allhailbrokeloose

[allhailbrokeloose]

really? am i supposed to feel sorry for a dude driving tesla? and no im not entitled to free content i watch it while its free and i pay with my time or where do those views they love to brag about come from? if it’s not free im just not gonna watch simple as that, ik it may sound groundbreaking but their content is not as vital for my survival as six fcking bucks

[allhailbrokeloose]

[allhailbrokeloose]

people are acting like we’re saying creators shouldn’t be paid for their work; they absolutely should. and watcher already is. they have a patreon, they get sponsors, their videos regularly get millions of views which gives them ad revenue, they sell merch; they are getting paid. feeling indignant and disappointed that they’re asking us to pay for content we were already getting for free isn’t entitlement, it’s expected. ​they wanted to make bigger produced shows and now their budget can’t sustain it, that’s not on the viewer to make up for

[allhailbrokeloose]

i'm seeing that y'all are gonna let watcher control the narrative and act like we misunderstood them and they were never gonna remove their stuff from youtube. you can say whatever you want about their streaming service, but one thing is a fact: they are lying to us pretending that was not their intention and we're spreading misinformation. we not only aren't stupid and understood the video correctly, but also they told variety that that's what they were doing.

[allhailbrokeloose]

Really weird how many of you worship Shane and Ryan so hard that you're like "They have a right to be paid for their art!! Stop being a brat and support them!!"

Like it's not about whether or not I want them to make money. Obviously I do. It's about how they:

teased this as a big exciting update

have been dropping serious amounts of cash on shows that no one asked for

hinted in the video that they are doing this so that they can continue to do the big expensive shit that no one asked for

keep reminding us that Steven drives us a Tesla for some godforsaken reason

are acting like everyone on earth can afford the subscription and that international exchange rates don't exist

skipped over a million other options like patreon shows and ad-supported independent streaming before jumping straight into thinking they deserve a streaming service

Like can you stop being parasocial for one second and realize how fucking terribly this has been handled. They are showing zero respect to their audience both in their decision and how it was presented. Can you not look at that and think "Huh, maybe my guys fucked this one up?"

#boy did they fck up big time #they could have at least tried to do it nicely but they had to be arrogant assholes about it

[allhailbrokeloose]

love that everyone is united in just going “terrible idea. wish you the best. thanks for the laughs. bye.”

[allhailbrokeloose]

genuinely cannot imagine dickriding the watcher guys the way some of you have been. like they made a bad business decision! they alienated their audience! they made jokes about "eating the rich" and then one of their owners turned around and bought a tesla! they said they'd pull all their old content off youtube and then immediately backpedaled and started gaslighting the people who noticed it! they're just guys on the internet, they're not your friends and they are not anti-capitalists. they just want money and they don't care about their primarily young/international/non-wealthy audience.

#EXACTLY #THIS

[allhailbrokeloose]

smells a bit like kp0p over morals bc why you running around poor shaming ppl for the sake of three dudes that just slapped you in the face? wanna pay for it go right ahead but don’t expect other ppl to be this unhappy about their lives

[allhailbrokeloose]

shout out to the 5 1/2 people defending watcher….couldn’t be me but I gotta appreciate the parasocial dedication

[allhailbrokeloose]

The most important comment in this whole mess

[allhailbrokeloose]

it's also kind of insane how fan reliant their business is. aside from are you scared, too many spirits, ghost files that literally use fan submitted stories as their premise, the marketing done by the fanbase is huge. i alone have several watcher posts over 10k notes on here that have breached containment and made it to people's dashboards who don't know what watcher is or never seen an episode. i've had the watcher socials use my posts as memes on their own sites. even the biggest memes that are still from their bfu days (hey there demons, it's me ya boy) is good marketing. what are they gonna do when all of this goes away?

[allhailbrokeloose]

i lied abt only posting abt this situation once, i just saw this lovely person’s comment!! passing it on to tumblr 🫡

#idk if it’s working but.. #for anyone who wants to 🏴‍☠️ #bc i honestly feel like ive lost the spark #i will never be able look at them the same way

[allhailbrokeloose]

also shane is the only one acknowledging that what they are doing is silly jokey stuff (even tho his content is the most valuable) the other two really think they are redefining the industry here. btw unsolved only became popular bc of shane after shane joined. and idk why worth it was popular i never seen a single episode but im sure it’s not bc of steven he’s unlikable af

[allhailbrokeloose]

ppl who are defending this controversial decision are saying they have the right to profit off their content as if they weren’t doing so before! they weren’t doing charity and it’s never about the community or whatever. where does that tesla come from and ofc those 200 dollars jackets if you will (lol)? not like they were driven by pure enthusiasm magic of friendship and concern for your mental health all this time but finally snapped and decided to get at least six bucks out of it. truth is the boys got greedy and it cost them their entire career

#rightfully so if you ask me

[allhailbrokeloose]

gonna buy this god-forsaken web site and charge all y'all $8 a month to edit reblogs.

#better business model than watcher

[allhailbrokeloose]

i love how u can tune into mystery files like hehe silly boys discussing fun mysteries! and ryan and shane are like btw fuck capitalism fuck racism don't trust the government also you should steal things

#aged like fine milk

[allhailbrokeloose]

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.