More than an hour after VidCon registration was scheduled to begin June 25, the doors weren’t open and the entry line snaked back and forth in front of the Anaheim Convention Center until it lost all shape and collapsed into a swirling crowd. The problem was benign — something to do with the fire marshal — but it looked like the overwhelming assembly of towheaded kids, pink-sneakered tweens, gothy teens, obsessed grownups, loving parents, and sweltering costumes would never get inside.

Some 6,000 miles away, Cannes Lions was on day four of its extraordinary transition from annual advertising boondoggle into a full-on creators-go-Hollywood takeover. (That’s still a work in progress. Although CAA showed up at Lions for the first time with a $250 million creator fund, creator manager Naomi Lennon said she spoke to a Gen Z executive who asked, “What is a CAA?”)

Two events with the same story from different perspectives. But to my mind, it’s that cadre of squirrelly fans who represent the real power. None of this happens without their attention, which now fuels everything from “Backrooms” to brand storytelling. 

It’s also a marketplace with its own terms of entry and that room is filled with people who hold cards most indie filmmakers have never touched.

Every Creator is a Startup

Former VidCon CEO Jim Louderback has witnessed this creator conference since 2010, when VidCon was 1,500 people in a hotel basement across the street from CAA. He said they felt like they were in on a secret nobody else understood yet. 

“Every creator over a certain level is the CEO of a startup company,” said Louderback, who publishes the foundational newsletter Inside the Creator Economy. “But unlike entrepreneurs, a lot of them never had a job except being a creator.” 

That means they do everything. They create, they sell, they figure out product-market fit, they optimize their business. The VidCon Industry Track was full of panels centered on practical concerns: product economics, creator partnerships, brand development. A metrics panel walked through sophisticated audience analytics at a rapid clip, delivered not to high-level marketers but directly to the people whose careers depend on understanding it.

All that education builds toward the thing every filmmaker wants: the ability to control how their story is told.

The Deal Disney Didn’t See Coming

At VidCon I also met Gregg Bywalski, the Paris-based managing director of the global holding company Webedia Creators. It represents hundreds of companies, brands, and their creators, and he told me a story. 

The Webedia-repped Inoxtag, a French creator with 9.4 million subscribers, made a documentary for his YouTube channel about his attempt to climb Everest. In September 2024, MK2 agreed to distribute “Kaizen” in theaters for one night. It sold 350,000 tickets in a single day across 1,000 screenings, crashing the websites of every exhibitor. The next day it was posted to YouTube, where it saw more than 10 million views in 24 hours.

I knew that part, but what I didn’t know was Disney+ later wanted to license the film. The deal demanded exclusivity, which meant taking it down from YouTube. Inoxtag refused; that would break a promise to his fans. 

Said Bywalski. “I don’t think they’re used to that kind of answer.”

As to what happened next — well, now you can watch “Kaizen” on Disney+ and on Inoxtag’s YouTube channel. “I think it was just a natural position for [Inoxtag], not a strong reaction in his mind, the way it registered for us,” Bywalski said. “To him it was simply the obvious stance.”

Indie filmmaking has no equivalent and next to that kind of leverage, it looks incredibly vulnerable.

The Open Question

Indie film and the creator economy are not the same thing, and collapsing them would serve no one. But what indie filmmakers traditionally carry — festival pedigree, critical esteem, institutional backing — depends on a system that’s under pressure from multiple directions.

Watch time is becoming a greenlight metric in its own right. At VidCon, a major platform executive said the data he weighs most heavily when deciding whether to develop something is accumulated time spent with the creator’s existing content. 

Filmmakers don’t have that, of course, but metrics don’t always contain themselves to the context in which they were introduced. (Opening-weekend box office began as a financial planning tool.) A credible signal in a creator negotiation can feel like a signal everywhere because the evaluators don’t change. 

Actors have experienced this phenomenon for years. Submitting for an audition means including your social stats across multiple platforms, and casting agents may filter by audience thresholds. Treating followers as a primary filter is an opportunity for distortion, but it’s also a hard number in an industry that’s desperate for them.

That’s why indie filmmakers may find themselves holding credentials in a language fewer people speak. No one needs a policy decision for this to happen. It just drifts into the criteria and by the time anyone notices, it’s the norm. 

Inoxtag built years of trust with millions before he ever sat across from Disney. That’s what let him say no and mean it. A filmmaker without the audience or fluency doesn’t have the same no. 

It’s unclear whether that’s a crisis or just a transition. Inoxtag’s leverage wasn’t a claim anyone made on his behalf; it was 350,000 tickets and 10 million views. Indie film has always made its case with what critics and juries said about the work. Whether it can make that case with what audiences do instead remains open.