Influencer
Jenny Hoyos Grew Up Dreaming About VidCon and Now She Returns With a Strategy She Is Done Keeping to Herself
Before Jenny Hoyos had millions of subscribers, she was close to walking away. Her videos were not gaining traction, posting alone was eroding her motivation, and she had no community around the work. Then she attended a small in-person creator event, met people who shared her obsession, and within months, she and one early collaborator both hit 100,000 subscribers within 24 hours of each other. That room, she says, changed the entire trajectory.
Jenny is one of short-form video’s most-watched creators, with more than 11 million YouTube subscribers and a view count built largely on the premise that going viral has less to do with production budget than with understanding what drives human attention. A featured creator at VidCon Anaheim for 2026 and a featured speaker for multiple years running, she arrives this June with a Creator Track session on viral strategy, an appearance in the Creator Pickleball Tour, and a fan meet and greet.
The most consequential thing she is bringing to Anaheim is not the credentials, but a strategy she says has been gatekept by those currently using it, responsible for driving over a billion views in a single month.
“A lot of people who are doing panels are consultants, not creators,” she says. “I’m a creator first who’s also helping creators. I’m actually walking the walk.”
From Fan to Featured Creator
Jenny’s arc with VidCon mirrors her career trajectory closely. She wanted to attend as a fan, drawn by the same pull that moves any viewer toward the creators they watch. “When I was a kid and when I wanted to go, it was very much just to meet them and become friends with them,” she says. The second time she went, she was a featured creator. The frame had changed entirely.
That shift carries its own texture. Walking the main floor as a recognized creator means different stakes now. Jenny mentions being quietly redirected once when spontaneous crowd formation drew attention from event staff, an episode she describes without complaint. “I’m not going to lie, it’s fun to me,” she says.
Now, the event serves different purposes. Collaborations, peer exchange, and real relationships with creators navigating the same pressures have replaced the fan-era motivations. She sees VidCon moving in that direction more broadly. “I think it’s going to be a place for creatives,” she says of its future. “Not even a place for fans to meet their favorite creators.”
That transition has practical weight for those who benefit from attending. Sessions organized around specific growth challenges pull people with aligned ambitions into the same rooms. On her own schedule this year, Jenny is drawn to a session by the creator Anthpo (Anthony Po), whose approach to virality she describes as idea-driven rather than personality-dependent. “If you replace him with someone else and still use the same ideas, expertise and tactics, those videos would still go viral,” she says. Being able to combine a strong personal brand with platform strategy, she adds, is “deadly.”
The Talk She Was Still Writing When We Spoke
The session Jenny is bringing to the Creator Track, “How to 10x Your Views Overnight,” is less a motivational talk than a tactical breakdown of idea selection and human psychology. She plans to teach creators how to identify which concepts will go viral before a single frame is shot, without spending more time or money.
Her central argument: the effort behind a video and its eventual performance are far more weakly linked than most creators assume. “There are ideas that you can spend your entire week making this video,” she says. “But then there are also ideas that can go just as viral with you staying in your room and recording in five minutes.” The variable is not effort. It is understanding what captures human attention.
She is direct about what makes the session unusual. “A lot of people are going to say a lot of the same things at VidCon,” she says. “What I’m going to talk about is a completely different strategy than what everyone else is doing, but it has gotten me over a billion views every month.” The information, she notes, is currently gatekept among those already using it.
That changes at Anaheim.
The Month Everything Broke
The strategy Jenny is presenting came directly out of a period she describes as a rude awakening. A year ago, she was posting once a week and averaging around 10 million views per video. The numbers looked strong. The underlying audience reality was not.
When she shifted to posting more frequently, the view counts collapsed. “I went from one month getting 10 million views every video to the next month having 10k views a video,” she says. The diagnosis was uncomfortable. Viral reach had masked a thin relationship with her actual viewers. “I only had 10,000 people who actually wanted to watch me.”
Two months of restructuring followed, ones Jenny calls brutal. Her monthly view counts dropped from 100 million to 50 million, then rebounded sharply. “The next month it was a billion,” she says, approximately 900 million on YouTube alone.
The formula she is bringing to VidCon emerged from the specific failure that made that recovery possible.
Quality Quantity Is Not Optional Anymore
The broader argument Jenny makes about the current state of creator strategy is one that most people in the industry are reluctant to say plainly. She says it plainly.
“For the longest time, quality over quantity has been the way to succeed,” she says. “But at this time it’s quality quantity.” Both, simultaneously, at volume. She is posting 20 videos per day. Others are posting 100. The incentive structure compounds. “The people who get bigger make more money, and when they make more money, they get bigger teams.”
For creators who have not yet begun building volume, the direction is clear: start now, before the bar rises further.
Her reasoning extends to how audience relationships actually form. “The way that relationships are built is time spent with people,” she says. Short-form content is not incompatible with a deep viewer connection. It requires volume to get there. “If we only have 30 to 60 seconds, you’d better be making 20 of those 60-second videos a day.”
What She Came to Exchange
Jenny is arriving in Anaheim in the middle of a transition. Having spent years mastering short-form virality, she is now focused on converting that reach into long-form YouTube content, a format with different audience dynamics and a different creative logic. Part of what she is looking to take from this VidCon is peer knowledge from creators who built their audiences from the opposite direction.
“I know how to get that big reach,” she says. “I would love to share my expertise on how I do that through short form, and in exchange for learning how to properly do long form.” That reciprocity defines how she thinks about the event now: what she brings, what she receives, what relationships she leaves with.
The near-quit that preceded everything is the most honest case she makes for why in-person events still matter. The creator community that stopped her from quitting was not assembled online. It was found in person, through proximity and shared ambition. “When I go to these creator events, this is where I meet the most important people in my life,” she says. “All of my closest friends right now are creators.” If she had never started making videos, she says, she would have zero friends.
For the creator who comes to VidCon this year hoping to find something similar, her distillation of a career built on failure and recovery is the same principle that defines her content strategy: lose often, learn faster.
“Winners win because they lose more than losers,” Jenny says. “You have to keep failing to learn.”
VidCon returns to the Anaheim Convention Center from June 25–27, marking its 15th anniversary. More information is available here.
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