Virtual New York Comic Con - YouTube Partnership

In 2020, the world turned upside down. One of the hardest hit areas of the pandemic was obviously the event business, which left the question of holding New York Comic Con up in the air. With physical shows cancelled, we decided to launch our event (the nation’s largest pop culture convention) entirely online, and teamed up with YouTube as our exclusive partner to do so. Entitled The Metaverse, I was a senior lead on the project, spearheading production of the panels and functioning as the primary content liaison with YouTube. I worked with film and tv studios, video game developers, anime companies, and book publishers to record their talent-heavy panels, and oversaw our streaming vendor.

I produced dozens of panels which aired over four days, which included such Triple-A content as The Walking Dead, Archer, What We Do In The Shadows, Doctor Who, American Gods, Nancy Drew, The Good Doctor, A Discovery of Witches, The Hunger Games, Kevin Smith, Snowpiercer, Resident Alien, Tenacious D, and even an exclusive reunion of the creators of Lost, the first such panel since the show went off the air.

All told, we served millions of streams and the NYCC Metaverse became a shining example of how to hold a successful virtual-first event.