🔴 Creator Spotlight at the Webbys

If a core promise of the creator economy was easy distribution without gatekeepers, should anyone give a damn about creator awards?

This year was the 29th edition of The Webby Awards, the Oscars of internet culture. It’s also their first season with dedicated categories for creators. I interviewed Webby Media Group’s new executive director last month, went to the award ceremony on Monday for a scene report, and spent the week thinking about the role awards like this play in the creator economy.

In this issue:

• 🗺️ Choose your own adventure or read it all:

  • Read just the orange text for my scene report

  • Read just the black text for a classic Spotlight report

• 🔐 Capital is a gate; content is a key

• 🧠 How to win a Webby Award

— Francis Zierer, Editor

• A quick Reel and an easy lesson: 5 simple shots to tell a story (Instagram)

• We interviewed Brazil’s top podcaster this week (Creator Spotlight)

• A fun new website that makes me nostalgic for old websites (Clone)

14 websites

It’s not often I find myself in New York’s financial district.

This past Monday night, I put on a suit, took the subway to the bottom of Manhattan, gave my name to security, and entered the cavernous Cipriani Wall Street hall to attend the 29th Annual Webby Awards.

Did the internet kill the gatekeeper? No. A few may have fallen, but even as we who stood staring through the wrong side of the gate flooded through, we met new gates. Every income bracket is a gate.

Awards — be they the Oscars, Webbys, Tonys, Pulitzers, or the Westminster Dog Show — have no claim to perfection. I like award shows; I watched the entirety of the Oscars broadcast this year. They measure the taste of the tastemakers; by whom they choose to honor, they suggest the shape of any kept gate. They’re important for posterity, for arguing about, for benchmarking.

Tray-passed hors d'oeuvres. I took a lamb chop, dipped it in the mustard. Had a glass of white wine. Tuxedos and cocktail dresses, here and there a bolder choice. Comedian Chris Klemens, the People’s Voice winner for Individual Creator, Comedy, waited next to me at the bar, wearing four shoes and four arms.

The first edition of the Webby Awards was held in February 1997 in San Francisco, with only 14 categories focused purely on websites — the Internet Movie Database (you know it as IMDb) won for Movie and Film.

There were 411 categories this year, though winners, just like at the first ceremony, have to limit their acceptance speech to five words.

The 29th Annual Webby Awards is the first time they’ve had categories specifically dedicated to creators. When I interviewed Jesse Feister in April, who joined Webby Media Group as Executive Director earlier this year, I asked him why this was the year: “The actual format of being a creator has reached a peak where it makes sense to define and clarify what excellence is […] in this space.”

• 11 Creator Excellence awards, i.e.:

  • Best Community Engagement

  • Best Series

  • Most Viral

• 15 Individual Creator awards, i.e.:

  • Art, Culture & Music

  • Fashion & Beauty

  • Social Impact

The main 411 awards are really 822 awards; there are two voting bodies.

The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) is a body of over 3,000 media, tech, and culture luminaries; their members select a formal Webby winner for each category from those submitted, as well as up to five nominations in each category to be voted on by anyone on the internet — the People’s Voice award.

This two-award structure is crucial given that the Webbys seek to celebrate “the best of the internet” each year. It acknowledges that a formal body — gatekeepers — needs a democratized counter-voice.

Of course, open internet polls are a game to be won. Remember Boaty McBoatface?

We need a unified definition of “creator”

By the time I got to my table, appetizers had already hit the tables, ferried by an army of white-jacketed waiters — each place set with a ball of mozzarella surrounded by variously colored tomato wedges.

To my left, the contingent from Serviceplan Germany, winners of the Special Achievement Award for Agency of the Year, took home 15 wins, 4 nominees, and 3 honorees.

To my right, a member of the Sam’s Club User Experience team. His team won a People’s Voice for Best User Experience: AI Apps and Experiences Features.

Ilana Glazer from Broad City hosted. She introduced the theme for the night and the year: “All good.” This was an optimistic room. The crowd erupted for Jools Lebron of “Very mindful, very demure” fame. The loudest applause and only standing ovation of the night came later, for Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

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How does the organization define creators? This is how they define the creator category: “The Webby Awards honors outstanding content made exclusively for social platforms by Creators and Influencers that have a highly-engaged audience of followers.”

The categories blurred at times. There were a lot of awards. The creator category was the smallest this year, with 22 awards.

• 5 creator categories saw the same nominee win both the formal Webby and the People’s Voice.

• That’s 23% — the average across categories was 27%.

• The most significant award overlap occurred in the Social category — 38% of the 63 winners won both award types.

One winner (and overlap) I found odd: Shannon Sharpe won for Best Creator, Sports — and one of his shows, Club Shay Shay, also won both the People’s Voice and formal Webby in the Podcast category for “Best Creator or Influencer Series.” I wouldn’t call Sharpe a creator, and I wouldn’t call the Kelce brothers creators for the same reason. Both have popular podcasts; both are already wealthy and famous from their NFL careers.

This taught me something new about how I define “creator.” While I believe creators can become celebrities, I don’t believe traditional celebrities can become creators or should be honored as such; there’s an important categorical, status-based difference; it’s not just about the format of the media they’re putting out.

(I’m willing to be proven wrong on that point, though; drop a comment on this post if you disagree.)

Jesse wrote a LinkedIn post this week I found illustrative of this point: “The distribution of opportunity is shifting. And to me, that’s one of the most inspiring and genuinely good things about the Internet and technology.”

This is core to what it means to be a creator, and this is the reason I write and talk so much about the definition of the term “creator” — there’s no unified definition. And when a voting body like the IADAS comes together and decides who gets a Best Creator award, they need a unified definition.

On the Business of Creators podcast, Jesse gave a succinct definition of the term creator: “the person creating the content is core to what the audience is consuming and how they engage with it.” Again, he stressed that this definition is subject to change.

He’s right. I’d add that a creator is also defined by at least partial ownership of their brand or project, either by working independently from a company or having a scalable revenue share built into their contract. This entrepreneurial incentive is a definitive aspect of the creator economy.

I was pleased to see dedicated creator awards, and I thought this year’s were generally well-distributed. One place I took issue: the focus was squarely on video; every creator winner was video-first.

I don’t believe “creator” is limited to video, as it was here, and I’d like to see categories for written content added next year. There are a few newsletter awards, but they’re under the Websites & Mobile awards category.

Capital is a gate

Halfway through the evening, we broke for dinner. Roasted chicken in a silky sauce; neat, lightly crisped potato cakes; little bundles of green beans. Chocolate cake for dessert. I took a chamomile tea.

After the break, Sean Evans of Hot Ones introduced Amelia Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date. She won the Webby Special Achievement “for redefining the celebrity interview” and “her singular voice as a host, producer, and entrepreneur in the digital age.”

Amelia’s is precisely the type of creator media story I like to see the Webbys celebrate; a decade-long path from indie interviewer to full-on new media entrepreneur, successful on her own terms.

Full disclosure. Money has not changed hands between Creator Spotlight and Webby Media Group, but we collaborated multiple times over the last year. They promoted Creator Spotlight in one of their newsletters for an award submission promotion in this newsletter. I interviewed Jesse for our podcast, and I received a free invite to the ceremony.

I cannot write about the Webbys without mentioning the costs of submitting work, attending the ceremony, and obtaining a trophy. This isn’t unique to the Webbys; nearly every major awards show in the culture industries has submission and other fees.

I bring this up only to add another layer to the Webby Awards’ definition of “creator.” It includes an implicit clause: the creator must be able to justify the cost of submitting their work; the creator’s project must be viable as a business.

• $90–$625 per submission (variable depending on what category you’re submitting in and when in the application window you submit)

• $795 for a ticket to attend the ceremony and afterparty (maximum 4 per winner)*

• $575 for a trophy*

  • *Winners are comped one ticket and one trophy; additional tickets and trophies come at these costs

Fees like this are just another line item for the agencies and companies who collect most of the awards; they’re more significant investments for creators, especially those indie creators without a company or agency backing them.

Partnerships folks at creator platforms, take note — you might run a campaign next year covering these fees for creators on your platform.

For one of the final awards of the night, Ice T presented Snoop Dogg’s Special Achievement Entrepreneur of the Year, “for expanding the playbook for how creatives can harness entrepreneurship to amplify their influence. Snoop swooped in to listen to the speech, sitting at an empty seat at my table; phones appeared in hands, selfies appeared on phones.

This is a key feature of the Webbys — how traditional celebrity, behind-the-scenes movers, and internet fame mix, both on the awards list and in the room. Slices of the internet, for an evening, cohere in a real place.

Brand of the year went to Google. Robert Wong, co-founder of Google Creative Labs, broke the five-word rule with his acceptance speech: “AI is cool, but people are cooler.”

How to win a Webby

Winning a Webby isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s simple enough.

1. Browse the list of award categories

2. Pick 1–3 that best describe the type of work you do

3. Study the nominees this year (and in recent years, if available); your bare minimum assignment is to make something that surpasses them (in form, innovation, originality, etc.)

4. Produce the work

   1. Build in content capital if you don’t think you have enough already. Involve creators or others with sizable social followings in the project.

5. Submit it (submissions open in September)

   1. Build a strategy for if you make it to People’s Voice voting.

   2. If you’ve made it to People’s Voice voting, campaign every day until voting ends. Bring your audience along for the ride. Make them feel like they’re part of it. Pull out all your stops.

Content capital. It’s a way to refer to the size of one’s online audience and how engaged that audience is. Before Creator Spotlight, I worked for a company called Air. My former colleagues won a People’s Voice award this year — the work they produced got them there, but the way they leveraged content capital clinched the prize.

The Rizzler took the stage (alongside his father) to accept his award, programmed alongside other creators, but this was not one of the new creator awards — it was for Social Video under the Advertising, Media, & PR category.

Air’s Head of Content, Ariel Rubin, had already won a Webby for his work at the International Committee of the Red Cross. When I worked with him at Air, he often said his goal with any given campaign we built was to win another Webby; marketing is a competition, and the Webbys represent a premiere league.

Last year, a project I’d worked on with Air made it to honoree; this year, Air’s entry won on content capital; if People’s Voice is a game, this is how it’s played.

The numbers behind this year’s record-turnout People’s Voice voting tell a clear story about how voting works:

• Over 3.6 million votes were cast this year by …

• Over 750,000 individuals voted …

• Meaning each individual cast 4.8 votes on average

• For around 2,055* total nominees across 411 categories.

  • *There were “nearly 13,000 entries” total this year, but only 411 specific awards were available for People’s Voice voting. Assuming each category had 5 entries (I could not confirm this; some may have had fewer), that’s 2,055 total nominees.

Three well-known creators besides Rizzler were involved in this video. Their Instagram following alone is at least 3.2 million, tallying up each creator’s primary account. All four accounts tallied in that number constantly promoted the People’s Voice voting during the three-week voting period.

@itztherizzler

Rizzing up the Webby’s‼️🤫🤔 @Air @The Webby Awards #therizzler #webbys #awards #rizzapproved

How do you win a People’s Voice award for a marketing campaign? More marketing. The same applies to any nominee, especially those in the creator category. That the average voter only casts 4.8 votes suggests a high percentage of voters are going to the site to vote only for specific nominees before clicking away.

Content capital is not financial capital, but if the latter is a gate, the former is a key.

Besides personal satisfaction, the point of winning awards is legitimacy and the ability to broadcast it.

An award like the Webbys has a legitimizing function, but is receiving a Webby the peak for creators? That’s for you to decide, but it’s certainly one mountain in the range.

Walton Goggins took home Actor of the Year. Fellow actor Justin Theroux presented the award, praising Goggins for his “hat-trick” of shows — Fallout, The White Lotus, and Righteous Gemstones — and his charismatic appearance on Architectural Digest’s home-tour YouTube series. An 8,000 square-foot home, stuffed with tasteful art, on 125 acres in Upstate New York, by the way.

Goggins, like any other Webby winner, could only share five words: “If it happens, be grateful.”

Monday’s ceremony wrapped up at 10 p.m. I didn’t make it uptown for the afterparty; I had a podcast to record in the morning. Before I left, I congratulated my old colleagues and, like Questlove and seemingly every other attendee, took a photo with the Rizzler, if only to remember: in 2025, I saw the internet IRL.