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.

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"

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.

They literally called us poor and broke up with us

"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

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

last month on Patreon they had 5,730 subscribers, they would've made $28,650 in a single month if every member paid $5, however it should be noted most people paid between $10 & $25 dollars so the amount is closer to $57,300+. (for a single year using their worst performing month, they would make between $343,800 and $687,600 on patreon alone) looking at the Watcher's main channel alone they have an rpm between 6 & 8.5. in this year alone they have published 22 videos grossing more than 18,324,000 views. Since January, they would have made between $109,944 and $155,754. if we take into account Charlie's(Penguinz0) statements about ad rates we can assume that every ad read gave them $10,000 to $25,000. In 22 videos since the start of January they have had 10 ads, since most of the videos are bloopers from other ones instead of actual content. This would place ad revenue between $100,000 and $250,000. If we continue this trend, 10ads/4months, they would have 30 ads ranging from $300,000 to $750,000 a year. in total, they would have made anywhere between $324,544 and $634,954 since January and will make roughly $973,632 to $1,904,862. again these are all with conservative numbers. they had absolutely no need. what they needed to do was film more videos, because in no world are these videos "worth" $6, the general script is mid, and they mostly just have fun. I know its part of their brand but the video ideas are so basic they could film multiple videos in a week, (if it takes 4 hours to film and they work a 9/5) they would be able to film 10 videos a week, or 8 if they want to dedicate one day to ad reads and podcasting. they have 15+ staff mentioned in the videos, which is again absolutely ridiculous to have production coordinators, and heads of development, production, post production, etc. when the work these videos take is not a lot. they literally stand in front of a pulldown board and lecture you about really common anomalies that everyone has heard before. so many other youtubers make this content in a 1-2 person team bc its really not that difficult, especially when all of the information is on wikipedia

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

Steven Lim really messed up with his Instagram post that he took hours to edit. It threw Napalm on a dumpster fire by saying "For those fans who got us here, we really appreciate your viewership. For those who WANT to continue watching us...." which can be roughly interpreted as "For those fans who got us here (and are no longer needed).... For those who WANT to continue watching (which are the real fans and are the super bestest)." People were mad before, but once he posted that cringe everything went into top effing gear.

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.

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)

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

It's not a matter of if you HAVE $6, it's a matter of if it's WORTH $6. I think that's where the major flaw in their thinking comes from.

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