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long post ahead. i wanted to respond to some of the things i've seen people saying about the watcher situation. i honestly just needed to get some of this stuff off my chest lmao.

"sorry, the bridge has been burnt and i can no longer support watcher" - valid.

"i'm happy with this compromise and will continue to watch their content" - valid.

"oh so they apologise, change nothing, and now people are happy to give them money?" - things have changed. they compromised and completely changed their plan for the new website. did you not watch the update video? they're also issuing refunds to anyone who wants one.

"i bet people who over-reacted feel real stupid now!" - some people over-reacted, but a lot of people had valid criticisms and concerns. they shouldn't feel stupid if they expressed it in a non-abusive way.

"yay, we successfully bullied them into changing their minds!" - you're ... you're proud that you bullied someone? this isn't fucking elon musk or jeff bezos. these guys aren't multibillionaires exploiting their employees. these are three youtubers who want to pay themselves and their employees a living wage, while making content they're proud of, and they made a simple fucking mistake. stop throwing around the term 'eat the rich' as though it applies here.

"the apology video is clearly PR!" - yes, watcher is a business. this is how a business responds to situations like this. they had abuse hurled at them for 48 hours straight, they shouldn't feel bad for wanting to make sure everything said in the video was 100% agreed upon and analysed beforehand.

"steven was clearly the one behind this, he should be fired or step down!" - was he? do you know that for a fact? cause from what i saw, all three of them got in front of the camera and made the announcement video together. i agree that he should step down as CEO, but only because they clearly need someone who has actual business experience leading them (if you remember, ryan and shane stepped down a while ago because they didn't want to deal with that side of the company anymore - in the same video, they thanked steven for being the sole reason watcher was still going).

"they shouldn't have been silent the whole weekend" - maybe so, but it's clear they went into lockdown/crisis mode. also, businesses aren't open on weekends. i think it's fair that they waited until monday and took their time with it. maybe they should have tweeted something like "we're sorry and we're working on an explanation", but that just would have given people another place to attack them.

"you're all being parasocial" - i've seen this used against both people who are supporting/giving the team the benefit of the doubt, and people who are against everything. a lot of people (myself included) have used this experience to realise they were developing/had developed a parasocial relationship with these men. this is a good thing - it allows us to recognise these things and make changes within ourselves.

i think generally people are more parasocial towards youtubers than celebrities in films and tv shows. YT feels like there is a barrier removed between the creators and us; it makes us feel like we know these people in a way that we don't know actors who are always playing different roles. YT makes it easier to believe we're seeing the real people, when we really don't know them at all.

"why should i pay someone who owns a tesla?" - you don't have to. also, steven has been working consistently for years. it doesn't surprise me that he has enough savings for an expensive car. people are allowed to own things that you and i can't afford.

"they're embarrassed to be youtubers" - might be true, who knows. but for me it feels more like they want to be taken seriously as filmmakers/television producers, and don't feel like they can do that on YT.

"there's clearly money mismanagement going on" - i think this is likely. i personally don't know what it's like to run a business like this, which is why i've been watching videos from other youtubers who do. since they're saying they don't know where the funds are going, i'm inclined to believe watcher's budget is way off what it should be.

"why didn't they initially say they were having money troubles and might close doors?" - i can see both sides of this. i believe they should have recognised that their audience would have been more receptive to this kind of honesty. however, if you're asking people to give you money, while also saying the venture might not work out, it doesn't engender a great deal of trust. why should i pay for a 12 month sub if it's possible watcher will fold in 6? who will be around to issue me a refund then?

"we were happy with blue and yellow text on a screen!" - valid, but it's clear that they weren't. they clearly want to push themselves further creatively. on the other hand, it definitely feels like they got impatient and wanted that future creation to start now, when they don't have the funds for it. they shouldn't have tried to force their loyal audience to pay for content the audience didn't ask for.

"i don't want to fund steven, andrew, and adam flying around the world eating expensive food." - very valid. i wonder how different things would have been if this 'Worth It' revival had come around 6 months earlier. it still would have been tone deaf in a global living crisis, but i don't think people would have been this upset. what i don't understand is them doing this show if they genuinely couldn't afford it, which is the implication i got from them announcing it just before announcing the paywall.

"why don't they move their office out of LA?" - that would be incredibly expensive, especially for a company that is struggling financially. they would have to uproot their entire lives, and would probably lose a great number of their staff who don't want to/can't move. they would have to completely start over, which is something i imagine they're desperately trying to avoid.

i think the cancel culture that has grown in popularity over the internet over the last few years has led people to believe that:

they can say whatever they want online with no consequences.

people aren't allowed to make a single mistake, and should understand that when they do, it's okay to for others to spew hate and awfulness towards them.

part of me doesn't even know why i made this post, i think i just got sick of seeing the same complaints and questions lmao.

#beautifully said #watcher #steven lim #ryan bergara #shane madej #watcher entertainment #I truly think this was out of some catastrophically bad business sense with a dash of having too lofty of artistic goals #at least for your current situation #ultimately they’re a business and they might want to make TV quality stuff #but their current audience doesn’t and in the meantime we’ve gotten all flash and little substance as they try to do both in all videos #instead they oughta pump out the cheaper ‘sit at a table’ stuff that I and apparently everyone seek #and on occasion push above because they genuinely do have an eye for it #you just can’t try new content and a new service and a new pay scheme all at once while counting down to it like it’s a celebration

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absolutely cackling at the difference in thumbnails between the two watcher videos lmfao

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It's good they apologised but I will not resubscribe to watcher. I used to enjoy buzzfeed unsolved but their watcher stuff just lacks the same charm I guess? I honestly just have been scrolling past their videos in my subs for a good while now. So I really wasn't even upset when I unsubbed bc i've been clocked out of their content in my mind anyways.

#tbh same #I liked the For Your Amusement park podcast as a parks fan but even that was waning #they spent too much of the time talking about how it was constantly losing them money and had no sponsors #which I can’t imagine helps the ‘no sponsors want to sponsor us’ issue

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“And I hope you NASTY, VILE, BULLIES who BROKE those poor men by *checks notes* 1.) pointing out that a bad business decision was bad and 2.) recognising that a CEO is, in fact, in charge of a company ROT IN HELL for your irredeemable crimes against our parasocial blorbos!!!! 😡🤬”

#watcher entertainment #watcher

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Is my trust broken with watcher? Yes

Do I get to see more of this guy? Hopefully also yes

#watcher #watcher entertainment #puppet history

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eleventh plague. emails. 

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one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

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the idealized version of my tomorrow self will fix this

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i am really so sorry to continue harping on about the watcher entertainment streaming service. but this kind of stuff (internet content as a business & marketing it as such) is truly my obsession, and i think i will implode if i don't talk about some of the takes i'm seeing.

i'd like to emphasize again i don't have strong feelings about watcher either way. i like ghost files, i watch mystery files sometimes, i watched worth it back in the buzzfeed days. i don't watch any of their shows religiously.

anyway, here's the main things i keep seeing crop up and my thoughts on each:

"watcher has 25 employees they have to pay, and employing people in this economy is good, so we should be banding together to pay them."

employing people is good if you currently have the capacity to pay them. i checked watcher's linkedin page, and many of their employees were hired within the last year or two. if they hired people they cannot pay with the business model they had before, something is seriously wrong with their internal bookkeeping/decision making. it means they either didn't know they couldn't pay these people long term, or they did know and were content with risking newly hired employees' livelihoods on a huge content pivot in the next year.

of note is that none of their employees' titles have anything to do with managing the finances of the company. they are the size of a small business but have no one aside from the figureheads of the company in charge of their finances.

this is the kind of company decision making that leads to downsizing and layoffs, which can be devastating. but you know what's worse than laying off a portion of your staff? laying off everyone because your business is going under.

"not everyone can afford the subscription, but those who can should pay it to support the watcher team."

no. $6/month for a couple hours of content (depending on what shows you actively watch and the natural fluctuation of their release schedule) is a fundamentally bad value. i can pay that much for a few movies on amazon. i can pay that much for dropout, if i want to support a smaller business instead.

and to be totally frank, even if people do sign up, i don't think they'd get enough to compete with the amount they get through patreon/sponsorships. and the fact that they didn't know how many of their subscribers would realistically sign up is a bad sign.

a pretty good conversion rate of free to paid subscribers of a service or content is 3% (usually accomplished through a free trial). given the very poor reception of the announcement, let's say about 1% of their 3 mil youtube subs pay for their service. that's 30k people paying for their new platform. that's $180k a month in their pocket.

(they currently only have 12k subs on patreon so we are being generous here.)

a sponsorship deal (based on my googling, i have less direct experience with this) is anywhere from $10-50 per 1000 views. they've gotten about 1 mil views on their last few videos. 3 mil subs is nothing to shake a stick at, but let's say they're on the lower end of the payscale at $25 per 1000 views. that's $25k a video, $100k a month if they release 1 video a week. their lowest patreon tier is 5 bucks, so even if all their subs are at that tier, that's another $60k, so $160k total. it's entirely likely they're bringing in much more than that when you factor in merch, adsence, etc.

did anyone on their team crunch numbers on how many people would need to sub to make the switch worth it? did anyone do market research on how many people they could convert to paid users? because if not, if they really didn't have a game plan for this, the subscription service was always doomed to fail.

"this was their only option to continue making the content they want to make, with the production value they want."

i watched their announcement video. a key point in that video is that they have done sponsored videos and that's what used to pay for their content, but they did not like the amount of creative control the sponsor had over the content.

look, i get that's no fun. we'd all love creatives to be able to make whatever they want. but when you are a small business with a team of employees relying on you, you have to think about making money, sometimes at the cost of creative liberties.

and they had so many other options to make money for the projects they want to make without jumping to a subscription platform.

they could have started actually promoting their patreon, and maybe done some restructuring of the tiers. why not a highly produced, special series just for patreon members? or a special high-budget episode of each series, while the main series is lower budget?

bite the bullet and continue taking sponsorship deals on some less-produced shows, while axing sponsorships from the ones the crew feels more passionate about.

schedule larger, blowout-production shows only when they can be afforded. this is what Notorious Amongus Guy streamer jerma does. he saves up for big productions like his baseball or dollhouse streams, so he can really get creative with them.

they had other options and they've tried very little, especially when you compare them to other content house business at similar scales. try guys and good mythical morning both put out significant content with significant staff, and have had to diversify their income streams with auxiliary products, shows with widely varied levels of production, etc. but it seems to be working for them. watcher has merch and that's about it, and seems to only want to increase the production quality of ALL their shows.

really, all this just boils down to a terrible business decision. it's hard to say if the watcher team is working with a consultant or anyone outside of their team, but they certainly don't have anyone internally who is experienced with running a business like this. to me, it seems very much like they got in a room together and did some extremely optimistic income ballparking with no research behind it.

and that might have been fine for three dudes running a channel alone, but if they're a business, they have to start making decisions like one.

#said infinitely better than how I did #I’m tired of the absolutely busted take of ‘these ARTISTS chose to pay people a GREAT WAGE and it’s YOUR responsibility to pay for that’ #like nah I do think you should support your favorite artists when you can but not unconditionally #if theyre out there burning money with no long term plan #I don’t have to agree to throw mine on the pyre because I liked a video of theirs #watcher #watcher entertainment

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Sorry for talking about this again but I keep seeing people go “oh don’t you think artists deserve to be paid for their work??” in response to the watcher shit and it’s so…. disingenuous, by that logic we should all be fully in support of NFT artists and YouTubers who sell shitty online courses for exorbitant amounts of money, one of my biggest issues with this is that a subscription service is an inherently predatory business model that typically relies on the customer forgetting they signed up, making them jump through so many hoops to unsubscribe in the hopes that they’ll give up and keep giving them money, and making the refund process just as difficult as the unsubscribing process so the service can keep the money they scammed out of the customer

You also really can’t guilt people into paying for such a highly unreasonable price, Hulu is $7 a month, $2 with a student discount, and has over 1,200 shows and 1,300 movies, even rooster teeth at its peak had a lot more content to offer to their subscribers than watcher does, even dropout, which I’ve seen far too many people compare this to, has over 20 shows, many of which with multiple seasons, the longest of which being dimension 20 with 21 seasons and over 200 episodes, the other service I’ve seen people bring up is nebula, which has 175 content creators on it and is a dollar cheaper than watcher tv, watcher does not have nearly enough content to justify the $6 a month fee

I should also point out nebula has a membership option in which you pay a one time fee and get access to the service forever without ever having to pay again, which, yes, while it may be expensive, it’s also much better in my opinion than a predatory subscription-based model

This is also not an artistic decision, it is a business decision, artists can make shitty business decisions too, it doesn’t make them exempt from criticism just because they’re an artist

#beyond fair #saying ‘oh so you only support them when it’s free’ is so cold of a take #like I don’t owe them my money no matter what they do if they make a sudden and violent shift in product #half the comments I have seen other than the ‘I can’t afford this’ folks have been about not knowing they even had a Patreon #I am one of them #if I’d known they’d had a patreon id have joined it #because my money is going towards THE PUBLIC seeing their stuff #but to just subscribe to their Vimeo paywall in the name of some artistic value? #nah fam #just because they’re making a thing doesn’t mean I have to support it #watcher #watcher entertainment

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Do I feel bad about how mean some of the Watcher comments are? Ah, sort of.

But mainly when I see people posting things like 'I no longer have to pretend that anything they did on Watcher was as good as Unsolved' I'm struck by how it just shows that people followed them, and stuck with them, out of love, loyalty and respect. So when the illusion of those feelings being mutual was shattered well, this is basically post-divorce honesty hour. It's the paraosocial relationship break up equivalent of 'I never really liked your apple pie.'

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Not to talk about the watcher thing again as I’ve already kind of said my piece, but one of the most batshit insane parts of this whole unbelievable situation is that for some reason they decided that for some fucking reason the BEST time to announce this highly controversial decision was literally DAYS before they would be going on an international tour and having to face irate fans IN PERSON. Guys. What the hell. At least have the sensibility to announce a move that you HAD to have known would make people upset AFTER one of the few times you actually interact in person with your fanbase.

I hope you’re ready to investigate the Tower of London for ghosts, because I have a feeling the Londoners will be more than happy to acquaint you with the building later this week.

Insane move after insane move. Truly.

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As a casual fan of Watcher and avid fan of train wrecks I am having a wonderful time right now

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I just know all the YouTube video essayists/commentators just launched themselves at their computer to start scripting The Downfall of Watcher, 3:54:08

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Shane “share the passwords” Madej you’ve got some explaining to do!

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"Steven isn't solely responsible for the paywall shift" and "Nobody wants to watch Steven eat insanely expensive food and have to pay for it" are statements that can coexist btw.

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steven lim: we actually need more money for higher production value so that you guys have the best! and we're bringing back a super expensive show! for you guys, the fans!

the fans: