Creators should start event franchises

Building new ad inventory in the age of Generative AI

AI videos are probably going to take over our feeds. We may temporarily link arms and stand side by side with human creatives in our revolt against slop. But, on a long enough timeline, many will accept something synthetic in their hunt for a quick hit of entertainment.¹ There are already early signs of these revealed preferences: this AI monkey is allegedly making $400k a month from AdSense. This AI VTuber is able to fully interact with its chat. About 20% of YouTube’s feed² seems to already be AI “slop.”³ This is an existential threat for anyone who puts food on their table by trading the attention of an audience for brand deals. Creators should start building ad inventory that generative AI cannot compete on: defensible event franchises.⁴

Institutional media has had to swallow this bitter pill over and over again—ad dollars are amoral and will move to wherever attention is. After repeatedly having their business model pulled out from under them, institutions realized that media is often an amazing wrapper for different business models entirely: Semafor is trying to spin up a flagship event series to compete with Davos, the New York Times is a news front to a gaming company, Hearst has unlocked various B2B revenue lines. I suspect alternative media will have to eventually learn the same lessons in different ways. The abundance of brand deals post-COVID have meant that this hasn’t been necessary over the first decade of the creator economy, but it’s possible that it will be a hard lesson for the next.

Admittedly, saying that events are “in” feels spiritually similar to the tech industry rallying around “taste.” Virgin alert!!!! But it does feel like there’s a great corner of the internet that is increasingly packaging their events as a revolt against onlineness: CatGPT’s phoneless parties, GrownKid’s wrestling speed dating event, Offline Mag.⁵ But a single event in a silo is an art project. They can be meaningful and fun and necessary, but they’re not really a business model that you can bank your creative career on. The key for creators is to build these events into franchises: self sustaining business units that can exist beyond their founding talent. As the feed gets increasingly competitive, creators need to graduate from selling impressions to owning the context in which those impressions occur.⁶

Three considerations for a successful events franchise:

I. A concept that can exist beyond its founding talent

II. Media as a moat

III. Broadening the revenue mix

I. A concept that exists beyond the founding talent

An events franchise cannot have key man risk. The event needs the creator as a shortcut to escape velocity, but they themselves cannot become a ceiling for the event’s reach. KSI played a big role in starting his cross-over boxing league, but he no longer exists on most fight cards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most viewers don’t even realize it’s his league. At some point there should be fans who have a connection to the event who do not have a connection to the creator.

The concept does a lot of work here; the packaging for your core theme or idea. It’s the same thesis behind creator brands like Happy Dad (Nelk), Seek Discomfort (Yes Theory), or Nami Matcha (Ashley Alexander). They’ve all succeeded to varying degrees, but the underlying principle is the same. You articulate the central thread that runs through the creators work—YesTheory is about seeking discomfort, the Nelk Boys are alcoholics—and then create new IP around that. It still exists in the original creator’s universe, but the branding, naming, and social profiles live entirely separately. These then become independent properties that you can hire out or, if it calls for it, sell partially or entirely.

I don’t think that you need to bet the farm on creating a new category.⁷ Instead, I bet we’ll see a lot of creators reinventing existing flagship events with proven product-market fit, like MKBHD building a modern CES, or Colin & Samir building a modern Cannes Lions.

II. Media as a moat

Most mature events businesses have a moat around access. You can’t compete with the UFC unless you have a slate of equally compelling fighters. You can’t compete with Davos until you can convene the world’s most powerful people. This sort of competitive advantage is built over decades, and the way in which a creator builds it for themselves will depend on their content, audience, and central worldview. But in the meantime, knowing that a novel event idea can be copied at a moment’s notice, there’s a moat to be built around the event’s media. At the risk of sounding trite, creators intuitively understand content. Especially when a creator is competing against an existing legacy flagship event, they need to lean into that competitive advantage. The media around an events franchise should almost be treated like its own creator: What are some recognizable formats it can own? How might people build a relationship to the event’s media even without attending the event itself? How does this audience compound into an asset for the business? In a Generative AI world, these need to be direct relationships that aren’t intermediated by feeds.

A few event series with particularly repeatable content engines:

• Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short N’ Sweet” tour: There was a built-in moment in every event where she would do a new, uh, bedroom pose whenever she played her song “Juno.” It was a moment to look forward to at every event, and it would predictably go viral on socials afterwards almost every time.

• Red Neck Brawls: The fighter intros are just ridiculous.⁸

III. Broadening the revenue mix

Events businesses don’t win on ticket sales alone. At any given moment, a single UFC fight card is making money from: on-site sponsorships, streaming sponsorships, cable/streamer licensing, pay-per-view sales (pre-August 2025), merch sales, etc. I wonder what a creator-native version of that revenue mix would look like. Why couldn’t you livestream an event, sell on-screen banner ads like a traditional media setup (a la TBPN), and then run a subathon for remote viewers to pay to influence the event in real-time? It feels like there are a lot of precedents from the institutional events business that have yet to be recreated for the creator economy. A few specific revenue lines creators should experiment with:

Audience revenue

• Sponsorships: Could you work backwards from your ideal sponsor and build an event that aligns with their worldview? Most brand events just seem totally wack. A better parallel is something like Olivia Unplugged, an edutainment influencer that exclusively exists to spread Opal’s core philosophy around screen time. What could the “Olivia Unplugged” of events look like?

• Digital PPV: What part of your event is so compelling that it could be repackaged into a digital product? (e.g. subathon to influence the event in real-time, access to watching the event if you’re not physically able to be there, etc.)

• Data: This is sensitive, but how might you gate access to your attendees as a product for B2B customers? I’d imagine Brian Morrissey’s Media Mixer event is passing back access to its attendee list to Beehiiv, for example.

Attendance revenue

• VIP tickets: What’s the most exorbitant version of the event that you could offer to well-moneyed attendees? Meet-and-greet packages are lucrative but uninspiring.

• On-site merch/consumables: Creators are already doing a version of this with limited edition flavours or collectibles. How else might you stretch this for an events franchise?

• Concessions: Could you run your event at a venue during off-hours and take a cut of bar sales? Could you organize an actually scarce experience at your event, like a Nami Matcha pop-up, and take a cut of concessions?

IP revenue

• Licensing/Spin-offs: Is the event IP valuable enough that other businesses might want to pay to access it for their own purposes? Imagine Netflix licensing Dude Perfect’s documentary about their first tour, for example.

• Misc. B2B revenue: MKBHD’s version of CES would presumably make most of its money off booth rentals and technology certifications. What adjacent customers can you unlock outside of core attendees?

I don’t think it’s a particularly hot take to look at everything happening on the internet right now and feel an intense desire to focus on the real world. Events are obviously operationally intensive, and creators shouldn’t even think about them until they have solid footing elsewhere in their business: content-market fit, a clear audience identity, a rolodex of sponsors. But running towards operational intensity is the point. As the price of competing online approaches zero, you want to build a moat with a real cost of entry. Creators shouldn’t compete with Generative AI on its own game; they need to compete on games that they are structurally better equipped to win. When the robots come for IRL events we’re all fucked anyways <3

1. Could obviously caveat this into oblivion. This will play out in a nuanced way, and our best art will still be human-made, and surely we’ll have some signals of “artisanal human made art.” But that’s besides the point.

2. Funnily enough it seems like this study was conducted by a Generative AI company? The Guardian seems to have done some of their own analysis on the topic though, to similar findings.

3. I do think that “slop” will eventually be a misnomer—quality is subjective and relative!

4. Creators have long been in a race to build businesses that scale beyond themselves and their one-off brand deals: physical products, digital products, production companies, and more recently, software businesses. The rise of direct subscriptions is also adjacent to this same phenomenon. I suspect those will all continue to be great escape vehicles in the worst case scenario for generative AI. But I think event franchises are underdiscussed, and therefore an underpriced opportunity.

5. My #1 hater characteristic: I get rabid when I see an event going viral for a concept that I tried years ago. Phoneless parties…Wrestling themed parties…If someone hosts a writing event themed like a Japanese game show I will LOSE IT!!!!! Being too early is way worse than being too late. It’s like Michael Jackson believing that musical ideas were a divine gift—if he didn’t use them immediately, the collective unconscious would pass them to Prince.

6. Dude Perfect is a fantastic example of a creator business doing this at scale.

7. Airrack learned this from his “turn anything into pizza” CPG product. It was just too new of a category; retailers didn’t know where to stock it!

8. Referencing Sabrina Carpenter and Red Neck Brawls in the same list…name a mf with range like me man…