Former CNBC journalist Helen Zhao is carving out a unique space in the creator economy by applying journalistic rigor to a niche often dominated by first-person expat vlogs. Her brand, “Immigrant, Not Expat,” combines data, reporting, and character-driven storytelling to cover the global movement of Americans .
After leaving CNBC, Zhao spent a year and a half traveling the world. When she returned, she encountered a media landscape reshaped by layoffs and a piece of advice from a mentor: the future of journalism lay in becoming a creator . Today, she is building a brand that sits between institutional outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the legion of “expat tip” creators, believing no one is covering the topic with a journalistic lens .
Filling the Gap Between Expat Vlogs and Mainstream Media
Zhao entered a content space crowded with personal accounts—videos about what a city is like, visa applications, and daily life abroad. Her contribution is to ask a different question :
“A typical expat vlogger would tell a more first-person type story. The way I would cover this story is more so from the perspective of: there are a lot of expats making videos about this place. Now let’s look at the data. How many more expats are moving here, and how is that impacting the local population?”
Her first viral video, a piece on Da Nang, Vietnam, served as a proof of concept. She treated it as a journalistic story, pulling in data and interviewing locals who described the city’s transformation. A longer YouTube piece on the topic attracted around 50,000 views . This success, however, took her down a brief wrong path: she initially made more content on the same city, which didn’t perform as well. It took her six months to identify the real pattern: her audience wants “journalistic trend stories about expats and digital nomads, especially where Americans are moving for a better life” .
Her “Americans Immigrating Abroad” series, for example, examines the structural reasons behind the trend and shows a high conversion rate—a video with 150,000 views, she says, can gain her 5,000 followers .
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A Slow, Meticulous Approach to Storytelling
Zhao approaches her content with the rigor of a journalist, not the pace of a daily vlogger. Every script is built around a central question: “What is the really juicy tension that will make people really care?” . She will spend hours, sometimes up to five hours, working on a few paragraphs until the story clicks into place .
She notes that some of her best-performing content, such as a piece on Switzerland, was produced without ever visiting the country. She argues that the core story—about a nation ranked among the world’s happiest producing a discontented middle class looking to leave—came from data and interviews, not expensive travel .
Currently, Zhao’s Immigrant, Not Expat brand is unmonetized. She is focused on building an audience before building a business, while also working a full-time job as a video journalist at the California Post .
