Vidcon General Manager Jim Louderback | Inside the Creator Economy

VidCon has legitimized creators as a trusted source of content and partners for brands. A couple years later, I meet that creator who said, "I came here when I was 15 as a fan, and now I've got 5 million followers or subscribers and brand deals, and I'm building a business.

And, you know, thanks VidCon, you helped me." Hi, I'm Jason Harris, and you're listening to Soul Science, fast forward your marketing mind in about 20 minutes. Welcome to the pod. Today I'm joined by Jim Louderback. Jim is a highly respected figure in the media space with over 20 years of experience in digital media, experiential events, and tech marketing. He's the editor and publisher of Inside the Creator Economy, which is a weekly newsletter about the intersection of creators, tech, Content and Media. You can subscribe on LinkedIn. He is currently a strategic advisor to Paramount and formerly built and sold VidCon to Paramount. VidCon is the leading IRL and virtual conference where the world's top creators, fans, and brands all converge in one place for meaningful discussions about the future of online video content. Jim has a proven ability to scale and sell startups along with growing large companies. He joined VidCon in 2014 as editorial director of the industry track and took over as CEO from founder Hank Green in 2017. 2017. Following the company's sale to Paramount, Louderback took on the title of VidCon General Manager and SVP. All right, here we go. We're going to talk a lot today about the creator economy and the future of online video content as well. So we will dive right in. Welcome, Jim. I always like to start with a good origin story. How Jim found his way into the creator tech startup space. Did you kind of always know you wanted to get into this? Like, give me, give me a little of your background.

Yeah, my background is pretty much follow the fun things and see what happens. Um, got a, uh, a math degree and an MBA early on, ended up doing consulting for large companies, building computer systems as a programmer, leading programming teams, answered an ad in the New York Times to run the Lab. Lads, the test labs at an early computer magazine called PC Week. I was like, I'll never get the job, but maybe they'll give me a column someday. They hired me. I actually developed a methodology for building computer systems, very different from existing methodologies. I'm going to geek out a little bit here. That ended up on the COVID of a magazine called DBMS, Database Management Systems. It was a geeky magazine about that. So that's why they gave me the job.

That's amazing. Yeah, the, the database management What was it? DBMS Magazine on the COVID Amazing. All right, keep going. So then you were talking about, uh, Ziff Davis, I believe.

Anyway, so Ziff Davis got, um, you know, on the editorial side, learned how to be an editor, editor-in-chief, helped start a cable network at ZDT called ZDTV, which was the first cable network about technology. But it also— we didn't get stars and people who were really good at reading the teleprompter but we took geeks like me and put 'em on TV and Leo Laporte and some others. And so it was, it was radically different. Um, did that for a while. Um, but ended up, um, going back on the magazine side and the website, helped launch some early websites for Ziff Davis, including, um, parts of ZDNet. And some people I worked with at TechTV started a couple companies. Now we're talking like 2005, 2006.

I remember ZDTV. I remember the pets.com, Webvan. Remember Webvan?

Uh, well, well, OG on the Webvan story, remember when the Giants opened up their stadium, which is a great stadium, Pac Bell Park it was called then, every cup holder had a Webvan sticker on it and there was a big Webvan, uh, ad, you know, banner in the back.

Yeah.

And of course season started in April, they were out of business in June. The banners and the cup holders stayed until October.

That's amazing. How did you get into the kind of VidCon days from there?

When I went back over to the, to the ZIF side, started, um, actually was the first person to review this box from a company called NewTek that put an entire television production studio into a PC. It was called the TriCaster. I was like, this thing's amazing. Let's launch shows like what we were doing at TechTV, but we'll do it with 2 people instead of 20 people, and we'll distribute it through online streaming. Uh, and so a couple of folks that I've been working with at TechTV started a couple of companies. One was Dig and another was Revision3. and they raised a bunch of money for both, and Digg was going like this.

Yeah, Digg was on fire.

You remember Digg, it was on fire, and this was 2006, 2007. They're like, why don't you come run Revision3 for us? It's going to take what you've been, you know, the vision we had with TechTV, we're going to distribute it all digitally. Come be our CEO. We just raised a bunch of money. We've got a couple people. Lead this thing. So that was my introduction. That was 2007. We were doing Digg Nation. We were doing a bunch of other shows, Texzilla. And what happened in 2008, if you remember, it was another crash. And, uh, also what was happening is we were distributing our shows on iTunes, but we were also like 30 other places, Reverend Break and Blip and, and so many other platforms. But we were putting it on YouTube and when the crash happened, we had to tighten our belt and really look at where the world was going, like many other companies, and make sure that our cash survived and did a deep dive on YouTube. Pivoted the entire company to YouTube. And so we started producing and finding YouTube creators and bringing them in. We became an early YouTube multi-channel network, which we had 300 or 400 creators who were part of our network. YouTube let us do that. And we started doing some really innovative things with advertising that basically we stole from the Ed Sullivan Show and radio, which were in-show sponsorships. So you'd be doing, you know, going along with Dig Nation and, and, and Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht would be talking about shows on Dig. And then in the middle of it, they're like, Hey, we want to talk about Budweiser, or, you know, we're drinking this new beer today, or, you know, we would integrate the brands in. And that was really controversial at YouTube. We had a deal that we could do it, but they almost shut us down. The other networks wanted to do it, but couldn't. I mean, eventually everyone's doing it. So that was sort of the introduction to that. And then 2012, we sold that to Discovery. In 2009, this event popped up that a couple of YouTube creators started. that they were going to do in 2010 called VidCon. I had been working with them, found out about it, helped them a little bit, tried to get Hank and John to be part of Revision3, but they wouldn't do it smartly, probably. Um, but I spoke and sponsored the first one and subsequent ones. And then after I sold Revision3 to Discovery in 2012, it was just Discovery for a couple of years. After leaving Discovery, um, went back to Hank and John and I had a little non-compete for like a year. I was like, hey, you know, I can help you with something if you want. And Hank was like, hey, run my industry track for me. I was like, okay, that sounds like fun. I'll do it for a year and then go do something else. And you heard my bio, so I kind of stuck around instead of going to do something else. So that's kind of how it all kind of evolved.

I love that story. What happened to Revision3 when you sold it?

So we built it into Discovery Digital Network. So we started a bunch of different networks that were in some ways complementary to the Discovery television networks. So we started something called Animalist that was, you know, the internet version with YouTubers of Animal Planet. We started, um, you know, we started, uh, something called a more adventure-oriented one. Um, we started a science show, uh, that was sort of tied into the Discovery Networks. And so we built a bunch of networks, and it eventually, uh, after I left, it merged with, uh, Group Nine, another investment that Discovery had made. And Seeker, uh, which was what the adventure brand that we built, is actually still part of the Group Nine group right now. So it's the, the remnants of it are still at Group Nine.

You were monetizing views on YouTube. That plus the branded content was the way that you guys made the business successful?

Absolutely. So it was taking money from the, you know, the pre-rolls that they would put in. We had a deal, we were able to sell our own pre-rolls in, but the real thing that worked for us, it's very cost per action stuff. That we borrowed from radio, and this is the promise that we gave to the creators when they would come to us and work with us, is we had deals with Netflix, we had deals with Budweiser, we had deals with a wide range of different brands, and we would integrate those brands into the show. And the ones that worked the best were the ones that actually, where there was a cost per action. So Netflix in the early days, we, we would go and, and set up movie clubs for these creators. So they would say, hey, this week we're gonna watch, you know, um, you know, Gone with the Wind. And by the way, you want to watch it with us? We'll sign up for Netflix with our code and we'll give you, you know, X amount off for like the first couple months, and then join our Netflix movie club. You know, they were all about customer acquisition at that point, and we were getting paid $60, $70 an acquisition.

Oh my God.

And we would turn around and share that, you know, 50% with the creators. So we were making bank until, uh, like 2013 when they decided they wanted to go to brand advertising and they didn't care about you know, customer acquisition anymore. But we used that with Audible. We used that with, with, uh, Squarespace. We used that with so many other brands.

Whenever there's an acquisition, it can go one of, one of three ways. It can kind of stay, stay flat. It can really bolster up the company and the company can get to new heights, or it just totally dismantles and destroys the company. Which path happened in the Revision3 world?

I think the Revision3 world, we had the opportunity to, and we did a lot of stuff for Discovery. But in the end, it didn't align with Discovery. So I think it, it, it didn't crash and burn. It grew, but, and, and a lot of what we did actually permeated Discovery in general, but it became less interesting to them. And that's where they rolled it into Seeker because we never actually really got to the profit levels that we had hoped for.

I think it's very full circle that you're now advising Paramount.

You know, when, when Paramount and it was Viacom at the time, bought Revision3. They also bought another company similar to Revision3 called Awesomeness, which was more around the teen girl space. But one of the reasons why they did that, if you remember YouTube, uh, they— Viacom sued YouTube for like 6 years and they lost that whole teen generation.

Yeah.

And so one of the reasons why VidCon was attractive to them and Awesomeness is because it allowed them to connect with teens again in a way that they hadn't really because of the fact that they sued YouTube for so long. So we've— VidCon's done a great job making— helping Viacom, ViacomCBS Paramount be relevant to this new generation of consumers that were, you know, in some— in many ways aging out of Nick, didn't really have anywhere to go until they would age into MTV and Comedy Central.

Let's say someone hasn't been to VidCon. Maybe they've heard of it, maybe they're not that familiar with it. How would you describe what VidCon's like?

So VidCon is 3 events in one. It's a summit, a conference, and a festival. On the festival side, which is what gets all the attention and which is a lot of the reason why Viacom is super interested in buying it, it's like Comic-Con for online video geeks, right? So if you're a fan of MrBeast or Charlie D'Amelio or any of those other hundreds and thousands of creators, you come to VidCon to celebrate the connection to those creators, to find other people like you that love them, and to really share in that. You know, it's a, It's a music festival combined with a Comic-Con for online video. And, but the conference side is for people that want to be that next generation of creators, learn how to make better content, learn how to collaborate with other people, meet other people like them, inspired by creators who've been before them. That's our creator track. That's our conference. And that's where we teach people to be that next generation of creators. And then the summit side is the industry summit. It is where The whole creator economy comes together every year to figure out where things are, hear from the top platforms and brands, figure out where things are going. And that is like all the B2B conferences we all go to in the media world, except the fans are there and the creators are there too.

So tell me how the experience, how you've seen it evolve since you've been, you know, there so long.

Yeah. Well, so I'd say on the brand side, it's definitely expanded as more brands have discovered that if you want to connect with teens, this is the place to do it. And every one of those teens is an amplification engine, right? They're, they're all celebrating their love of their creators, but they're all out there with their phones creating themselves. And so that's great for the brands that know how to take advantage of it. So more and more brands have come in, kicked the tires, and a number of them have stuck around. On the, uh, on the audience side, you know, it's, it's still teens that are really passionate about the creators and come for that, but it's gotten both younger and older. So if It used to be the 13 to 18-year-olds were the sweet spot. Now we see 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 10-year-olds, not only coming because they wanna meet their favorite creators, but also because they wanna make video and be creators. And then from a platform perspective, we were YouTube only for the first 5 or 6 years. One of the things that I did when I came in to run the industry track was really reach out to different platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Musical.ly was there early on, and now TikTok, Snap. LinkedIn, Pinterest all have big presences there now. And the thing that— the last thing I'll say that I think is really interesting from a change perspective that we saw this year is YouTube had been our title sponsor for a long time. TikTok came in and was title sponsor for the first time this year. YouTube, I spent more money this year than they ever have. They had a huge presence as well. But the fact is, from a creator perspective and a connection perspective, TikTok is a very different platform than YouTube. And the connection that creators have to their audiences, those parasocial relationships are way deep on YouTube, a lot less deep on, on TikTok and TikTok people. The way people use TikTok is much more of a, I got some time to spare. I'm just gonna swipe, swipe, laugh, laugh, haha. But they don't develop as many. They do develop deep relationships in some ways with creators, Not as many, not as long, not as deep and passionate. So a creator that may have millions and millions and millions of followers does not have the deep connection to the audience that a creator with a quarter of those followers on YouTube can have. So not that one's better or worse, but the way I think about it is TikTok is more about awareness. You wanna get people aware of you as a creator, aware of you as a brand, aware of what's out there. TikTok is awesome. If you want to go deep to the consideration phase or the purchase phase, That's where YouTube and YouTube creators are much stronger because they have a deeper personal relationship with their audiences. So we find creators using TikTok to get people aware of what they're doing, but trying to move them to YouTube to really get that depth of connection and maybe buy something from you or convert.

How do you see VR and Web3?

I'll start— let's start with Web3. One of the things that a creator doesn't get from these platforms that they create on is ownership of their audience. And that's super important because the closer you are to your audience, the closer your connection, the more likely that you can find out who your super fans are and you can really start to monetize them directly or connect with them directly. And, you know, if you want to connect with all of your subscribers on YouTube or all of your followers on Instagram, you can't really do that except by posting. So Web3 has the promise of allowing a creator to create a direct relationship with the people that care about them the most. And I really love that opportunity. And creators are looking at it just like TikTok may be an awareness play, YouTube may be a depth of experience play. Um, these platforms where you can move your audience to using Web3 capabilities and align incentives about growing together offer great promise to creators. You know, you've got Patreon and you have some of those other things, but you, I think the opportunity to do that on Web3 is, is really interesting. When you look at the metaverse and people are equating Web3 and the metaverse, I still think they're very different. But when you look at the metaverse, it is a, it is a new canvas for storytelling. And it is a canvas that we don't understand well. Creators who have been on YouTube for 8 or 10 years, maybe a couple of them will end up being good creators on the metaverse and creating, using that as a canvas for telling stories. But I really think the, the MrBeast of the metaverse just graduated from 8th grade somewhere, and we don't know who that person is. They might be building experiences on Roblox right now, but what that storytelling environment looks like is going to be very different. And I would say watch this space. I'm excited about it. I think it's going to be amazing, but I don't think the, the, the, you know, the typical suspects that we know in the YouTube and TikTok space are the ones who are going to get it. You can experiment with it. Um, I did an interview at VidCon with the chief product officer from Roblox, and MeganPlays, who's a YouTube creator, has now moved into Roblox. She's built— she and her husband have built a game studio on Roblox where they're employing 70 people and they're building experiences on Roblox. That's not for everybody, but there are opportunities to do that.

The creator economy, when it started, merch became really big. That became a real big way to monetize. And then pre-roll became a big way to monetize. Doing brand partnerships became a big way to monetize. Do you feel like there's always a new way to, to figure it out, or do you feel like those same trusted ways to make money are still existing in the creator economy.

I think that new things are coming up all the time, and now you look at like digital goods, for example.

Yeah.

So being able to create, um, digital goods— you can do this in Roblox where anybody can now go create a skin or go create something there and sell it. You know, NFTs again, tarnished and, uh, but not fading. And the ability to do those sorts of things where they're digital originals that hopefully we can end up using across multiple platforms. Those are new areas to lean into. I think being able to invest in a creator and share in their growth— I mean, what if you discovered the next, you know, Charlie D'Amelio or MrBeast, and you were a fan of theirs, and you were able to buy into their economy, as it were, and then grow with them? That's also an area that I think we're going to develop out on the monetization perspective. And also More and more we see creators now taking their content and they're starting to build their own video experiences and maybe putting them on Roku or putting them on connected TVs. So there are a lot of new opportunities and a lot of ways to waste a lot of money and time too. Yeah, but I'm excited that I think we're going to keep on seeing more things come up.

What impact do you think VidCon has made on the rise of the creator community?

Well, I think VidCon has legitimized creators as a trusted source of content and partners for brands. And I also love that VidCon has been a place where we've trained and helped creators reach their audiences, connect with each other, and also work through a lot of the issues that creators have around loneliness and depression and identity, and that we're a safe space and we welcome everybody. And when I see, you know, the faces of the teens who realize that there are other people like them and that they can be themselves and they can connect with their creators. And then a couple of years later, I meet the creator who said, I came here when I was 15 as a fan, and now I've got 5 million followers or subscribers and brand deals, and I'm building a business. And, you know, thanks, VidCon, you helped me.

I think VidCon really helped brands feel like it was a real thing, made it seem like, okay, I can take a portion of my budget and spend it here and it feels safe. It doesn't feel fly-by-night.

Yeah, I, I agree with you, and thanks for saying that, because I think that was a big thing that VidCon wanted to do, and I think you see it play out.

Obviously you have a, you know, math background. Do you use a lot of data and research to make your decisions, or do you— hey, I think, I think we should try this thing and let's just bet on it?

First of all, to, to think about VidCon being, you know, going outside of the US when we think about a market, our process is do research. So we would do primary research in every market where we would take a look at, you know, what's the appetite for the creator economy, who are the top creators that they like. We do price sensitivity analysis. We do looking at where they would want the event and whether it made sense. And so all of those things tie into where do you do a VidCon? You know, we also use data source, like a big use of Tubular for a long time. Trying to take a look at what creators are popping and who's big in region. Um, and then, but, but it's also, you know, part of events is who wants us, right?

Right.

So not only who wants you from a fan perspective, but will the areas that you're interested in going to, will they support you? Will they give you, you know, money or a convention center or, or collaborate with you? And so that's where you go out to the tourism departments and the governments and say, Hey, we're thinking of bringing this in. Is there a way we can collaborate together? And then, you know, you pull all those pieces together. Are the creators big? Are the audiences big? Does the research come in? And then you look at it and say, okay, we have all these pieces together. Let's just all hold hands and jump off the cliff and see where it goes.

What's Jim Louderback's favorite thing? Is it, is it scaling startups or is it modernizing a large company?

I think it has to be scaling startups. I've been in big and small companies. I think it's starting new things. You can start new things at large companies and have a lot of fun with them. We did it with ZDTV and TechTV. But what we did with that is we started it, but we put it in a separate place, separate from everybody else. You know, that was really smart. What I do think, and this is— I've realized having done all of it is, you know, when you're doing a startup and a small company and you know this because you've seen it with the stuff you've built, is when you're small, 90% of your time is spent outwards on clients, on audiences, on hiring people, on what's out there. And then as you get bigger and bigger, bigger the company is, the more time you end up spending internally in meetings and strategy and connecting with other people in the company and making sure that everybody's aware of what's going on and partnering internally as well. So I happen to find it more interesting to be on the outward side rather than the inward side. Not that I'm not good at meetings, but I'd rather think about doing them on the outside rather than the inside.

Who, um, are some of your role models that sort of shaped who you are today?

So one of the nice things that we got about, um, when and where I got an MBA was there were some really big thinkers at NYU when I was there. One of them was, um, Dr. Deming, and this is the guy that in 19— 45 or 47, went to Japan to teach them post-World War II how to build their economy. And he was very much focused on assembly lines, but not on like, you know, the sort of test, evaluate, put it in. But it was all around quality and connecting people together and saying, you're responsible for it. If this thing you're making doesn't work, it's not going to get picked up by the quality inspector further down the assembly line, you're responsible for it. And those quality circles and giving people the autonomy to be responsible for what they do. He wrote the book and he helped— really was a big player in turning the Japanese economy into what it was in the '70s and the '80s. And I got to study at his feet, as it were. And that idea of empowering people and letting them be in charge of what they do and not putting roadblocks or gatekeepers in front of them. I learned that. And so that was a huge inspiration. So I fundamentally believe in that. And then beyond that, I mean, I'm super inspired what Hank and John Green have done. Hank is one of the best people in the world and what he's— the way he treats people and thinks about things and is such a clear thinker. I'm also just inspired by pretty much every single day.

Do you have a favorite author or book that you kind of go back to or that was transformational for you? And it doesn't have to be business, could be personal.

Well, I love The Lord of the Rings. I'll read that every couple of years. Um, but, uh, you know, I really been inspired by some of the stuff around, uh, there's a book called Diffusion of Innovation, and it's all about how innovations get diffused through the, through the, uh, the world. And it's not like all of a sudden innovation comes out and everybody's like, yeah, of course we're going to do that. I mean, think about mobile phones, think about VR, think about all those things. But you know, one of the early stories that the author of Diffusion of Innovations talked about was citrus fruit. You know why British sailors are called limeys? They realized that they packed a bunch of limes onto the boats. They go on these like, you know, months-long trips around the world and they're sailing vessels. And by having limes there, they didn't develop rickets. Rickets was a huge disease for sailors. Their teeth would fall out. And so they called them limeys. But what happened was that the citrus fruit— citrus, citric acid, I guess— and limes kept rickets away. And one of the reasons why the British Navy ended up dominating the world for a long time was because their sailors didn't get rickets. And that innovation took forever to weave through the rest of the sailing world powers. And, you know, it should have been immediate, like, oh yeah, okay, look, they got limes. That must be it. Let's say we got to put limes on our boat. But it took 40 years so that innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, laggard is something that was scientifically laid out in this book, The Diffusion of Innovation. And every now and then I pick it up and I'm like, I need another example. I'll just open it randomly. I'm like, oh yeah, that happened. And you see it play out with every technology innovation from the PC to the mobile phone to, you know, to birth control pills, to like so many different things.

Oh wow, I love that. Do you have a favorite Jim Louderback quote or mantra that you try to live by?

If you wake up one morning and you're not having fun at what you do, and if you're not like 70 or 80% of your workday is enjoyable, go do something else. I'm not saying that you want to, you know, just like chuck it all and go, you know, be a surf instructor, but really, if you're not enjoying it, go do something else. And even if you have to cut your salary in half, just go do it.

You spend so many hours doing whatever your career is, you better enjoy it.

Yeah, and it's a little bit antithetical to the whole hustle thing. It's like no matter what you do, hustle and suffer and go through pain because you'll get there. It's like, no, it's too short for that. Go find something you really like and go do it. Not saying the money is going to follow because it doesn't always, but you're going to be happier, you'll be better adjusted, and you're going to learn more because you're into it. And that will lead you to places that will probably be better than that, you know, hating getting out of the bed in the morning.

Have you ever had a job that you dreaded going to?

The jobs are part of it, but it's the people. I have— I mean, I left tech TV and I really was enjoying what I was doing, but I left it because I hated the person I was working for and management did nothing to fix it. And in the end, I was like, I cannot go back to that office another day and have to put up with this. And so I didn't have a job, I just left. Tying back to what you asked about on the book side, that's not necessarily what Dr. Deming was, was preaching, but saying give the power to, to people to, to do it. They're responsible. And the more you empower people and make it responsible and don't micromanage them and demean them and trust them, the better it's going to be for everybody.

Wise words. Uh, all right, well, thank you for your time. This was really enlightening.

Thanks. I really appreciate it, Jason. And thanks for everything you do. Thanks for supporting VidCon.

Soul Science is a Mechanism podcast produced by Maggie Bowles, Ryan Tillotson, Tyler Nielsen, Emma Swanson, and Lily Jablonski. The show is edited by Daniel Ferreira with theme music by Kyle Merritt. And I'm your host, Jason Harris.