American actor Will Smith, former footballer Rio Ferdinand and the founder of Emaar Properties, Mohamed Alabbar, will be among the key speakers at the 1 Billion Followers Summit in January.
The event, which will take place in Dubai, is expected to welcome more than 15,000 content creators.
Other key speakers include YouTuber MrBeast, who has more than one billion followers across all his social media platforms, political figure Lara Trump, who is a former Fox News host and daughter-in-law of US President Donald Trump. Comedian Max Amini will also appear at the event, which runs from January 9 to 11.
The summit will feature 500 speakers and 580 sessions, and will be attended by chief executives and other industry experts. All the major digital platforms and companies, including YouTube, X, Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, will be represented.
Organisers predict that January's summit − the fifth time it has been held − will be the biggest yet. Saeed Al Eter, head of the UAE Government Media Office, said the sector's momentum continues to grow globally.
“The speakers in the first summit had 1 Billion followers, today the speakers have more than 3.5 billion followers,” Mr Al Eter said on Tuesday. “There are around 200 million content creators worldwide. It’s a rapidly growing sector. About 47 per cent of content creators are working full time.”
Dubai is hosting leading influencers and content creators across various fields and providing ideal networking and collaboration opportunities, Mr Al Eter said, at a press conference at Emirates Towers in Dubai.
“The volume of revenue generated by content creators globally is $250 billion and expected to be $1.3 trillion by 2033.”
The summit will showcase content promoting humanitarian and social initiatives, in a collaboration with MrBeast.
“Within three weeks, the initiative saw more than 170,000 humanitarian and community videos [created], with more than 100 million views,” said Mr Al Eter.
The winner of an award for creating films using artificial intelligence tools will be announced at the summit. More than 30,000 films from 116 countries have taken part, and the shortlist will be whittled down to five finalists.
“The film industry is huge and we wanted to see if AI can generate high-quality movies,” he said.
The 1 Billion Followers Summit will take place across three venues – Emirates Towers, the Museum of the Future and Dubai International Financial Centre.
