I need to vent about Watcher, endure it if you can
Relax, this isn't a parasocial thing, but it is a long ass post, which suits me as a long ass human.
I need an outlet to discuss the terrible business decision Watcher has made by announcing their plan to leave YouTube, and this long-forgotten Tumblr account reached from its grave to grab at my ankle.
If you didn't see their video, good for you. It's extremely cringe-worthy in its sentimentality and editing, with blurry shots, pensive pauses and obligatory sad piano.
But at least there's no f'ing Ukulele.
Although, I think we might get the Ukulele in a few months.
Even though anyone who reads this is probably familiar with what the "Ghoul Boys" have done, I feel as though I need to add a little history.
You can skip this part if you've been obsessively following the shenanigans, this is for the noobs who were never a "shaniac" or a "boogara".
Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara used to work at Buzzfeed. They hosted the successful Buzzfeed Unsolved shows. In 2019 they followed in the footsteps of the Try Guys and Safia Nygaaard and left Buzzfeed to create their own YouTube channel named "Watcher".
They brought along Steven Lim, another Buzzfeed person who is most known for the "Worth It" series. This series followed Lim and his friend/s spending obscene amounts of money on obscenely overpriced and indulgent products.
Think of it as being similar to the $100 V's $10,000 Sidemen content, only without the self-awareness and British "bad lads" humor.
Notably, even the Sidemen seem to have cut back on those adventures, perhaps understanding how bad it looks when so many people are struggling to pay their essential bills.
Steven became the CEO of Watcher while Shane and Ryan continued to create and present for the new channel.
They were wildly successful by YouTube standards. At the time of their self-spanking on Friday they were close to achieving 3 million subscribers, in just 4 years, based on basically only 2 cornerstone shows. If Social Blade is still a reasonably trusted source in everything but estimating income, they were gaining thousands of new subscribers every week.
Their most successful shows were Ghost Files, Puppet History, Too Many Spirits and Mystery Files.
Ghost Files is the only one of these shows which requires heavy investment, travel, a large crew and impressive production costs. These videos are shot on-location and require a lot of work. The rest are basically Good Mythical Morning style, just the two hosts and their banter.
Aside from Ghost Files, their content could be created with 3 cameras, 2 lapel mics and a good editor.
They were massively successful, solely because of Ryan and Shane.
So, what did they do on Friday 19th April? They decided to announce the launch of their own subscription platform.
Not a Patreon for extra content, behind-the-scenes, audience interaction etc, (they already had a Patreon with 6,000 paying subscribers earning them at least $50k a month), but a bespoke streaming platform which looks like a clone of Netflix.
The cost is $5.99 a month, or $60 a year.
And by that I mean the price is comparable to Netflix while the content is comparable to a 4 year old YouTube channel.
Don't get me wrong, their production quality is incredible. The quantity, however, is not.
From the end of May viewers will have to pay to be a subscriber on their own platform in order to watch their shows.
They'll still be posting their trailers on YouTube, and the first episodes of new shows, but to watch it all you'll have to pay up or miss out.
Edited to add: Variety originally reported the Watcher crew were planning to remove all their existing content from YouTube to monetize it on their own platform. It's since been confirmed they will not be removing their old content. Fans are undecided whether this was a back-track after the announcement or a misunderstanding by Variety. You be the judge.
Of course, they're entitled to do this. They are creating a product and you can either enjoy it or not. No one is entitled to see it, for free, whenever they like.
Half of the sombre video gushes about their "humble beginnings" as "struggling young guys in a big harsh world", which comes across as extremely self-indulgent and ego-stroking.
A quarter of it explains how insanely successful they've been on YouTube and how this is all thanks to the fans who stuck with them after Buzzfeed, how it's allowed them to hire 25 people, how it's given them the freedom to create what they enjoy making and what the viewers want to see, and - most importantly - how it's allowed them to increase production quality on Ghost Files.
The final quarter of the video explains that this isn't good enough, the quality isn't high enough, the finish not glossy enough, it's not "TV caliber" enough! They want more, they need more, you have to give them more, mostly (apparently) because their CEO Steven Lim wants to bring back his show where he flies around the world with his bestie sipping Champagne and eating gold-leaf-covered lobster.
In short, they want more money to make even bigger things, even though their audience never asked for that.
Oh my goodness, this is going to be a ride so strap in.
I'm not a YouTube creator so there are a lot of things I do not know. Having said that, I know a little about business.
This ain't Buzzfeed, y'all
Watcher became successful because of Ryan and Shane. It was their friendship, their personalities, and the content we loved to watch featuring them at Buzzfeed, that brought us along for the ride.
The audience they poached from Buzzfeed is there for them and Ghost Files. It's not there for Steven Lim and "Worth It". His show worked under the Buzzfeed umbrella only because they had numerous sub-categories in that community to support it.
The Try Guys left and created their own channel from their Buzzfeed fans.
Safia Nygaard left and created her own channel from her Buzzfeed fans.
Shane and Ryan left and created Watcher from their Buzzfeed fans.
Steven Lim left and became the CEO of Watcher. He didn't take his audience with him.
The audience of Watcher is not the audience of "watch me fly around the word with my pal and spend $100K on hand-reared, Whiskey marinaded, diamond-encrusted Kobe steak".
Steven chose to become a CEO instead of a presenter. He's missed the opportunity to take that Buzzfeed audience with him.
This is made clear by the Watcher channel itself. Their "man eats food" content rarely breaks 500K views while their Ghost Files breaks 2 million consistently.
If a million of their viewers followed them from Buzzfeed to Watcher, the other 2 million have joined them since, based almost entirely on their spoopy content.
Not only did they base their channel on this genre and format, they have distilled their audience further ever since the creation of their channel and no matter how hard they try to diversify into "man eats food" it's just not working.
This ain't Netflix, y'all
As mentioned, the $5.99 charge is comparable to Netflix and just about every other streaming platform. Only Watcher can't give you even 5% of what a competing platform can offer for that price.
Other platforms also tailor their content and their pricing based on geographical location and localized economics.
You're paying far less than $5.99 a month if you live in an economy where the median household income is $300 a month. YouTube has a global audience. Their subscribers don't all live in a stable economy where $5.99 is considered disposable income.
We don't know the numbers, but I would guess only 60% of their subscribers are based in the USA, Canada, and the UK.
Even for those who do live in a stable economy, their audience is predominantly young adults and students. Most young adults are currently facing the reality that they will possibly never own their own home, they're living day-to-day trying to budget.
They've instantly priced-out a large % of their audience.
I confidently predict that diehard fans who can't see anything wrong with this will sign up for $5.99 a month, binge watch for a couple of weeks, realize there's no new spoopy content and cancel.
They'll come back when a full season of Ghost Files has arrived, pay again, binge it and leave.
Steven Lim thinks they're gonna get $5.99 a month, every month, from thousands of subscribers. In reality they're going to get maybe $12 a year, from people signing up to binge watch what they want, then leaving.
This will then decline naturally as attention wanes during the months where there is no spoopy.
This ain't good marketing, y'all
They're going to be posting "trailers and season pilots" on YouTube.
Sure, I bet YouTube is gonna be totes okay with a channel doing nothing but trying to hijack traffic for an external site.
Posting nothing but trailers and season premiers will mean maybe one full video per month during busy seasons. That's not enough to remain relevant for the algorithm.
If 80% of those posts are also just trailers saying "leave YouTube and come here", the channel will be smacked down quicker than a crypto scam using an AI generated Elongated Muskrat.
Their channel was growing steadily, but that was with full content regularly posted. When the schedule drops off, and when most of it is considered spammy by YouTube, it's going to collapse like a flan in a cupboard.
A streaming platform needs a constant flow of new subscribers just to replace the gradual drop-off (maybe ask Rooster Teeth about that). When your global audience at YouTube is gone, where are those new subscribers coming from?
The platform is also an additional overhead. It's going to cost thousands a month to keep the servers going.
This ain't good financial management, y'all
I don't know if they've already spent hundreds of thousands of $s on Lim's "men eat food" gamble, but I suspect they have.
I know they have spent hundreds of thousands of $s on a new season of Ghost Files, flying to the UK to host live events while filming those episodes.
This means they've over-extended their finances just at the moment where they've cratered their opportunities to see a return on investment.
Just that, on its own, is enough to destroy a production company.
They do not need 25 employees any more than I need an editor and proof-reader for this long ass post.
They do not need a production studio in Hollywood any more than I needed an office to write this.
They do not need to spend tens of thousands of $s on glossy graphics that appear on screen for maybe 4 seconds in one episode any more than I needed to add screengrabs to this painfully long essay.
By leaving YouTube they've lost:
Adsense revenue (which might not be much on a per-video basis but adds up with a back catalogue over years of productions)
Sponsorship deals, which allegedly contributes almost 50% of their annual revenue.
Merch sales, which is about to crash if the only people they can promote merch to are already paying per month in their smaller ecosystem.
Patreon. Why would someone pay $5.99 twice, for the same or less content?
And they've abandoned all of this for maybe a few thousand people who will probably end up paying just $12 a year when a new spoopy season arrives for them to binge.
I'm no Will Hunting, but no matter how hard I try to make the numbers work they just don't, and I don't need Robin Williams to tell me it's not my fault.
Some of you are feeling like Ned's wife right now, and some of you will have no idea what that's in reference to.
Most of you will hate that I made that reference more than you hated the SNL skit.
Maybe the worst part about all of his, from a viewer's perspective, is the dismissive nature of their sign-off.
They didn't mention the Patreon members once, not one single time in the whole video. It's like they consider the Patreon "too YouTube". They're the deformed cousin locked in the attic. They're the relative who wasn't invited to the wedding because they can't afford a Tom Ford suit. They're the colleague who isn't invited to the staff night out because they only work in accounting and no one has anything in common with Janice anyway.
These are diehard fans who were actually paying them extra to support them and enjoy a little bonus behind the scenes, and the boys didn't even consider them worthy of an utterance.
They also finished with "If you don't follow us and pay up it's been real, peace out". I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically what it was.
They spent so much of the video saying how awesome and great it was that the fans and YouTube got them to this point, but they didn't thank their Patreon members, and they ended with a blunt suggestion that if you don't follow them and pay more then you're not a real fan anyway and they don't really need you.
"Thanks for getting us here, sucks to be you, bye now!"
You made them wealthy, you helped them hire 25 people, you helped them increase production value to "TV caliber" even though you didn't ask for that, but your job is done and now you're superfluous. Only the real fans are wanted.
In the words of the great George Carlin - "It's a big club, and you ain't in it".
They're okay losing the vast majority of the people who got them here if a few thousand of those are comfortable enough to be able to pay $60 a year for a YouTube channel.
We've had a weekend to enjoy the constant heat of this bonfire and it's predictably worsened with each hour of silence from the company and its employees.
The fact that they haven't back-tracked, despite almost unanimous agreement that this is badder than the baddest thing that could happen to their company, suggests they're okay with it.
Consensus seems to be that they knew it would be this bad, and they're cool. They predicted 90% of people would scream "Boo to you good sirs! Boo indeed!" and they could still survive on the 10% who don't see a problem here.
The lack of response reinforces the narrative that they're totally fine with discarding almost their entire audience if they can just squeeze the cash they need out of whoever is left.
This ain't fixable, y'all (maybe)
Note: I don't want this to be mean, but it's going to sound a little bitchy no matter how I try to say it.
If they'd brought out the Ukulele on Saturday, or even teased Ukulele's on their socials before putting out a video on Sunday, they probably could have survived this with much hand-wringing and a little groveling.
But now I think they've grilled this Kobe steak for far too long.
They've lost 100K subscribers, and counting. The venom among Patreon members is allegedly worse than the public comments section under the video, which is startling. Dozens of YouTubers are torching them harder than a $100 crème brûlée.
People are scraping their channel content in case it's nuked.
Shane "eat the rich" Madej's sentiments over the last few years look disingenuous, to say the least. To shamelessly steal someone else's comment: "Imagine being all 'eat the rich' right before throwing yourself on the plate". He's silent while his McMansion burns down, at his own hands. "Why not!?" indeed.
Steven "I drive a Tesla" Lim's socials now make him look like a tech-bro try-hard and his use of words like "early adopter" and "soft launch" in the video only compound the belief that this was all his brainchild. He is the CEO, and that comes with responsibility and the associated blame. You can't steer the ship into the Bermuda Triangle and then disappear without looking like the bad guy.
Okay, you can disappear, but that convoluted metaphor is a mystery for someone else to solve.
Ryan "TV caliber" Bergara now sounds like an elitist who thinks YouTube is "too pedestrian" for his big plans, not big enough to meet his artistic vision. You see, he's more James Cameron, while YouTube is more like your student film club. He's grown beyond this pesky platform with billions of daily hits offering exponential growth with almost zero financial risk.
Even if they released a video today admitting they messed up big time it's still going to be hard to get the taste of this Ghost Pepper Warhead out of the collective mouth of their viewers.
This hasn't just burned their shared brand, it's singed their individual reputations among an audience upon which their careers rely.
What they should have done, on Saturday, is release a video (Ukulele or no) confessing their error. They should have announced their new platform will instead just be a bigger and better Patreon, with early access to everything, behind-the-scenes content, extra features, audience interaction etc.
They should have reversed to make clear their YouTube channel will stay the priority, their main source of revenue, but that you could get more on their own platform if you want it.
And, maybe, over time, people will pay for that. If they grow their channel to 6 million subscribers in the next 4 years there will be a couple hundred thousand of them willing and able to pay $5.99 a month for 8 years of shows, 8 years of behind the scenes content, 8 years of community involvement and regular early access to new episodes.
Maybe then they could try out their "privileged guys eat expensive food in expensive places" show and see how it does? Maybe a majority of people won't be living on the cusp of poverty by then and it won't look as tone-deaf as a 13 year old YouTuber trying to cover Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah"? Maybe then they could hire another 50 people and make Bergara's "TV caliber" (I still don't know exactly what that means) game shows and reboots?
The clock has been ticking since they hit that "publish" button on their career ending video, but that clock is about to count down to zero and silence will permeate throughout their previously lively community.
That 1980s basement set needed someone crying in the corner, right?
The problem is, their own platform is not a terrible idea. Really, it's not the worst thing they could do. The badness came in the timing, the switch, the middle finger and the f you. They could have released this as an extra, their own Patreon alternative, waited, developed it over time into something sustainable and established.
They could still try to do that and hope this dark chapter is forgotten.
Maybe I'm wrong? Maybe Lim is a financial genius with more skill than the management of Rooster Teeth and their corporate parent company combined? Maybe this gamble will be wildly successful despite all streaming services down-sizing or just going bankrupt? Maybe they won't be back on YouTube in 3-6 months begging for views after having to lay off 20 of their employees?
I know this... if I were one of those 25 employees blind faith would not be enough to stop me from looking for another job.
I suppose this will, for now, remain... a mystery.
I'm not writing another essay about this, but I'm glad to see they've backtracked and made the right choice to use WatcherTV as any sane creator would - to host early access and exclusive content in addition to their YouTube channel.
Over time, while promoting it in every video, building up that trust and fan base, it can be a secure and long-term financial bonus helping them to expand their business incrementally as finances allow.
Why this wasn't the plan all along is anyone's guess. Gambling everything on this was never the sane decision.
I still think they need to scale back on costs. I still think the food content is not currently a viable source of income while being a serious drain on resources. I still think they need to stop hiring all their friends and they need to hire one person who doesn't have personal relationships with everyone there and can make the tough business decisions.
No one likes firing people, it's ten times worse when it's a friend. But this is a reality of business and just wishing it wasn't so isn't going to make it go away. It would be awesome if we could all run a business where we can hire all our friends and family, never have to rely on any outside funding, make whatever we want, make a great living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and continue to grow.
That's just not the reality.
Their apology was genuine, in my opinion. I just hope they can work out the right financial balance.
