We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the Creator Track of VidCon London, but there were some great tips we picked up from the Industry Track too! Our CEO Jesse was a panellist on the ‘Going Global’ talk on Friday and managed to sneak into a few talks in between meetings. We sat down with him to hear about his two key takeaways from VidCon London 2020.

Rights management is growing beyond YouTube

ContentID ushered in an era of rights management for semi-pros. Creators rightfully wanted to claim ownership of their own content as it was duplicated and distributed across the internet. The challenge is that this was historically limited to video assets shared within the YouTube universe, but tracking down your content across multiple platforms is notoriously difficult.

There are two broad ways of solving this:

1. Finding tools and agents that will track your content across platforms and reclaim any monetisation. This method can be effective, but it’s laborious and expensive.
2. I think the second method is more enticing - Selling the rights to your content by platform or region / territory. It’s then incumbent on the rights buyer to reclaim content. In my mind, that’s a better position because they’re more likely plugged into the very platforms and regions they want to acquire the rights for and so reclaiming content won’t be nearly as big a challenge as it would be for the original creator.

As creators are continually forced to be more like business people than creatives, advice and solutions like this will become ever more important.

Influencer marketing is very real

There was a lot of fanfare and excitement a few years back when brands would pay an obscene amount of money to major influencers without any real sense of what the payback was. Things have changed - there’s now a wide range of tools (e.g. Paladin) that let you track campaigns and calculate ROI based on the original investment.

The tools and tracking mechanisms allow for two things:

1. More money to shift from the ~$150bn of traditional TV advertising to more socially-driven digital video. This rise of interest in digital can be great for brands looking to diversify their content further.
2. The advent of smaller campaigns with smaller influencers. ‘Micro-influencers’ are the hot topic in the influencer marketing world and they’re proving that you no longer need 5 million followers to be an attractive channel for brands. Niche audiences, even in the 10’s of thousands, could be hyper relevant audiences for certain brands who are much more inclined to spend a capped amount to reach your audience.

There you have it! Whether you’re a brand or a creator, the talks and panels on Thursday and Friday of VidCon are essential for further understanding the current trends, knowing where to sink your time and increasing the growth and reach of your content. It’s also a great time to network within the industry before the madness of the community track begins. We’re already counting down to the next VidCon (103 days left!!) 👋