what can others learn from you? “I have 500,000 followers” signals what you’ve built, your influence. “Here’s how I turned that audience into a production company” tells them about your skillset.
Before you buy the ticket, understand your ROI
VidCon has never paid its speakers, something Jacques tells us has become a harder proposition as competing events start offering talent fees. He’s also clear that, on its own, “exposure” is no longer enough of a value exchange.
So, VidCon has had to make the return more concrete. Speakers and featured creators can get free booth space to sell products. This year, the team also introduced its Brand Match Accelerator, which pairs brands and creators who want to meet and puts those meetings directly on their calendars.
If you’re considering VidCon or any creator event, it’s a useful test to ask: What can I reasonably expect to leave with that I couldn’t get from staying home? That might be five relevant brand meetings, three potential collaborators, a list of sales leads, or one relationship you’ve been trying to make for months.
Decide that before you go, and build your schedule around getting it.
Prioritize high-impact spaces
The main stage may have the biggest names, but some of VidCon’s most in-demand programming happens in the smaller rooms.
These mentorship sessions put 20 attendees around a table with an expert or working creator for an hour of conversation. VidCon doubled the space for these sessions this year, and Jacques says every session still filled up. Creator meetups take the same idea a step further, bringing people together by niche or experience level to swap notes with peers doing similar work.
This reflects a shift Jacques has watched accelerate over the past two years: creators increasingly want to exchange knowledge with peers in the weeds rather than learn top-down from bigger names on a stage.
When building your schedule as an attendee for a conference-style event, don’t solely prioritize the biggest names. Look for formats that let you ask questions, trade notes, or meet ten people working on the same problem as you.
If you’re throwing a larger creator event yourself, Jacques’ rule is to resist booking talent first
Start with the outcome instead of the talent: What should someone understand, learn, or be able to do when they leave? Use that to set the theme, use that theme to build the sessions, and only then decide who belongs.
The same logic makes the talent pitch stronger. Jacques asks four questions:
What are we trying to achieve?
Who will be in the room?
What reach comes with participating?
And how can you make money by showing up?
If you can’t pay a fee, be specific about the other economic value you can create — customers, sales, brand meetings, distribution, or access to people they actually want to know.
Treat the empty space as programming, too
Jacques says one of his recurring mistakes when planning an event is wanting to fill every available minute of the schedule. But the gaps are often where attendees get the value they’ll actually remember: meeting someone after a panel, continuing a conversation over lunch, or finally getting time with a person they’ve been trying to reach.
That changes where the money should go: Jacques suggests cutting an elaborate stage build in favor of the food and drinks that keep people hanging out after a talk.
And at a smaller event, the selling points change. Jacques says word-of-mouth is the biggest currency a boutique event has: get the right people in the room, give them something worth talking about, and let their posts help fill the next one.
Then, measure whether the value was real (i.e., VidCon increasingly asks attendees about leads and revenue afterward).
The goal is to make an event people enjoy and want to come back to.
