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VidCon has been around since 2010, and if you have not heard of it, ask a teenager. The conference for online video creators and their fans took place this month in Anaheim, California. This is the first major event since Viacom bought the conference last year. This purchase has made the economy of "creators" officially dominant. And with that status comes a more Hollywood vibe. TV directors, talent scouts and advertisers were everywhere in the show. And there's a great conversation about how creators can play the biggest game in the city – YouTube. Jim Louderback, managing director of VidCon, spoke with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood about how the event has changed since the beginning eight years ago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Jim Louderback: At the time, it was just YouTube. So the creators were on YouTube, the fans were on YouTube, the connections in the communities were built on YouTube. And now it's so much wider. So yes, YouTube is here and they are huge. I mean, they're still the 600-pound gorilla, but we have Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitch and Twitter and Musical, and there are all these different platforms that do different things and allow people to find audiences and creative and do what they like in so many different ways.
Molly Wood: Tell me a little about these other platforms and their position on YouTube. Because I feel it right now, YouTube is "that". You live or die according to this algorithm, and you have, like the tweenagers who walk around this conference saying "algorithm", which is in itself a bit unusual. How important is it for you to increase the power of these other platforms?
Louderback: For me personally, YouTube is amazing. But it's good for some types of content; they have certain things. As they are very good at things like comedy and DIY and vlogging. There are other formats, like LinkedIn, for example. A year ago, they did not even make video. LinkedIn now, there are all these creators who put the video on LinkedIn, but it's more business-oriented. It's a trick that if you put it on YouTube, you probably will not find an audience. You put it on LinkedIn, hundreds of thousands of people watch and you can build real communities.
Wood: Is YouTube currently the only place to make real money, to build a career?
Louderback: Heck no. People make hundreds of thousands of dollars on Twitch streaming. They make money on all platforms, but in different ways. Now YouTube has done such a good job of sharing advertising revenue with people who are big on YouTube. Other platforms have not really figured out how to do this share of advertising revenue at the level that YouTube has. But this is not the only monetization game in town, and you can build a career outside of YouTube and earn a lot of money. Just ask some people of Twitch.
Wood: Is it fair to say that there is a small disadvantage in YouTube's monetization model? Because it's so dependent on the viewpoints and therefore the resulting advertising, it depends so much to be seen by a huge crowd of creators that it somehow encourages the stunts.
Louderback: Well, yes, I mean, let's go back to the algorithm a minute, because you talked about it earlier. And basically what it means is that there are things inside the platforms that dictate who can see a video when you publish it, after watching a certain video, what other videos are recommended. And with YouTube, YouTube wants people to spend more time on the platform. They want you to watch more videos, they want you to keep watching and keep looking and watching. And so they give benefits and they prioritize the videos that people watch all the time, which are longer. Over time, by growing your audience and becoming a YouTube star, it's necessary to make more videos every week, to make longer videos. And for many creators, it's become a hamster wheel, and you can not get rid of that hamster wheel. But there are ways to create audiences on YouTube using Patreon or merchandise or other things where you are not indebted to the almighty advertising dollar. But other platforms are experimenting with new ways to do it where perhaps you do not need to be at that level to have a decent salary.
Wood: And you know, Jim, I mean, you and I started to revolve around this industry for a long time. You have been dealing with online video talent for many years while we were all trying to make high value television production for the web. How did you see the change in a way that you would not have expected when you were dealing with online video talent in 2009, 2010?
Louderback: I think the thing that I thought was really interesting at the time was that we were creating a whole new media and we were going out and we were creating this new world, who we are. But what I could not have predicted, is how much television has changed to look like online video, and, in fact, how does online video change in many ways to look like more on television. So, for example, look at Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show". The first 15 minutes of "The Tonight Show" are essentially formatted as a series of YouTube skits. And more and more, we see high production, we could call them TV shows, I mean you could put them on Netflix, or put them on CBS and they would be beautiful, but they are actually produced, delivered and consumed only on these online digital platforms. So, I was expecting online video to become her own thing, and that's what she did. But I did not think it would look more and more like television, whereas television would look more and more like online video.
Wood: Well, you could argue that the path of talent is also beginning to look more and more like television. And then what are the nuances or even the disadvantages of that when you start having real security concerns, or stars basically kids who do not know how to deal with this level of fame and attention?
Louderback: Well, I think that's always happened, right? We have always had these kind of child stars who have faced these problems, we are now doing more and more on other forms. And, you know, you can go through a litany of children's stars from the '60s and' 70s who, you know, probably ended up, you know, not working as well in adulthood. But the good thing that I like in the online video space, is that, yes, we see people come together in great celebrity. And you know, here at VidCon, we certainly celebrate some of the people who have these great followers, but we also celebrate people who will never be. They will never have a million followers. They will never break the celebrity where they can not walk down the street or they can not go to Denny's and have a sandwich. But they are able to build a career and a satisfying life by creating videos and spreading them, and by creating fans and community. And let's face it, that's the big change in the media because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, if you wanted to be a video star, a TV star, a movie star, a star of the media, you had to go through the gatekeepers. We have been through this industry for a long time. The guards, back in the day, they were the ones who would say if you could reach an audience or not. I mean, I was in magazines early on, and I had that dream when I was 25 years old that I would have a column in a big computer magazine, and all the guards got in the way of that, until I got a job at PC Week and they gave me a column, and I thought, "Oh, my God, I am the luckiest person in the world. " And then, two years later, the Internet came out and anyone who wanted to become a computer columnist could put a blog online. Well, it's the most wonderful thing about the digitization of the media in general. And I think we see it with online video, wherever you are in the world, if you have talent, you can create a video, you can put it on the internet and you can build an audience and build a life with . And 30 years ago, you could not say that. Thirty years ago, you had to go to Hollywood or go to New York to pay your dues and hope that someone would put you in a magazine or put you on a radio show or put you on TV. Now you can do it yourself. And I think it's amazing.
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Correction (June 25, 2018): An earlier version of this story made a false statement of Jim Louderback's title. The text has been corrected.
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