I just got back from Anaheim after spending the past few days at the creator conference VidCon. My first draft of this newsletter was a fairly boring description of the event. I decided to scrap that and share the story of one of my nights out instead:

VidCon

I’m sitting in the backseat of a car driven by Hudson, an 18-year-old YouTuber. He has 1.8 million subscribers, which isn’t too shabby. But that pales in comparison to his dad, the owner of a channel with 23 million subscribers with content that primarily features Hudson’s 14-year-old sister.

I’m joined on this ride by three others. Jake sits up front. He worked as an editor and scriptwriter for several creators before launching a faceless Fortnite channel four months ago that he’s already turned into a revenue-generating, full-time endeavor (each video gets ~200K views). Alongside me in the back are Evan and Mike, two guys on the MrBeast strategy team that my college friend Mateo runs. Hudson isn’t the best driver. After every lurch, the three of us swap nauseating looks, eager to get to our destination.

That destination is a train station, which TikTok rented out for the night to host a blowout event. So after leaving the Roblox party (where we got hooked up with custom Roblox bomber jackets and did our best to make conversation with gaming creators) we split our nine-person squad into two cars and set off.

We park and exit the SUV. I feel silly being a 29-year-old about to enter a party with a jacket embroidered with ‘Roblox’ on the back, but don’t exactly want to ditch the rare collectible either — despite knowing deep down I’m likely never wearing it again.

We meet up with the other four people in our crew, one of whom is MrBeast’s older brother. Prior to jumping into a software role on the MrBeast strategy team, he ran his own channel called MrBro which grew to 4.3M subscribers. While VidCon attracts a good amount of people who work in the creator industry, a majority of the 55,000 attendees are fans of content creators (or the patient parents of fans of content creators). Notoriety from his channel, plus his close resemblance to his brother, meant it was hard to walk more than 10 steps with him at the convention center before he’d be stopped for a photo request.

Our names are on the list — a perk of rolling at a creator conference with folks who work for MrBeast. So instead of waiting in the hour-long line, we walk in through a side entrance with a TikTok rep who cautions us that “she’s not supposed to be doing this.”

The party is filling in (and a good amount of filling in is needed when the venue is an entire train station). We walk over to the food line and grab gourmet bites while a blonde woman in a white dress switches between DJing on stage and recording herself DJing on stage.

Upstairs we find the desserts. I grab a TikTok-painted cookie that looks a lot better than it tastes. As I’m about to walk back down with the group I run into Jonathan — a new friend I grabbed dinner with the previous night after meeting at a networking event. He’s a short-form comedy creator based in Houston with 900K social media followers who started creating content while bored at home at the start of the pandemic. Two years ago he quit his job at Lifetime Fitness after earnings from his content began to outpace his salary.

He’s chatting with another guy so I jump in and get acquainted. He tells us he manages a dance creator, whose TikTok we subsequently pull up. Turns out the dancer has amassed a following of six million largely through a singular move: bouncing on his back while wearing all-purple attire. He’s crushing it with brand deals, with FedEx being one of his largest partners.

I rejoin our crew on the ground floor of the now full venue. We chat and mingle for a bit and then midnight rolls around and we decide to split. I call a Lyft, meander up to my hotel room, strip out of my Roblox jacket, and pass out as soon as my neck hits the pillow.

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Til next month,

Ben

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