On the last Thursday of May, 500 selected creators and creator-side teams walked onto the FOX Studio Lot in Los Angeles. The second Press Publish conference, hosted by the podcast duo Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, took place on the same lot where FOX's TV series are filmed. It was a one-day programme with a single stage, and it sold out before the speakers were announced. Sponsors included YouTube, Google Gemini, Adobe, Red Bull and Canon.
Alongside Colin and Samir, the stage featured Johnny Harris, Alessandra Catanese (CEO of Smosh), Michelle Khare, Billy Parks from FOX Creator Studios and Kara McCloud from the MrBeast team. The programme followed one theme, which the event named itself. Creators and Hollywood work in the same entertainment system, sit in neighbouring chairs and share the same budgets.
Among the audience was Brandon Smithwrick, former content director at Kickstarter, previously a social and publishing strategist at Ralph Lauren and a senior content strategist at Squarespace. Today he runs the Content to Commas newsletter and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree in Marketing & Advertising for 2024. The day after the conference he published a LinkedIn post summarising five observations he took from the stage. His post offers a concrete framework, not a marketing impression.
Owned audience off the platform as the primary asset
Smithwrick's first observation is structural. Followers on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok belong to the platform, not to the creator. Social is the top of the funnel. The real asset that can be sold, moved to another platform or relied on when an algorithm changes is an owned audience off the platform: a newsletter, a podcast with its own feed, or a website with an email base.
This framework is not new for Press Publish. The Publish Press, the newsletter of Colin and Samir, is built on the same premise. The conference is its physical extension. What is new is its explicit naming on the main stage, a stage funded by YouTube and Google. The platform itself has acknowledged that it cannot be the only link between a creator and their audience if a creator business is to survive algorithmic change.
For a brand director at a company that works with creators on sponsored content, this framework implies a concrete filter when contracting. It makes sense to choose a creator who has both followers on a platform and an email base they manage themselves. Without a second channel, every campaign is one-off and exposed to the risk that the platform changes its rules between the brief and publication.
35M followers and $2,000 in sales. Audience and buyer are not the same people.
Smithwrick gave an example without naming anyone. A creator with 35 million followers launched a product and sold it for $2,000. Audience size is not the same as buyer pool. The alignment between what a creator does and what they sell determines conversion more than the size of the audience.
This pattern recurs in creator economy reports. Goldman Sachs estimates the creator economy at $480 billion by 2027, but growth is not even across creators. The creators who monetise best are those whose audience was built around a specific interest rather than around a personality.
For a brand considering a partnership with a high-reach creator, this information is a warning. Reach metrics (followers, impressions) are easy to measure. Alignment with purchase intent is not. A creator with 100,000 followers focused on a specific vertical (beauty, finance, food) often converts better than a creator with five million general entertainment viewers. The Press Publish stage confirmed this maths with an example that reversed the hierarchy of reach metrics.
Markiplier on Iron Lung. Doubt as a working condition.
Markiplier (Mark Fischbach), a gaming YouTuber with over 38 million subscribers, released the horror film Iron Lung on 30 January 2026. He wrote, directed and starred in it himself. The film was made on a production budget of $3 million and by its third week of release had earned $51 million globally, including $41 million in the domestic market and $10 million internationally, across 4,161 cinemas.
Markiplier financed the film himself and arranged bookings through Centurion Film Service. His fans pressed local cinemas, which then put the film on screen. Markiplier keeps half of the global box office. Trade press estimates that Iron Lung reached more than seventeen times its budget, an exceptional figure in the horror category.
Smithwrick's interpretation from the stage was that Markiplier enters every YouTube project with doubt. According to The Hollywood Reporter, studio executives had turned the project down in advance, arguing that it would not be a phenomenon on the level of Taylor Swift's concert film. Iron Lung disproved that assumption. For the European context, this example reads as follows: a creator with their own distribution, their own marketing channel and capital can enter a category that the traditional film industry considers closed.
Michelle Khare on format. Three episodes instead of seven.
Michelle Khare, host and producer of the YouTube series Challenge Accepted, described on the Press Publish stage the format decision for one of her recent multi-part projects. She tested a 90-minute one-off cut and a seven-episode series. The final format was three parts. According to Khare, the decision did not come from algorithmic thinking about watch time, but from how many episodes the story actually needs.
On Challenge Accepted, Khare works as writer, producer, director and presenter. Variety reported in 2025 that she spends up to a year preparing a single episode. Her feature-length episode, 90 Day Black Belt from the Challenge Accepted series, premiered at the Montclair Film Festival, and Khare successfully entered it for the Primetime Emmy Awards in the category Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special.
A format decision made against algorithmic metrics is rare in the YouTube editorial documentary category. Creators in this segment usually adjust format according to analytics data, not according to the storyteller's judgement. Khare described the reverse logic on stage: data as an input, not as the referee. For brands sponsoring multi-part series, this approach is more costly, but it produces content with a longer life in the archive.
Timely versus timeless as a choice for each piece
Smithwrick's fourth observation was the shortest. Every piece of content should be either timely (tied to a current moment, news cycle or trend) or timeless (evergreen, with archival value). According to the Press Publish stage, mixing the two categories produces content that misses the current moment and fails to hold up as a reference.
For a media brand in Europe, this choice requires editorial discipline. A newsletter that wants growth from the current moment does timely work. A newsletter that wants to become a reference does timeless work. Trying both modes in the same issue usually loses in both categories.
What the European side sees
Press Publish LA is an American event with American economic logic. Its sponsors are YouTube and Google Gemini, the location is the FOX Studio Lot, and the audience is made up mostly of creators from the English-speaking market. European brand directors do not have an identical comparison.
The closest European analogue is the OMR Festival in Hamburg, which attracted over 70,000 visitors in 2026 and took place on 5 and 6 May. OMR is significantly larger and broader, covering not only creators but online marketing as a whole. Press Publish, by contrast, is tightly curated. 500 people, one track, one theme.
Competition on the American side is growing. VidCon Anaheim takes place from 25 to 27 June 2026 and has been owned by FAN EXPO (Informa) since August 2024, after its sale by Paramount Global. VidCon's profile remains fan-first, not creator-business-first. Creator Economy Live East takes place on 28 and 29 July 2026 at the New York Marriott Marquis and targets the brand side of creator partnerships, not the creators themselves. Press Publish filled a gap for a conference aimed at creators as business operators, not at fans and not at the brand side.
For a brand director in Europe, the observations from Los Angeles are practically transferable to a brief. A filter for owned audience when selecting creators (newsletter, website, podcast feed) shows which creators can weather an algorithm change. Alignment between creator and product, tested before reach metrics are measured, decides whether a campaign converts or merely generates impressions. Editorial discipline around timely versus timeless extends the life of sponsored content in the archive.
Markiplier's Iron Lung and Khare's Challenge Accepted show that creators with their own distribution and their own storytelling judgement are entering categories that until now belonged to studios and television productions. The Press Publish stage named this shift as a working reality.
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