ICYMI: LinkedIn's Creator Session at VidCon Is the Vibe Shift; Day Two

[LTK’s Amber Venz Box being interviewed by Morgan Sung, via VidCon]

Welcome back to my coverage of VidCon’s Day Two… thanks for clicking in on a Saturday!  

I’ll be heading back for Day Three today because I want to catch Jessy Grossman, Christen Nino De Guzman, Gigi Robinson and Brandy Merriweather’s panels. 

But there won’t be a third newsletter this weekend — I’ll share more with paid subscribers during the week and any key themes next Friday. In the meantime, you can keep up on Twitter, Instagram Stories and LinkedIn.

⏰ 1-SECOND SUMMARY

• MrBeast’s talent manager, Reed Duchscher, warns against TikTok as a long-term strategy

• A conversation with Creator Economy OG: LTK founder, Amber Venz Box

• LinkedIn hosts its first of two creator panels at VidCon

🎥 VIDCON RECAP

📝 Seen and heard: 

9:00 am I stopped for coffee in the press room with Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson. It’s where members of the media are able to do interviews and where I had caught up with NBC News’ Saba Hamedy and Kalhan Rosenblatt on Thursday. 

9:30 am Friday’s sessions kicked off with a continued focus on the business of being a creator. Marc Hustvedt, president at MrBeast, was predictably bullish on creators: “At this point, creators can reach more audience, more efficiently and better than the infrastructure of advertising.”

10:15 am That confidence was echoed in the next Industry Track presentation featuring a VC perspective from Slow Ventures’ Megan Lightcap: “We are investing in the creators themselves via their holding companies, not the tooling / infrastructure.”

10:30 am The conversation segued into the next panel featuring founders and budding B2B influencers talking about the next-gen Creator Economy tools they were building to empower creators, including Creative Juice’s Sima Gandhi, Karat’s Eric Wei and FYPM’s Lindsey Lugrin (who launched a Creator Pricing Benchmark Report for brands during the conference).  

“Creators are a new type of small business,” said Gandhi, echoing something I’ve believed for years. “They're a business of one. They're solopreneurs. They’re somebody who works for themselves.”

11:30 am-ish Back to the press room for more coffee and to try and figure out the rest of the day’s schedule. In previous years it was easy to distinguish between the Creator Track and the Industry Track but the distinction between the second and third floor has been blurred.

Every creator is now a business and every business person is developing their personal brand, making it even harder to pick between parallel programming tracks.

"For all the creator economy excitement, B2B creators are often overlooked,” Brandwatch’s SVP Strategy James Creech told me, noting that this year’s convention seemed to reverse that. “Many B2B creators are building huge businesses across newsletters, podcasts, and social platforms like LinkedIn. Their content caters to professionals, who are often industry decision makers with real budgets!"

11:45 am Nowhere was the B2B or just business-obsessed convergence more obvious than the presence of LinkedIn’s first ever Creator session at VidCon — one of two this week — focusing on personal brand building and using the platform to its full potential in a session led by Senior Creator Manager Trish Lindo.

And because it’s one of the questions I get asked the most often: how does someone become a Top Voice or get invited into the accelerator programs? Lindo provided some tips:

1. Create quality content on a consistent basis

2. Share content that's sparking conversation

3. If you pitch yourself to a platform creator manager, make sure they’re in your discipline (entrepreneurship, finance, creator economy, fashion, etc.)

“Sometimes it really just depends if they have room on their roster,” Lindo told the room, “because we're all beholden to 100 or more [creators]. So sometimes it's not about you. We like you. Either we just don't have the bandwidth at this time or I can't help you.” 

1:00 pm-ish Back to the press room to meet creator Gigi Robinson and founder Ayomi Samaraweera — online connections turned into part of my IRL network — and get some work done. 

2:00 pm Because of the overlap between the Industry, Creator and even Community Tracks, the impossible choice at this time was Washington Post’s Dave Jorgenson talking about memes or YouTube creator liaison Rene Ritchie decoding secrets of the algorithm or TikToker Keith Lee on a panel called “The Rest of the Story,” exploring creator visibility as a catalyst for change. 

My foodie fandom won out and I went with Lee. Not only was I thrilled at all the success he’s having (see my January prediction!) but the entire panel with Kat Blaque, Angry Reactions, Tatyana Joseph and moderator Nick Reid was like a soul cleanse and felt like a really good choice.       

*​​Fun fact: I had put in a request to speak with Lee at VidCon but his team turned me down. No hard feelings. It makes me think there may be something bigger and better coming his way soon. But that’s VidCon. If you’ve got FOMO sitting at home, there’s FOMO here because somebody else is scoring better meetings, better lounge access (ahem, Instagram) or better party invites (ahem, Viral Nation). Someone, somewhere always has better access. The week is an exercise in gratitude to appreciate what you do have, versus what you don’t.  

3:30 pm-ish Back to the press room for tea and to start writing this newsletter with a brief detour to meet PBS’s Meg Daley (we go way back) and the Red Cross’ Jessica Buckholtz.

📝 TAKEAWAYS

If I had a word cloud for the first two days of VidCon it would contain something like: AI, Creators, B2B, monetization, long form, podcast, consistency, and YouTube (as the title sponsor they were highly visible and the YouTuber roots of the convention meant that most of the video platform sessions were standing room only).

• Both Samir Chaudry and Amber Venz Box predicted that content that is uniquely human will be a key differentiator for creators to stand out in the coming tidal wave of AI generated content.

• Mark Manson, who’s relaunching his YouTube channel this summer, echoed something I heard from several career creators and industry pros: Long form video and podcasts are brand builders and the key to building sustained audience growth. It’s also a possible antidote to a platform algorithm that will feed you entertainment but removes the focus on the individual creator.

  For Drew Afualo, that’s a request that came from her audience: as she explained in her panel Turning Your Audience Into an Empire: “The first thing they asked for was longer form content, right? My videos are kind of long. I was over three minutes. But they wanted more. So that's where a podcast came in.”

• Consistent content was also a constant drumbeat, whether it was LinkedIn’s Trish Lindo push for creators to post (I counted 18 instances of the word “consistent” in the presentation) or TikToker Tatyana Joseph encouraging a young fan to keep showing up for her audience.

• The final thing I want to point out is the rock star caliber of the brilliant women I heard speaking at VidCon — Drew Afualo, Andrea Casanova, Amber Venz Box, Brandy Merriweather, Christen Nino De Guzman, Gig Robinson, Sima Gandhi, Trish Lindo, Lindsey Lugrin and so many more — and the general consensus that female audiences power purchasing decision.

  “Women follow you, they go on tour with you, they love you, they support you. Women determine what's popular. They determine who hires you and who wants to work with you”

  -Drew Afualo, content creator, comedian, and podcaster

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🎙️ Conversations: LTK’s  Amber Venz Box

Amber Venz Box launched a startup in 2010 that would eventually become LTK, a shopping discovery app that earns creators a commission from the sales they generate. That makes it one of the earliest and most enduring Creator Economy businesses. 

If you’re not familiar with Venz Box, she’s now one of America’s richest self-made women. As for the app, it generates $4.1B in retail sales annually and has led to 200+ LTK creator millionaires. And yet we don’t talk enough about what a powerhouse this company is, so I jumped at the chance to speak with Venz Box following her keynote at VidCon. 

Lia Haberman: You're like the Jeff Bezos of the influencer world. Did you have a sense of the empire you were building when you started?

Amber Venz Box: As technology has changed and consumer preferences changed, our vision grows and expands based on what's possible. And so in 2011, I didn't picture us at the time having our own consumer property, but certainly by 2014 we had launched a consumer arm and by 2017 we launched our own app. And now it's become the most critical piece of what we do in our business. And so our plans continue to expand and grow. 

LH: You essentially created one of the first creator economy companies before the term even existed. Can you compare your experience getting started versus the interest in creator economy startups these days?.

AVB: When we raised our series A, it was 2015, and most everyone we spoke to said, ‘Oh, I'll I'll ask my girlfriend’ or ‘I'll ask my wife if she reads blogs or if she knows bloggers. People candidly didn't understand the word blogger. We then changed our name to influencers because we were like, ‘Blogger is a dirty word, apparently, and maybe slightly pejorative. And so we're going to move to influencer.’ As things have changed over time, now it’s creators.

Being from from Dallas, being a first time entrepreneur, working in an industry that was almost purely female and totally misunderstood, it was very different than we think about 2021 to 2002 where you could get funding for a creator economy idea or even for a feature product versus having an entire ecosystem like we did.

It took us ten+ years to raise a material amount of money in this space. And we had a real business that was meaningfully profitable and making distributions at the time we did it, versus now you see companies raising $20 to $50 million based on just a concept that may or may not work in our economy. 

LH: LTK is platform agnostic, which seems like a brilliant move now. But was there ever a point where you doubted that choice?

AVB: You know, Instagram was the first mobile social platform that creators adopted. OK, now we can take photos with our phones. Oh, and now you can make them look pretty like all the things came together at the right time for that app.

And so we did build a product that was specifically for the mobile social walled garden of Instagram. And that was our LIKEtoKNOW.it product. It was a newsletter that sent you the shoppable information. The first year we drove $10 million in sales, then $50 million in sales and $150 million in sales. 

I remember this was around the time that Gwyneth Paltrow on Goop published that her and Chris Martin were consciously uncoupling. And the day that I read that post, I called a product team meeting and I said we need to consciously uncouple from Instagram.

And so we just made a list on the whiteboard. It was becoming obvious that they had a concentration within our business that we didn't want them to have because of the misalignment. So, we just made a list of the roadmap that we would go down in order to uncouple. And day by day we chipped away at it. 

We ultimately ended up launching our own app and product. And that was one of the best decisions in our entire history.

LH: The internet and the business world aren't always friendly places for women. What sort of struggles have you had to overcome and how have you turned that to your advantage?

AVB: As a creator, this works because someone connects with me on one or multiple dimensions of my life. Maybe they're from Texas, or maybe they went to SMU, or maybe they're pale and tall, or maybe they have kids or are married, there's something about me that they see themselves in or that is aspirational or that just feels like home, right?

And so that allows me to then connect with them and to be able to do my job. That's something that's really unique to women and our ability to community build. It has been culturally normative for women to look to others online.

Historically, I think about 80% of online purchases of all kinds have been made by the women in the household. And so, I know the game, I guess, on all sides. And as a native in all of those places, I think it's been an advantage to me.

LH: What’s been the best advice you’ve received as a female creator-founder?

AVB: One of the biggest hurdles about being a founder is the emotional toll of that, of entrepreneurship in general. And then I find it to be compounded if you have a family or you're growing a family or you have children.

Someone mentioned this on stage earlier today: ‘stay above the clouds.’ Delegate absolutely everything that you can so that you can remain the visionary. 

I see in myself that I know I can do it all and I sometimes try to be the hero to do it all. And then that holds us back because I'm either run down or I actually don't do it as well as someone who's an expert at that thing.

*This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and length

📖 ON YOUR RADAR

• “Creators cannot be overly reliant on TikTok for long term business building” -Reed Duchscher, open letter to creators 

• YouTube is making it easier for creators to choose that perfect thumbnail -The Verge

• YouTube integrates AI-powered dubbing tool -TechCrunch

• Twitch’s new Hype Chat has a 70/30 revenue split -TubeFilter

• Patreon is launching a free membership tier — and will let fans buy things, too -The Verge

• Meta to pull news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada -CNBC

• Colleen Ballinger, Miranda Sings and the unraveling of an online fandom -NBC News

• Creative Codes: Six secrets to help decode your brand’s creative potential on TikTok -TikTok

• Why creator-led content marketing is the future of search -Search Engine Land

Paid Subscribers: I’ll be sending out some more industry breakdowns during the week. Reminder, you have access to a folder of resources and the Slack community where I’ll be hosting an AMA next Friday morning, June 30!