Olha Kapinos

Cannes Lions has been the advertising industry's north star for seven decades, long before the creator economy even existed. In 2024, Cannes finally made room for creators. It wasn't much: a rooftop slot on the Palais, easy to miss, and marketers still ran the agenda. This year that changed. The conversations that used to happen about creators started happening with them, and their side events were everywhere.

A YouTube playlist is a sequence of videos that plays automatically one after another — and a well-structured one keeps viewers on your channel instead of leaving after one video. To create a YouTube Playlist, go to YouTube Studio → Content → Playlists → Create → New Playlist. Title it with your primary keyword, set it to Public, add videos, and put your highest average view duration video first. Done in under 3 minutes. What determines whether the playlist builds watch time and session depth is the strategy layer: sequencing, SEO, analytics, thumbnail, official series, and more tactics from this guide. Channels with structured playlists see 15–36% longer session times across the channels in AIR audits.

Most YouTube creators who try memberships earn very little from them because they set them up incorrectly and promote them just once. But the channels we watch earn 30–80% of their total revenue from memberships. What makes it happen is designing perks around what your specific audience wants, mentioning memberships in every video naturally, pricing your tiers around what your superfans are willing to pay, and 12 more tactics. All are in this YouTube Membership guide.