Today's Edition
DUBAI (ALETIHAD)
The fourth edition of the 1 Billion Followers Summit, the world’s largest summit dedicated to the content creation economy, featured six roundtable discussions.
Experts and specialists from leading technology companies, global social media platforms, and top global influencers and content creators explored developments taking place across multiple sectors of the new media content industry, the key challenges they faced, and the opportunities they presented, as well as the latest trends and directions shaping the future of the global content industry, the paths it was taking, and the most prominent practices in this sector - enabling talented and aspiring creators to develop their skills and enhancing their opportunities to scale, expand their reach, connect with target audiences, and grow their follower base.
The roundtable discussions aimed to enrich the expertise of current and future content creators and equip them with practical knowledge and skills across diverse aspects of content creation, refining their experiences and strengthening their presence on social media platforms.
More than 15,000 content creators and influencers participated in the fourth edition of the 1 Billion Followers Summit, organised by the UAE Government Media Office from January 9 to 11, 2026, at Emirates Towers, the Dubai International Financial Centre, and the Museum of the Future, under the theme 'Content for Good'. The summit featured 489 speakers and 150 CEOs of leading global companies, reached more than 3.5 billion followers worldwide, and included over 374 panel sessions and interactive workshops.
Alia AlHammadi, Vice Chairperson of the UAE Government Media Office and CEO of the 1 Billion Followers Summit, affirmed the importance of the roundtable discussions in shaping the future of the new media industry and building bridges of collaboration among key stakeholders across the content creation sector and the creative economy.
She said, “The roundtable discussions represented a real platform for open dialogue and the exchange of creative ideas that contributed to developing the content creation sector, strengthening its sustainability, and enabling creators, brands, investors, and entrepreneurs to face challenges and capitalise on promising opportunities amid rapid technological shifts.”
The roundtable series opened with a discussion titled 'Creators x Investors: Building and Funding the Future of Ideas'. The session connected creative ideas with funders and investors through practical insights that addressed challenges and identified solutions.
Participants discussed how creators could develop their ideas and turn them into investable businesses, how investors assessed creators and creator-led ventures before offering support, and how dialogue between both sides could be encouraged to strengthen collaboration.
Participants explored how to transform creativity into business and how creators could structure ideas as scalable business models. They also examined the concerns of investors, including revenue continuity, feasibility, market demand, scalability, and the factors that enable a creator to evolve into an entrepreneur or investor.
Investors participating in the discussion outlined key requirements prior to investing, including a clear and realistic business plan, a defined roadmap with milestones, financial projections with transparent monetisation strategies, and clarity around the founding team, roles, and operational discipline.
The session also addressed challenges facing both creators and investors. Creators cited gaps in business literacy, limited financial planning knowledge, difficulties translating ideas into formal business structures or pitch decks, trust concerns related to creative control, inconsistent performance driven by platform algorithms, and reliance on personal brands. Investors highlighted risks related to brand dependency, unpredictable revenue models, reputation exposure, lack of structure, and concerns around long-term scalability.
The fourth edition of the 1 Billion Followers Summit also featured a travel-focused roundtable titled 'Tourism Boards and Content Creators: A New Era of Tourism Promotion Campaigns'. The session brought together representatives from tourism boards in Malta, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hong Kong, alongside travel content creators, to examine the challenges and opportunities of creator-led tourism campaigns.
Discussions focused on identifying barriers to collaboration, sharing best practices, and developing practical solutions to strengthen partnerships within the tourism sector. Participants highlighted emerging trends such as sustainability, local experiences, and digital storytelling, aimed at shaping tourism campaigns that were innovative, authentic, and scalable.
The session explored how travel creators transformed global experiences into meaningful cross-cultural impact, emphasising the role of visual storytelling, authenticity, and human connection in building trusted global communities.
Tourism board representatives and creators examined challenges related to creative constraints, collaboration processes, and partnership sustainability, while highlighting renewed creative thinking and rising trends that spotlight local experiences through innovative storytelling.
Another roundtable session, titled 'CEOs and Content Creators: Sustainable, High-Impact Partnerships', brought together CEOs and marketing leaders from major global companies with leading content creators to explore models for sustainable, high-impact collaboration.
The session fostered strategic dialogue on partnership frameworks, meaningful KPIs, and long-term creator–brand relationships. Participants discussed alignment of values, performance measurement, and the future of sustainable partnerships.
Marketing leaders highlighted challenges such as identifying creators aligned with brand vision, lack of standardised KPIs, and limited visibility into creators’ production processes. Creators discussed constraints related to creative freedom, underestimated production effort, delayed communication, budget limitations, and the difficulty of sustaining long-term partnerships.
A roundtable titled 'AI x Influence: Power, Intellectual Property, and the Future of Creators' brought together AI experts and global creators specialising in emerging technologies. Participants examined how AI was reshaping intellectual property, economic value, audience trust, and the broader content creation economy.
Key challenges discussed included intellectual property protection, unauthorised AI use of creators’ work, displacement risks, data privacy concerns, and the absence of safeguards around consent and compensation.
In the session 'Talent Managers × Content Creators: Synergy, Sustainability & the Future of the Creator Economy', talent managers and creators discussed evolving relationships, industry challenges, and opportunities to strengthen collaboration.
Topics included the role and value of talent managers, defining responsibilities and expectations, improving workflows, ensuring financial transparency, establishing fair commission structures, and preventing financial disputes. Mental health pressures and strategies to avoid burnout were also addressed.
One of the roundtable sessions, titled 'The Future of the Creator Economy', brought together a group of content creators and global experts specialising in the creator economy. The discussion addressed the role of creators in the economy and society, and explored how to build a more inclusive and ethical creative economy that serves as a driver of positive societal change.
Participants examined how governments could rely on creators as digital ambassadors, how intellectual property rights should be approached in the age of AI, how governments could support creators’ financial wellbeing, the role governments should play in enabling the creator economy, and whether regulations and laws hindered or supported the content industry.
They also discussed gaps in existing infrastructure, how creators could protect their savings for the future and generate income beyond advertising and brand partnerships, the pressures creators face that often remain unseen by audiences, how creators could scale from emerging markets to global platforms, how they could confront AI avatars and automation, and whether AI would fundamentally change the content creation process.
