VidCon is leaving Anaheim after 16 years in Southern California, ending a long association between the creator-focused gathering and the city that hosted its flagship event. Its next chapter will be under a new name: VidCon x LIONS Creators.

The change follows a merger of VidCon with LIONS’ creator-focused North American events. Both businesses are owned by Informa, the U.K.-based events, digital services and academic research company. LIONS is also responsible for the Cannes Lions marketing festival, placing VidCon more directly inside an organization built around advertising, creativity and marketing effectiveness.

The first VidCon x LIONS Creators event is slated for Nashville in 2027. It will be part of the Insight to Impact Festival, LIONS’ North American platform. That festival debuts in Denver in October 2026 before moving to Nashville the following year. VidCon x LIONS Creators is also expected to have a presence at Cannes Lions in June 2027, although additional programming details have not yet been announced.

A venue change and a change in what VidCon represents

The move is more than a relocation. VidCon was founded in 2010 by John and Hank Green and became a real-world meeting point for creators, fans, brands and industry figures orbiting online video and digital culture. Informa’s plan connects that community to a broader business-facing marketing platform.

That does not, on the available information, spell out the eventual format of the Nashville event. There is no confirmed schedule, ticket structure, guest list or breakdown of programming. But the merger clearly identifies a different organizational frame: VidCon will operate alongside research, content-marketing and creative-effectiveness programming rather than as a standalone flagship gathering in Anaheim.

For people who follow digital entertainment, that distinction matters. Creator events have often needed to balance several groups with different priorities. Fans want moments of community and access to the people whose work they watch. Creators seek audiences, collaborations and viable career opportunities. Brands and agencies look for partnerships that reach viewers without feeling disconnected from the culture. The VidCon x LIONS Creators concept is expressly designed around bringing those interests into closer contact.

What Insight to Impact brings together

Insight to Impact combines Informa’s TMRE: The Market Research Event and Content Marketing World with expertise from LIONS brands including WARC, Contagious and Effie. The stated objective is to connect consumer understanding, marketing effectiveness and creativity for the North American market.

Those terms can sound abstract, so it is worth unpacking them. Consumer understanding refers to research into what audiences want, do and respond to. Marketing effectiveness concerns whether a campaign produces meaningful results, rather than simply appearing busy or generating attention. Creativity is the work itself: the ideas, stories, formats and execution that give a campaign a chance to connect with people.

Adding VidCon to that mix puts creators in the middle of a conversation that is often held between marketers, agencies and research specialists. LIONS has described creators as increasingly central to both cultural production and brand-audience connections. Its stated goal for the combined platform is to help convert cultural influence into commercial outcomes.

That language deserves a careful reading. “Commercial outcomes” does not necessarily mean any one arrangement, revenue model or campaign type; none has been specified. It does indicate that the newly combined event will make business development and creator-brand partnerships a central part of its identity. For established creators, that could mean a more direct route to industry decision-makers. For newer creators, it may put career-building discussions alongside the fan and community side that defined VidCon’s original appeal.

From independent gathering to Informa platform

VidCon’s corporate journey explains why this consolidation is possible. The event was founded by the Green brothers in 2010, acquired by Viacom in 2018 and then sold by Paramount Global, Viacom’s successor company, to Informa in September 2024.

The current transition does not erase VidCon’s history, but it does situate it within a larger events network. Informa is folding VidCon into its North America business as part of a wider effort to evolve LIONS’ global model across North America, Asia Pacific and the Middle East and North Africa. The company says that work is intended to make the global industry more accessible throughout the year.

For the creator economy, a term used for the work and businesses built around individual online creators, a year-round network can be significant. A creator’s work may be public and always online, but professional networking often remains concentrated around a handful of physical events. The proposed LIONS structure suggests more recurring points of contact between creators and the marketing business, extending beyond a single annual convention.

There is an important limit to the announcement, however. It establishes the strategic direction and the first locations, not a guarantee of how successfully the old VidCon atmosphere will translate to its new setting. Anaheim’s departure may be especially meaningful for people whose relationship with VidCon was rooted in a particular place and annual routine. Nashville will need to become its own home for a changed event rather than simply inheriting that history.

Why the fan element remains important

VidCon’s leadership has emphasized that its core mission remains bringing emerging and established creators together with fans, brands and industry leaders to celebrate digital culture in person. That framing is important because a creator conference can lose something distinctive if it becomes only a trade event.

Fans are not merely an audience segment in this context. They are the communities that give online work momentum, spread it, critique it and support it over time. Creators likewise do not function only as distribution channels for campaigns. Their work can involve a personal style, a specific community and an audience relationship that brands cannot simply reproduce through a conventional advertisement.

The practical challenge for VidCon x LIONS Creators will be to retain space for that human side while expanding its professional and commercial utility. The company’s description of opportunities for creators to build careers and for brands to create authentic partnerships acknowledges that tension. Authenticity, in this setting, means a partnership that suits a creator’s audience and voice rather than treating that audience as a generic block of impressions.

Whether the event achieves that balance will depend on future programming choices that have not yet been disclosed. Attendees will likely want clarity on who each portion of the event is for, how fan experiences fit with industry sessions, and whether emerging creators can participate meaningfully alongside larger marketing organizations. Those are open questions, not promises established by the merger announcement.

The broader industry signal

The decision nevertheless sends a clear signal about where creator work sits in the entertainment and marketing landscape. Digital creators are no longer being treated as a separate side stage to campaigns and media strategy. LIONS’ leadership describes them as central to culture-making and to the ways brands reach audiences.

That intersects with conversations familiar to gaming and online-entertainment communities, where the relationship among studios, audiences, streamers, video makers and social platforms can affect how a project is discovered and discussed. For another example of how industry planning and audience-facing entertainment coverage often overlap, see this gaming-industry update on Treyarch’s next steps.

VidCon x LIONS Creators will not be defined solely by that business context. It carries a 2010-founded event’s community legacy into a marketing organization whose flagship global gathering is Cannes Lions. Still, the merger makes the priority plain: build a creator platform with greater global reach, connect creators more directly with brands and industry institutions, and position those relationships as a durable part of the marketing ecosystem.

For now, the concrete roadmap is short but consequential. Insight to Impact begins in Denver in October 2026. Nashville hosts the first VidCon x LIONS Creators event in 2027. Cannes Lions will feature a VidCon x LIONS Creators presence in June 2027. The finer details remain to be revealed, but the Anaheim chapter is closing and VidCon’s next version is being built as part of a much larger creator-business network.