Amid an onslaught of artificial intelligence buzz and a fast-changing social media landscape, the 1 Billion Followers Summit, a gathering of some of the world’s top social media influencers and content creators, got under way in Dubai.
The two-day event, now in its second year, is taking place at Emirates Towers and Dubai’s Museum of the Future, and features at least 3,000 attendees, 100 speakers and more than 300 companies from the technology and social media landscape.
Some of the many social media companies present include Facebook parent Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat.
In the opening keynote for the summit, Alia Al Hammadi, chief executive of the New Media Academy, which organised the event, reflected on the optimism surrounding influencers and content creators.
“The impact we have is not just in numbers,” she told attendees. “The impact we have is in the stories we tell and the positive change we can inspire.”
Ms Al Hammadi said there were about 50 million people working as content creators globally and compared it to her estimates that there were 67 million working in the energy industry.
“It’s not just a bunch of youths standing in front of the camera for the sake of fun and entertainment,” she said. “It’s a multimillion-dollar industry, and it’s expected to keep growing.”
Among the influencers and content creators headlining the summit are Khaby Lame, originally from Senegal, who has 113 million followers on TikTok, Hassan Suleiman, better known as Aboflah, a video gamer and live streamer with more than 35 million YouTube subscribers, and Abeer Al Sagheer, a Lebanese celebrity chef with more than 27 million followers across various social media platforms.
Also taking part in the summit, although not necessarily from the social media influencer world, is Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, who hosted a discussion on “The dark side of making it on social media”.
Influencers, many of whom first gained their fame, followers and financial success amid social media’s global ascent around 2007, have been faced with the challenge of quickly adapting to the changes in social content consumption.
When it was launched in 2010, Instagram, which put many influencers on the social media map, originally consisted of mainly photo content with various photo filter options.
Influencers made their mark by showcasing aspirational lifestyles and eventually made money through branded content and product placement on the platform, setting the standard for the influencer economy model for several years.
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