VidCon’s 15th anniversary arrived with a telling shift. This year’s title sponsor was POP.STORE, a creator monetization platform unveiling an AI-powered commerce tool for creators. The choice signals something larger: the creator economy’s center of gravity is moving from content to infrastructure, from creators as personalities to creators as businesses.
The Conversation Has Changed
That shift was on full display at VidCon’s Industry Leadership Summit, where I spent the day in a room with top creators, platform executives, and entertainment industry leaders wrestling with questions that have moved well past “how do I grow a following” into genuinely structural territory. The conversation at the highest level of this industry is no longer about content. It is about infrastructure, ownership, and accountability.
Building the Infrastructure Creators Never Had
Daniel Abas, founder of the Creators Guild of America, walked through three years of building the professional infrastructure creators never had: eligibility standards defining what counts as a professional creator, a contract rider now adopted by major brands and agencies, an IMDb-style credits system, and platform-agnostic verification for identity and brand safety. What is next on his roadmap, healthcare access, small business tax treatment, AI and likeness rights, sounds less like a creator economy wish list and more like the agenda of any maturing labor force finally organizing around its actual needs. This work complements the work being done on the industry side via the IAB and its Creator Economy Board, which exists to close the gap between creator experts and media buying experts.
AI, Likeness, and the Rights Nobody Has Figured Out Yet
SAG-AFTRA’s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland brought that same maturity to a harder question: “What happens when AI-generated voices and likenesses become indistinguishable from the real thing?” His point that image and likeness protections matter as much to a creator with 500,000 subscribers as they do to a studio actor is the kind of equivalence this industry has been waiting for someone with institutional weight to say out loud.
The Structural Questions That Actually Matter
The roundtables made the structural shift even more concrete. One session asked how creator companies scale without losing what made them work in the first place, a question every founder-led business eventually faces but one creators are confronting earlier and faster than most. Another examined the creator economy as fundamentally a small business economy, one of the largest concentrations of small businesses in American economic history with almost no organized policy advocacy to match its scale. A third dug into where capital is actually flowing, and what an “exit” even means now that roll-ups, licensing deals, and creator-to-creator acquisitions are all live options.
From the Attention Economy to the Intention Economy
While at VidCon I interviewed Keith Soljacich, EVP and head of innovation at Publicis Media, and asked him whether the rise of creators meant the death of movie theaters. His take: consumers will always crave shared, communal experiences, so as creators scale into media companies, theaters become their next distribution channel rather than their competitor. He framed the bigger shift as the media industry moving from the attention economy to the intention economy, and noted that the creators who win will be the ones who use AI and data to understand what their audience actually wants, not just what gets them to watch.
Who Controls Content Distribution Now?
That shift is no longer theoretical. Now that creator-made films are outperforming traditional studio releases at the box office, the real question is who controls distribution. Markiplier’s “Iron Lung,” a self-financed, self-directed horror film adapted from an indie video game, opened on a widely reported $3 million budget and pulled in $18.19 million domestically on its opening weekend alone, according to final figures from Comscore, eventually grossing $51 million worldwide. A grassroots fan campaign drove the release from roughly 60 independent theaters to more than 4,100 by opening day, as audiences pressured AMC, Regal, and Cinemark directly. A creator with an audience built entirely on YouTube did not just enter the theatrical pipeline. He outperformed it, even if briefly.
Both the ownership conversation and the distribution conversation arrive at the same underlying truth: the old frameworks, for ownership, for distribution, for what counts as a professional, were built for an industry that no longer exists.
The Brands That Show Up Early Will Win
The creator economy is no longer asking to be invited to the table. It is building its own guild, its own contracts, its own ownership frameworks, and its own distribution logic. The brands that show up early to understand that infrastructure will define the next decade of marketing. The ones that wait will be negotiating from a position of catch-up in a market that has already decided where it’s going.
