The internet's most famous people converged in 1 place and it all was captured on video: Inside my trip to VidCon
I kept a diary of my time mingling with online celebrities and the people who keep the creator economy afloat. It was sometimes glamorous, oftentimes scrappy and always fascinating, just like the internet itself. Let's talk about it.
A frenetic vibe from the start
Much of the vibe of VidCon is set by the palm tree-lined street outside the Anaheim Convention Center, where vendors line up to sell you food from a truck or guide you through the line for a photo opp.
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This year, there were Minecraft topiaries in honor of the game's mainstream success through its movie adaptation, a box sponsored by horror production company Blumhouse which participants could enter to scream at the top of their lungs and a huge rainbow banner celebrating YouTube's 20th anniversary that was positioned over a small house at the intersection of 'Subscribe Street' and 'Like Lane.' It rivaled Disneyland, which was also visible from the window of my nearby hotel.
The cameras are always rolling
Everyone was filming all the time — including me and Yahoo video producer Sam Matthews.
A giant coloring page was set up in the expo hall, and Snapchat hosted a bodega-themed event at a nearby hotel. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; illustrations: Jiaqi Wang for Yahoo News; photos: Kelsey Weekman/Yahoo News)
As we walked through the convention center, we saw a girl dressed as Wednesday Adams do an elaborately choreographed dance in the middle of the floor, declaring, 'I was just kidding' to the crowd that had formed by the time she finished. We saw another huge gathering of people formed around dozens of influencers holding their phones to their faces, lip-syncing to a song we couldn't hear with perfect synchronicity.
There was also a huge line of kids forming to take photos with a man dressed as The Lorax, who was giving instructions on how to pose and interact with him.
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None of this was sanctioned, but it wasn't forbidden, either.
Toys 'R' Us
Vendors sold merchandise at VidCon's expo hall, and the brand Pop Store set up a "clinic" on another floor to help creators monetize. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; illustrations: Jiaqi Wang for Yahoo News; photos: Kelsey Weekman/Yahoo News)
The sprawling expo hall in the convention center's grandest ballroom was extremely popular for attendees. There, amid lines of people waiting for meet and greets with their favorite creators or big events hosted on a mainstage, was a smorgasbord of all the finest collectibles. The little stuffed monsters known as Labubus were clipped to the purses and belt loops of every tenth person I saw. I formed a bond with a person in a Furby costume.
Another ultra-popular toy was the Easy Sqweezy Stretchy Banana which is literally just a big squishy banana toy that a dad told me kids like hitting each other with. There was a huge stand for mystery merch boxes, where fans could spend a few dozen dollars to get a random assortment of items related to titles like Stranger Things, Spider-Man and Star Trek. The cashier told me the most popular box is for The Goonies, but he didn't really understand why.
I met my actual heroes
I was part of the first generation to grow up with access to YouTube, so many of the creators honored in VidCon's Hall of Fame felt like the cool seniors who graduated when I was a freshman, though they're technically titans of media. Still, I was starstruck — more so interviewing Hank Green and Grace Helbig at the event than I was interviewing Josh Hartnett or Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the past.
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I was also charmed by how kind and down-to-earth the Hall-of-Famers were. Ian Hecox of Smosh talked to me for more than half an hour, and I didn't even let it slip that I used to have a crush on him.
Rosanna Pansino somehow got me cake at a hotel bar when she heard it was my birthday. I've heard all these stories about how internet fame warps your sense of self and reality, but everyone I met was incredibly humble and sweet.
An immersive anthropological excursion
I expected a crowd of more people my own age at the Hall of Fame ceremony, given that the honored creators had been around since the 2000s, but I was wrong. I consider myself pretty well-versed in the online world, but I felt like an explorer in the depths of an uncharted jungle.
Sam and I were surrounded by children as young as 7, screaming at the top of their lungs to meme-inspired songs performed by YouTuber CG5. We were then subjected to a magic battle between two viral illusionists, Justin Flom and SeanDoesMagic. The kids behind me were screaming jokes laced with internet slang, accusing people of 'hacking' and directing questions like, 'Yo, who are these people?' to an imaginary 'chat.' They were rude to the Hall of Fame inductees, talking over their acceptance speeches, but loudly admitted that Rhett & Link are funny.
Who all the kids wanted to see
Tons of people have asked me who the most popular creator at VidCon was. It wasn't the one with the longest legacy or the biggest following. It was Jmancurly, a YouTuber who almost exclusively shares videos of himself playing the virtual reality game Gorilla Tag, in which people play as legless primates.
I missed his onstage appearance at the Hall of Fame ceremony, but I felt his presence everywhere. He had a giant — and I mean bigger than a house — statue of a buff torso set up in the expo hall. Kids everywhere wore his merch and lined up to play Gorilla Tag. To VidCon attendees, Jmancurly was like all four of the Beatles combined.
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Another popular creator duo was AJ and Big Justice, the father-son pair who went viral for the loud New Jersey accents with which they assign things ratings on a 'boom or doom' scale. They had to enter the press room for our interview through a secret door because, as their manager explained, they kept getting 'swarmed.'
People begged them for photos and lined up to make videos with them, in which they would both scream and assess how many 'booms' a selfie-taker deserved. I was overjoyed when Yahoo received five big booms.
Someone who everyone missed
AJ and Big Justice often create content with The Rizzler, an 8-year-old child influencer best known for striking comically macho poses in viral interactions with celebrities. He sadly wasn't able to attend VidCon because he opted to go to Fanatics Fest in New York City instead, to the disappointment of at least a dozen people who asked about his whereabouts. I did see someone carrying around a seemingly life-size cardboard cutout of him, though.
The Rizzler poses in Times Square. (Michelle Farsi/FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
VidCon also felt more exclusive than ever, because, much to the chagrin of fans online, it didn't livestream its panels. You just had to be there.
Everyone wants to be an influencer
When I went to VidCon in 2022, everyone wanted to meet an influencer. People lined up around blocks and sat in full costume for hours for the chance to see a YouTuber they adored.
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In 2025, everyone wanted to be an influencer. Even when lining up at panels for a chance to ask a creator a question, most wanted to know the secret to success or ask for advice on their careers. I'll never forget how many children I saw wearing T-shirts with their budding YouTube channel names printed on them.
At first, I thought the designated area that linking website Pop Store had set up that offered a hospital-themed 'monetization clinic' for fresh creators hoping to make money off their content was dystopian. 'Your vibe is billable' a neon sign beckoned.
After wandering through, I realized that for so many people, turning sharing what you love into a financially beneficial endeavour is an absolute dream. Who am I to judge, even if someone in a lab coat is prodding me to try my hand at a giant game of 'Operation' so they could lower my guard far down enough that I'd willingly open a website on my phone?
Luckily, content creators and other members of the creator economy were extremely eager to give advice. I gathered words of wisdom from a dozen of them.
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I was particularly moved by the advice from video game streamer and true crime podcast host Ericka Bozeman, who could have tossed vague platitudes at the young YouTuber who approacher her, but instead gave him an on-the-spot overhaul by helping him identify what's distinct enough to embrace about his style and come up with a new channel introduction.
A new class of child stars emerges — and it's not all bad
LikeNastya, Avia Colette and Big Justice have massive followings and millions of people watching their every video. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Instagram)
It feels like we only hear horror stories about children who grew up famous online, but the ones I talked to at VidCon love their lives. Big Justice, for instance, is living his dream. Avia Colette, the now-adult child of some of the first family vloggers, wouldn't have it any other way.
'Minecraft' still reigns supreme
After the success of A Minecraft Movie forced the mainstream entertainment industry to pay attention to the power of a sandbox video game, I became obsessed with untangling how it has managed to stick around for so many years. I spoke to Minecraft YouTubers with millions of subscribers about how they sustain a whole massive ecosystem of fans and content, though you've probably never heard of them.
The longest-running YouTube creators are still killing it
The comedy duo I was obsessed with in 2005 is still thriving, but not without their challenges. I profiled the people behind Smosh, a YouTube channel that has survived virality and brushes with career death over and over again for two decades.
Smosh's full cast, including Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox in the middle. (Courtesy of Smosh)
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They told me the secret to thriving as online creators from the early internet to modern times, which hasn't been easy or normal, but it has been an incredibly fun ride.
Going viral doesn't matter anymore, according to the guy who's the best at it
Anthony Po is the king of going viral. He thinks it's easy. You probably don't know him by name, but chances are you've seen the Timothée Chalamet lookalike competition, or videos of him eating a jar of cheese balls in front of 3,000 people in a mask.
At 23, he's been a creator for about 10 years, and he said on a panel called 'From Viral Moments to Sustainable Business Models' that 'going viral is kind of easy … it's a science, almost.'
He worked for YouTube's most popular creator MrBeast in 2023, where he said their goal was to have every video reach at least 300 people.
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'There's a way to engineer that … you look at what exists and study culture,' he said.
Po isn't into that anymore — he wants to find the authentic human element in everything he does. But it still makes him go viral.
It was fascinating because I think a lot of brands might have been foaming at the mouth just to get a dash of his ability to get their products seen by so many people. Maybe he's onto something, or maybe he's just got the magic touch.
What it means to be a creator
I asked a lot of creators the same question: What do people get wrong about your job that you wish you could correct them on? I got a lot of the same answer: Basically, it's harder than anyone thinks.
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I loved VidCon cocreator Hank Green's answer, because he took things in a different direction. He never said content creation was easy, but called attention to the fact that lots of people are creators in the same way that lots of people are musicians. Not everyone's Beyoncé, but that's OK, there can only be one.
Mainstream entertainment isn't the goal anymore
Given the success of creator MrBeast's Prime Video reality series Beast Games, I thought the possibility of breaking out into the mainstream might be the talk of the town at VidCon. I was wrong.
It's notoriously difficult for even the most famous online celebrities to become traditional ones, and after many years, people seem to understand that. At a panel called 'Blurred Lines: Rethinking the Relationship Between Traditional & Digitally Native Entertainment,' I was struck by something that Paul Telner, Viral Nation's head of programming, said. A former YouTuber himself, he now works with creators to develop their own original IP.
'We have an incredible roaster of talent that I really think — they are their own networks. They are their own Nickelodeon. They are their own CNN, they are their own MTV,' he said. 'I love to pair them with traditional [entertainment], because traditional, for the first time in my career, is starting to wake up to creators.'
In other words, old school media like TV and movies need internet celebrities. As Telner explained, there was a time when creators would prefer to produce their own shows, maintain creative control and do so without network feedback. Now, they have more power than ever in the business. Hollywood needs access to the massive audiences of creators, and creators benefit from the budgets and production of traditional entertainment.
Meet and greet philosophy
I'm always struck by how many fans are willing to pay and line up for long periods of time for a chance to briefly meet and take a photo with their favorite creators. It solidifies, to me, that YouTubers and TikTokers are truly the next class of A-list celebrities for younger generations.
Dream, the most popular Minecraft YouTuber in an already extremely popular online subculture, told me he doesn't like doing meet and greets because it's not enough time to truly make a connection with someone. On the other hand, SoupTimmy, a YouTuber who also has millions of subscribers but a more niche specialty, doesn't mind them. He posts videos of himself solving Rubik's cubes.
'I just treat them like people,' SoupTimmy told me, his fingers clutching a tiny Rubik's cube he wore on a chain around his neck. He didn't expand on that, and honestly, he didn't have to.
Get friendly with AI
I admit I spent most of VidCon avoiding the panels and sessions about AI like the plague, hoping to prioritize talking to creators about what actually aids their careers on a daily basis instead. I underestimated how much AI was a practical answer and not just something that big creators like MrBeast are trying to harness and share as another way to diversify their revenue.
Stephanie Segev, head of creative and content at the link sharing website Hopp by Wix, tells me after VidCon that she highly recommends that creators 'embrace AI beyond ChatGPT prompts.'
'The creators who want to get a head start in 2025 are the ones truly embracing AI at a more technical level,' she says. 'A side-hustler who leans into AI can operate like a full-timer; a full-timer can run like a small agency.'
If this career is really all about consistency, which I keep hearing, maybe leaning into the efficiency of AI isn't such a bad idea. Just don't get into producing AI slop — YouTube just announced it's cracking down on monetizing that.
YouTube is still king
After I got back from VidCon, I joined Slate's internet culture podcast ICYMI to talk about my experience. Cohosts Candice Lim, Kate Lindsay and I declared YouTube king of the social media sites and daydreamed about how we'd change the convention. Listen here.
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In the 2010s, millions of millennials made the lurch into adulthood, bringing with us our famed earnestness and idealism as well as our gently tasteful Millennial Aesthetic. Declared immortal in 2020, pronounced dead 2021, said Aesthetic washed out our homes and gathering spaces in dusty pink and sage green, with soft arch-shaped accents and big, groovy plants. It wiped away maximalist commercial culture to replace it with pleasing, Instagram-friendly sans serif fonts and ad campaigns starring models with freckles. A totem of this particular time: the undyed canvas Outdoor Voices tote, bearing its 'Technical Apparel for Recreation' tagline in a bubbly blue font. It bobbed around city blocks on the shoulders of women who sometimes also wore the brand's distinctive, pale-pastel-color-dipped leggings, or its tennis-adjacent Exercise Dress, or the baseball cap that bore its tail-waggingly cheery slogan, 'Doing Things.' 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Does More Freedom Equal Less Screen Time? Experts Think So
In a screen time battle, there are no winners. Either you give in and let your kids have way too much screen time, leading to increased mental health problems and other issues, or you strictly control their screens so much that they end up feeling ignored, misunderstood, and babied. It's a lose-lose situation. My oldest child is only 7, and it's already a struggle for my family. But what are we supposed to do? A new study asked experts how to actually lower screen time in kids, and the answer is something that feels completely counter-intuitive: give your kids more freedom. The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt, along with Lenore Skenazy and Zach Rausch, recently partnered with Harris Poll to survey 500 U.S. kids ages 8 to 12 about their phone habits and wrote about the results in The Atlantic. They found that the majority of kids already owned smartphones, with about half of 10-to-12-year-olds reporting that 'most' or 'all' of their friends use social media, despite the minimum age being 13. (Haidt advocates that kids don't have phones until high school and social media until they are 16.) More from SheKnows Gen Z Is Bragging About 'Getting Cracked' on TikTok - & It May Not Mean What You Think Additionally, about 75 percent of kids ages 9 to 12 play the online game Roblox, where they can interact with friends and internet strangers. However, most of the children said they aren't allowed to be in public at all without an adult. Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone and more than a quarter aren't allowed to play unsupervised in their front yard. When asked how they would prefer spending time with friends, the majority said unstructured play in real life. 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'If there's a way that a kid can walk a few blocks to a store and buy something, at age 8, they should be doing that,' Haidt previously told SheKnows. 'And the kids who go out and do something, they come back and they're jumping up and down. They are so excited. It has a huge impact on the kids, but the really important thing is that it has an impact on the parents, because we don't know what the right age is to let them out. We're afraid.' Over-policing of Parents Short of getting in a time-machine and raising kids in the '80s, it's hard to let your kids roam the neighborhood when no other kids are doing it — or parents are watching out the windows and calling the police if they see unsupervised kids out and about. Take this tragedy from a family in North Carolina. Jessica and Sameule Jenkins let their 7-year-old son Legend and 10-year-old son Brandon walk to the neighborhood Food Lion supermarket and Subway sandwich shop, which was less than 10 minutes away from their apartment. In an interview with The New York Times, the parents revealed they were hesitant. 'I really thought against it,' said Mr. Jenkins. He added that he and his wife are 'very protective of our kids.' But they compromised: the boys could walk their if they stayed on the phone with their parents the whole time. 'They made it there safe,' Mrs. Jenkins said. But on the way back, Legend stepped off a grass median and was tragically hit and killed by an SUV driver. Although the driver faced no charges for the incident, the parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter with bail set at $1.5 million each. 'As many parents now control their children's every move, transgressions by parents who take a freer approach — one that used to be normal — can result in criminal charges,' stated the outlet. 'Just because parents don't have their eyes on their kids every single second doesn't mean they are bad parents,' Lenore Skenazy, who chronicles such cases as president of Let Grow, which advocates for more childhood freedom, along with Jonathan Haidt, told the outlet. 'We're blaming these parents, but they've done everything as good as they can for 10 years, and then something terrible happens.' When parents do let kids have more freedom, everyone benefits. How Parents Can Help Screen Addiction A March 2025 Common Sense Media report found that by the time kids are 2 years old, 40 percent have their own tablet. By age 8, nearly 1 in 4 kids have their own cell phone. Overall, 51 percent of children age 8 and younger have some sort of mobile device. And kids ages 5-8 spend about three and a half hours daily on screens. Other studies have shown that kids are addicted to their screens, which interferes with schoolwork, relationships, and life because they only want to be on their devices. Psychologist and author Dr. Becky Kennedy (known as 'Dr. Becky') previously talked to SheKnows about kids and screen time. She reminded us that we have to think about both short- and long-term needs for our kids. 'Sometimes short-term needs are, 'I need my kid to be fully occupied for an amount of time, so I can fill-in-the-blank: decompress, cook, answer emails, work out, have time to myself,' whatever it is. I totally understand this!' she told us. Long term needs might be: ''I want my kid to be able to access their own creativity and turn that creativity into action. I want my kid to learn to be bored, and to wait, and to know that that's part of human existence. I want my kid to learn that hard work and effort is what leads to good feelings, as opposed to only mindlessness and low effort leading to good, exciting feelings.'' '[I]t's not a way of saying long term needs should always trump short term needs,' Dr. Becky clarified. 'It's a way of saying we just need to think about them both.' No one is saying kids can never watch cartoons or play iPad games on a long car trip. But what experts are suggesting is that we also think about how we want to raise our kids to prepare them for the future. Teaching them how to explore and entertain themselves when they're bored. Help them gain skills to be independent and work hard at what they want. And it starts with loosening the leash and giving them a little more freedom. It's like what Clive previously told us. 'I don't know if being on my phone makes me unhappy,' the teen shared. 'But I'm 100 percent sure that when I'm really happy — like during the summer when I have things to do and I'm in my best place — I don't want to be on my phone.' 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