Allison Yazdian spent last week on a VidCon stage telling a room full of creators that an audience is not a business. Hours later, the Uscreen CEO was making the same case about her own company, the video membership platform that more than 13,000 creators have used to try to turn a following into something they actually own.
Allison had just wrapped a VidCon Creator Track panel on monetization, sharing the stage with Laura Edwards, co-founder of the syndication firm Wild Vision, and Robert Kaliati, president of Hammer Media. By her own informal count, about half the room had already diversified their revenue. The other half, including a father asking how to land his son’s channel’s first brand deal, had not.
“There’s zero gate at all for them to start being a content creator,” Allison says of that earlier group. “But then they start to realize, ‘How do I actually build something that’s sustainable, that I can own?’”
That question has defined her last two jobs. Allison became Uscreen’s chief executive in June 2025, succeeding founder PJ Taei, now executive chairman, after running creator growth at LTK, the affiliate shopping platform. Founded in 2014, Uscreen lets creators, coaches, and media companies across fitness, education, coaching, sports, and entertainment launch paid memberships and OTT channels instead of depending on a single platform’s algorithm. The company reports surpassing $1 billion in cumulative gross merchandise value to date.
Posting Builds an Audience, Not a Business
Allison’s first answer for creators still relying entirely on posting is the one she repeats on every panel: get an email address before anything else.
“A piece of advice I always give to content creators is, as quickly as possible, find a way to build a direct relationship with the audience,” she says. Even Uscreen’s entry-level package includes CRM tools for exactly that, letting creators collect contact information from day one.
The instinct is less about marketing than insurance: platforms hand creators reach at no cost, but little visibility into who is watching. “They don’t have direct access to it,” Allison says of creators who depend on the platform alone. “They don’t have the data around them.” She frames the owned relationship as additive, not oppositional: keep posting, and post more, since platform visibility still brings in new people. “You never want them to feel like you’re taking away from what’s already publicly available and free,” she says.
The harder part is getting creators to ask in the first place. “You can’t just say, ‘Hey everyone, give me your email address,'” she says, stressing that creators need to offer something of value before they ask for it.
Affiliate and Brand Deals Don’t Compound the Way Memberships Do
Allison’s clearest before-and-after comes from her own résumé. At LTK, a lifestyle influencer fielding DMs about where she bought a pair of Adidas Sambas could grab an affiliate link and earn a commission on every sale.
That model let creators monetize quickly, but left Allison with one takeaway. “Creators needed to continue to diversify because even affiliate and brand deals feel algorithmically dependent,” she says.
“Affiliate is sustainable because those links can live on forever,” she says. Brand deals don’t. “You may get a bunch of brand deals one month, but then you still have to go back and hunt,” she says.
Membership revenue depends on neither a brand’s budget cycle nor a platform’s distribution, Allison argues. She walks through the math she gives skeptical creators: a thousand members paying $20 a month, drawn from a sliver of even a modest following, adds up fast. “That’s $20,000 a month,” she says.
The dynamic plays out at a Uscreen customer: Hammer Media, where Allison’s fellow panelist Kaliati is president, built a membership around Caleb Hammer’s “Financial Audit,” a YouTube series with more than two billion lifetime views.
A Big Following Doesn’t Guarantee a Real Community
Allison draws a sharp line between fans who watch passively and members who would notice if a creator went quiet.
“I think active fandom is sort of what evolves into the community feel,” she says, arguing that creators with enormous reach would often fail if they tried to build a paid community around that same audience, “because it’s more passive.”
The difference comes down to what the content offers. A video that surfaces in a feed gets watched because it is there; content built around something specific, a workout plan, a financial framework, gives people a reason to seek it out. Allison says she regularly sees customers’ app communities post selfies, ask questions, and respond to each other unprompted.
That self-sustaining activity, not follower count, is what she treats as the real signal of a durable membership business. Uscreen has customers in the tens and hundreds of thousands operating at that level, suggesting scale matters less than whether an audience already behaves like a community before being asked to pay for one.
Losing the Platform Can Mean Losing the Business Overnight
The risk Allison keeps returning to is what happens when the platform a creator depends on disappears, changes its rules, or stops showing their content to anyone.
She points to the uncertainty around the potential TikTok ban, and to a more common version: account bans, shadow bans, and sudden algorithm shifts that cut a creator’s reach without warning. “I’ve seen it so many times,” she says, describing creators who go from earning steadily to earning nothing overnight.
Without a way to reach an audience outside the platform, there is no recovery option. “If your account gets shut down or the algorithm shifts and you’re not in their feeds, that’s it,” she says. “You can’t tell them where to find you.”
An owned destination, an email list, a branded app, or a membership site solves a narrower problem than most assume: it does not replace the platform or guarantee growth, but it guarantees a creator can still reach people who choose to follow them, even if the algorithm that connected them stops cooperating.
Speed Is the Enemy of a Sustainable Creator Business
Allison’s advice for creators building something durable is short and unglamorous. The first, covered above, is to own the audience relationship.
The second is to stay niche before going broad, speaking to that audience rather than rushing to generalize. The third is to lean on infrastructure that already exists rather than build an expensive internal team. “Build a village,” she says. “There are a lot of wonderful people in this industry who want to help, so you don’t need to build a huge team that costs a lot of money.”
What she will not offer is a shortcut. “Don’t go too fast,” she says. “There are no get-rich-quick schemes.” For creators hoping one viral moment will be enough, her answer is blunt: virality buys attention, not a business plan.
The Real Test Isn’t Becoming a Creator, It’s Becoming a Business
Uscreen’s own roadmap follows the same logic Allison gives creators. The company is building what she calls “an operating system for content creators to manage the sustainable revenue portion of their business,” adding CRM tools, analytics, and, increasingly, commerce.
“We have content creators where if you log into their app, you can actually go and shop their merch,” she says, describing storefronts now built into creator-branded apps.
That reflects a bet on where the wider market is heading. “I think at the end of the day, the future is going to be that every single entrepreneur, every single business person is going to be a content creator,” she says. The harder question runs the other direction: “Is every single content creator going to be a business?”
Allison connects that question to her renewed appetite for events like VidCon, which matter more, she argues, as creators’ working lives grow more mediated by algorithms and AI. “I think events like this matter more now than ever,” she says. “You see the kids running up to their favorite YouTuber, you see people dressing in costume aligned with their favorite content. That is so special.”
The clearest sign of a good VidCon, for her, was not the panel but the creators who came up afterward with specific questions. “We know that we’re helping the next generation of content creators,” she says. “It feels good.”
Cecilia Carloni, Interview Manager at Influence Weekly and writer for NetInfluencer. Coming from beautiful Argentina, Ceci has spent years chatting with big names in the influencer world, making friends and learning insider info along the way. When she’s not deep in interviews or writing, she's enjoying life with her two daughters. Ceci’s stories give a peek behind the curtain of influencer life, sharing the real and interesting tales from her many conversations with movers and shakers in the space.
Allison Yazdian spent last week on a VidCon stage telling a room full of creators that an audience is not a business. Hours later, the Uscreen CEO was making the same case about her own company, the video membership platform that more than 13,000 creators have used to try to turn a following into something they actually own.
Allison had just wrapped a VidCon Creator Track panel on monetization, sharing the stage with Laura Edwards, co-founder of the syndication firm Wild Vision, and Robert Kaliati, president of Hammer Media. By her own informal count, about half the room had already diversified their revenue. The other half, including a father asking how to land his son’s channel’s first brand deal, had not.
“There’s zero gate at all for them to start being a content creator,” Allison says of that earlier group. “But then they start to realize, ‘How do I actually build something that’s sustainable, that I can own?’”
That question has defined her last two jobs. Allison became Uscreen’s chief executive in June 2025, succeeding founder PJ Taei, now executive chairman, after running creator growth at LTK, the affiliate shopping platform. Founded in 2014, Uscreen lets creators, coaches, and media companies across fitness, education, coaching, sports, and entertainment launch paid memberships and OTT channels instead of depending on a single platform’s algorithm. The company reports surpassing $1 billion in cumulative gross merchandise value to date.
Posting Builds an Audience, Not a Business
Allison’s first answer for creators still relying entirely on posting is the one she repeats on every panel: get an email address before anything else.
“A piece of advice I always give to content creators is, as quickly as possible, find a way to build a direct relationship with the audience,” she says. Even Uscreen’s entry-level package includes CRM tools for exactly that, letting creators collect contact information from day one.
The instinct is less about marketing than insurance: platforms hand creators reach at no cost, but little visibility into who is watching. “They don’t have direct access to it,” Allison says of creators who depend on the platform alone. “They don’t have the data around them.” She frames the owned relationship as additive, not oppositional: keep posting, and post more, since platform visibility still brings in new people. “You never want them to feel like you’re taking away from what’s already publicly available and free,” she says.
The harder part is getting creators to ask in the first place. “You can’t just say, ‘Hey everyone, give me your email address,'” she says, stressing that creators need to offer something of value before they ask for it.
Affiliate and Brand Deals Don’t Compound the Way Memberships Do
Allison’s clearest before-and-after comes from her own résumé. At LTK, a lifestyle influencer fielding DMs about where she bought a pair of Adidas Sambas could grab an affiliate link and earn a commission on every sale.
That model let creators monetize quickly, but left Allison with one takeaway. “Creators needed to continue to diversify because even affiliate and brand deals feel algorithmically dependent,” she says.
“Affiliate is sustainable because those links can live on forever,” she says. Brand deals don’t. “You may get a bunch of brand deals one month, but then you still have to go back and hunt,” she says.
Membership revenue depends on neither a brand’s budget cycle nor a platform’s distribution, Allison argues. She walks through the math she gives skeptical creators: a thousand members paying $20 a month, drawn from a sliver of even a modest following, adds up fast. “That’s $20,000 a month,” she says.
The dynamic plays out at a Uscreen customer: Hammer Media, where Allison’s fellow panelist Kaliati is president, built a membership around Caleb Hammer’s “Financial Audit,” a YouTube series with more than two billion lifetime views.
A Big Following Doesn’t Guarantee a Real Community
Allison draws a sharp line between fans who watch passively and members who would notice if a creator went quiet.
“I think active fandom is sort of what evolves into the community feel,” she says, arguing that creators with enormous reach would often fail if they tried to build a paid community around that same audience, “because it’s more passive.”
The difference comes down to what the content offers. A video that surfaces in a feed gets watched because it is there; content built around something specific, a workout plan, a financial framework, gives people a reason to seek it out. Allison says she regularly sees customers’ app communities post selfies, ask questions, and respond to each other unprompted.
That self-sustaining activity, not follower count, is what she treats as the real signal of a durable membership business. Uscreen has customers in the tens and hundreds of thousands operating at that level, suggesting scale matters less than whether an audience already behaves like a community before being asked to pay for one.
Losing the Platform Can Mean Losing the Business Overnight
The risk Allison keeps returning to is what happens when the platform a creator depends on disappears, changes its rules, or stops showing their content to anyone.
She points to the uncertainty around the potential TikTok ban, and to a more common version: account bans, shadow bans, and sudden algorithm shifts that cut a creator’s reach without warning. “I’ve seen it so many times,” she says, describing creators who go from earning steadily to earning nothing overnight.
Without a way to reach an audience outside the platform, there is no recovery option. “If your account gets shut down or the algorithm shifts and you’re not in their feeds, that’s it,” she says. “You can’t tell them where to find you.”
An owned destination, an email list, a branded app, or a membership site solves a narrower problem than most assume: it does not replace the platform or guarantee growth, but it guarantees a creator can still reach people who choose to follow them, even if the algorithm that connected them stops cooperating.
Speed Is the Enemy of a Sustainable Creator Business
Allison’s advice for creators building something durable is short and unglamorous. The first, covered above, is to own the audience relationship.
The second is to stay niche before going broad, speaking to that audience rather than rushing to generalize. The third is to lean on infrastructure that already exists rather than build an expensive internal team. “Build a village,” she says. “There are a lot of wonderful people in this industry who want to help, so you don’t need to build a huge team that costs a lot of money.”
What she will not offer is a shortcut. “Don’t go too fast,” she says. “There are no get-rich-quick schemes.” For creators hoping one viral moment will be enough, her answer is blunt: virality buys attention, not a business plan.
The Real Test Isn’t Becoming a Creator, It’s Becoming a Business
Uscreen’s own roadmap follows the same logic Allison gives creators. The company is building what she calls “an operating system for content creators to manage the sustainable revenue portion of their business,” adding CRM tools, analytics, and, increasingly, commerce.
“We have content creators where if you log into their app, you can actually go and shop their merch,” she says, describing storefronts now built into creator-branded apps.
That reflects a bet on where the wider market is heading. “I think at the end of the day, the future is going to be that every single entrepreneur, every single business person is going to be a content creator,” she says. The harder question runs the other direction: “Is every single content creator going to be a business?”
Allison connects that question to her renewed appetite for events like VidCon, which matter more, she argues, as creators’ working lives grow more mediated by algorithms and AI. “I think events like this matter more now than ever,” she says. “You see the kids running up to their favorite YouTuber, you see people dressing in costume aligned with their favorite content. That is so special.”
The clearest sign of a good VidCon, for her, was not the panel but the creators who came up afterward with specific questions. “We know that we’re helping the next generation of content creators,” she says. “It feels good.”
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