Olha Kapinos
Creative Economy Consultant
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Olha Kapinos
Creative Economy Consultant
Olha works in the creator economy and follows it everywhere — from VidCon floors to TechCrunch stages. When she's not tracking trends, she's cycling across continents. She writes about what she actually sees, not what the industry wants you to think.
Author's articles
18 Jun 2026
YouTube Play Buttons Guide: From 100k Silver Play Button to the Creators Who Broke the Rules
YouTube Play Buttons — or YouTube plaques, as most creators call them — are the closest thing the internet has to an Oscar. The platform officially calls them Creator Awards.
13 Jun 2026
How to Grow Your YouTube Channel in 2026: A Creator's Playbook
The channels growing fastest on YouTube in 2026 look different from the outside. From the inside, in their YouTube Studio, the pattern is the same: retention holds, hooks deliver what the thumbnail promised, every video routes to the next one, Shorts feed long-form instead of sitting in isolation, at least three revenue streams run in parallel, and the channel stays active in the algorithm even when uploads slow down.
28 May 2026
Do YouTube Shorts Help Your Long-Form Videos Grow? Data From 18,000 Channels
In most niches, channels that combine YouTube Shorts with long-form content have more subscribers than channels that post long-form only. We learned that from AIR's 18,000-channel dataset across 11 niches and four channel-size segments.