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.

They literally called us poor and broke up with us

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

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 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"

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

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.......

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.

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.

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.

Another massive issue is that Steven Lim (the third guy) wants to start making another run of Worth It, where he eats $1,000 sushi in a penthouse with his fancy friends

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

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

"it's only $6 a month, it's affordable"... time to get in line with all the other subscription services we have to pay for these days

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

Although we international viewers from developing countries may not be the biggest percentage of subscribers, it still hurt to be overlooked like this, because even when six dollars isn´t that much for them, that amount of money at least cuadruples in my country, so for people here is the equivalent of paying almost 30 dollars for what it is basically a paywalled youtube channel.