these youtubers accidentally killed their channel

BTW: Watcher is offering 30% off to everyone for their streaming service, so I guess that means the “40% off” for patrons is actually a 10% difference. 💀

A creator can't tell a fan what's affordable for that fan.

When you cultivate an audience that embraces "Eat the Rich" you can't be shocked or mad when your audience starts to cannibalize you for making a greedy business decision.

The fact that they didn’t give a free subscription to their Patreon backers is mind-boggling, and shows that they didn’t really think this through.

"six dollars a month is absolutely affordable for absolutely everybody," says the guy who drives a tesla and has multiple shows dedicated to jet hopping around the world to eat meals that cost more than some people's rent

They literally called us poor and broke up with us

The problem with this isn't just that they're paywalling their stuff. It's the "why" that REALLY made this sting. They are guys that came from Buzzfeed. An online entity that was destroyed by over hiring, inefficient spending, and mismanagement. They have over 20 employees, in a MASSIVE office space, in one of the most expensive cities on earth, all to make shows that are literally two guys in a room goofing off the VAST majority of the time. They mismanaged their business, and instead of sucking it up, admitting they didn't learn their lesson from Buzzfeed and downsizing, they decided to paywall all their content after having a patreon, adsense, a merch store, live events, and literal 5 minute ad reads on every video. Rather than accept the obvious conclusion, which is that they need to completely rethink their business model; they keep asking the audience to enable them.

Buzzfeed unsolved literally PEAK when it's just blue and yellow subtitles talking to each other, nobody gives a shit about the "high quality production"

What gets to me the most about this whole fiasco is that they have two shows that are entirely dependent on fans submitting stories for them to read for free. They put out a call for one of them just last month and have paywalled fans from seeing their own work without any prior warning.

The important question is "Will they have ukuleles in their inevitable apology video?"

Nebula, an entire network of high-profile creators, is only 5$/month.......

i think it's incredibly direspectful of them to say "everyone can afford this" while being on flights regularly enough to discuss it as a casual, biweekly activity. it's just giving out of touch with the reality of most of their fans

They bragged about how they would be able to put this TV show level of quality for all of their shows when, ironically enough, that was the exact reason I was beginning to lose interest in watching their channel before their "announcement". With their newest seasons of Ghost Files and Mystery Files - yeah, they have a bigger set and all of these new fancy gizmos - but everything else felt phoned in. One of my favorite series they did was Too Many Spirits, which was literally just them getting drunk in their backyard and telling ghost stories. That dynamic that I initially came for and loved from Buzzfeed Unsolved and shows like that slowly disappeared when they started to double down on being more like TV. Just, man. They built their entire brand on interacting with their audience (taking suggestions from their viewers, live shows, Q&As, reblogging fan memes on their tumblr), and it sucks that what they really wanted from us was more money. Parasocial relationships are weird.

I hadn't even heard about the poor Patrons. The fact they wouldn't be grandfathered into the new streaming service is WILD, I'd be pissed too

Remember, The Professor would want us to pirate paywalled content. Do it for him.

They’re trying to do what collegehumor successfully did with dropout, except dropout has always continued to post a significant amount of their content up on youtube and has clearly put the money from subscriptions to use, while watcher has not made any indication of evolving its programing to make subscriptions worth it

The first 'Watcher TV exclusive' leaked btw; its 8 minutes of Ryan rambling pretty deadpan about what its like to film an episode of Ghost Files, including how they fake their 'first impressions' of the place, and how the entire cast & crew went to the cinema to watch Dune 2. He also calls one fast food chain "ok, but not better than [other fast food chain]". He opens the video with "this might be a series, might be a one off, who knows" so...yeah. Really promising TV quality productions over there. Definitely worth the $1.50 it costs ($6/month with 1 video/week)

"There's this idea that better production equals a better experience." Meanwhile i'm here watching an unshaven scraggle bearded man who looks like he just woke up in a black void and i'm not watching Watcher.

there was a comment i saw that basically said “we were happy even back at buzzfeed when it was just the yellow and blue subtitles. All we wanted was you”, which sums up my feelings pretty well if they want to make high production stuff, sure thats totally up to them. but thats not what their audience wants, thats not what i wanted. i hope they find a new audience that likes their new stuff, but its just no longer what i want to watch

Steven definitely has that Silicon Valley brain rot. During that whole “soft launch” speech I was constantly expecting the next words out of his mouth to be “liquidity pool”