From “Day in the Life of a Stanford Student” vlogs to room tours to college decision reaction videos, many students craft a creative online persona to go along with their in-person identity.

However, content creation can be a lonely business; each step of scripting, filming and editing is usually a solo endeavor, and it can be hard to stay motivated. Feeling the lack of community in their work, content creators Tyler Newman ’25 and Jenny Duan ’26 formed the Next Creator Collective in December 2023 to establish a community for content creators on campus.

The Next Creator Collective holds weekly creator hours on campus for student creators to come together and work on content. Duan said these hours designated for content creation are “a space for people to workshop and hold themselves accountable.”

The collective’s largest initiative so far has been the Creators on Campus conference held April 5. The conference drew over 100 student creators from Stanford and other universities and featured popular content creators like Tim Chau, founder of Impact Media, and Lillian Zhang, a financial literacy influencer. Representatives from Adobe, YouTube and TikTok also shared about the future of the creator economy space.

Brighton Brown ’26 was the design lead for the conference and helped create promotional materials and slides. Designing for the conference helped Brown, who is not part of the Next Creator Collective, realize the passion that people poured into content creation.

“I don’t have any social media, and so I thought it was really cool to see how [content creation] is really a job for a lot of people,” she said. 

Brown also sees an interplay between design and content creation. Notably, content creators don’t just focus on graphic design, but also on how their content speaks to their audiences.

“I’m a designer, so I think design is literally everywhere, but especially in content creation,” she said. “It’s not just the looks of your graphics, it’s how you design your content and how you want to address your audience. All of that is being designed, and so it’s kind of cool to see how intentional people are about addressing [their] audience.”

Newman told The Daily that many conference attendees formed friendships that led to dinner and beach trips afterward, and one attendee canceled their flight to stay an extra day. 

“The biggest takeaway from the weekend was that people, even with really big follower accounts, feel lonely in this industry,” Newman said. “But I think an even bigger takeaway was that even though a lot of people do feel lonely, there can be community that can be built, and it can be strong and lasting as well.”

Stanford is also a unique place to be a content creator. According to Newman, there’s a strong demand for Stanford-specific content from people curious about life as a student, but the Stanford environment tends to devalue the work of content creators.

“There’s often a lot of taboo around content creation especially at a university like Stanford, where subjects [that are] more tech-related may be more valued,” Newman said. “If people see people with cameras out and recording themselves, there might be a stereotype like, ‘Why are you doing content when you’re at Stanford?’”

However, Newman believes that content creation is equally as valid as other forms of creative expression like art or dance, and pushes for more students to recognize the discipline and hard work of content creators.

Duan believes content creation is more important than ever with the advent of artificial intelligence. The human aspect of content creation, in which content highlights a creator’s personality, style or daily routine, can be more appealing than statistics or data in differentiating one from the crowd.

“When we say content creation, we don’t mean only making TikToks. It’s a really good way to establish credibility online, especially in a world where more and more people are turning towards the digital space for verification, discovery, connection and business opportunities,” she said.

Above all, Duan and Newman emphasize that Next Creator Collective seeks to act as a community space for current and aspiring creators. As technology continues to evolve, both see content creation becoming more influential and mainstream at Stanford.

“Being aware of and being receptive to new changes in terms of people’s use of technology — content creation being one of them — is really important, so that people don’t miss the wave of, ‘what’s next?’” Newman said.