Fans, creators, and social media influencers gathered at Vidcon Anaheim to share ideas, collect swag, wish YouTube a happy 20th birthday, and, yes, create more social content.
I’ve been to my share of fan conventions over the past almost 30 years, but VidCon has always been something different. When you step into a pop culture con focused on comics, movies, gaming, anime, or anything else that draws crowds, the focus has always been on creators and artists that are established in their specific industry, backed by agents, assistants, and every kind of promotional machine at hand. But when you step into VidCon, the cameras are often turned on the audience themselves who, while quite many have production teams at their back as well these days, the voices and the content are broader and less curated by committee, The creators and content are the audience and vice versa.
And while VidCon has evolved greatly since I first visited in 2013, the heart of it stands at a crossroads between young maker innovations and corporate production powers meeting somewhere in the middle, appealing to scores of as yet discovered audiences and created by those same people.
Edit: The video has now been updated with an upscaled 4K quality edition, because I was too lazy to do it right the first time.
While Disney+ and YouTube platforms vie for attention alongside DaVinci and Elgato hardware and software creation tools in an ever expanding creative space, it’s the next creator of the minute or even creator of the decade that’s quietly roaming the floor that will likely push the tools, the trends, and the purpose behind and entirely unpredictable industry to places.
And all of that converged at VidCon Anaheim 2025 once again.