embeedoesstuff

[embeedoesstuff]

🍁🍃

[embeedoesstuff]

Jedi-isms

What Jedi say: Emotions lead down a dark path.

What Jedi mean: Calm your tits before you hurt somebody.

What Jedi say: The Force shall reveal the time for action.

What Jedi mean: Nah.

What Jedi say: I sense darkness in you.

What Jedi mean: Hey, asshole.

What Jedi say: The Force works in mysterious ways.

What Jedi mean: That’s the worst question I’ve ever heard.

What Jedi say: I will meditate on your words.

What Jedi mean: Go fuck yourself.

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FUCK

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i think for me, the watcher situation comes down to this:

it's absolutely respectable that the watcher team wants to grow and produce better quality content. it's respectable that they don't want to stagnate and end up pushing the same content out over and over again. that's not satisfying for them creatively, i get that.

however, if higher quality, more heavily produced content is not what your fans are asking for, then you can't ask them to fund it.

this all-or-nothing method they've gone for is frankly bizarre. it feels like they leap-frogged all other alternatives to improving their finances and ended up here, alienating and frustrating the majority of their fanbase (the fanbase they thanked for getting them to where they are).

i think this could have gone a lot better if they:

Hadn't hyped up this video for a week.

Hadn't announced the worth it successor just beforehand.

Hadn't put out a wishy-washy, "boo hoo we're so sad about this", over-produced video.

Hadn't made it $6/month (more in a lot of countries given exchange rates).

Had considered that this means fans in specific countries literally cannot pay for the subscription due to geo/region-locking.

my ideas for improving their funds, aka things they could have tried before blowing their brand up: create their own website with two options - a free version with ads and a paid version without ads, OR make better use of their patreon/make their website extra content, not all their content, for example:

Put the ghost file debriefs on there.

Put shows like survival mode on there (or even shift that show from pre-recorded video to live-stream - live stream access to patrons and VOD access to everyone, maybe).

Put episode commentaries there.

Do reaction videos to their old buzzfeed content, talk about memories and BTS, and put that there.

Put one/two episodes of each show, per season on there (and ONLY there).

Put the episodes up there a few days early.

Make specific, website only content (that's not your main and most popular series aka ghost files and puppet history).

Record the live, in-person shows and put those VODs up there.

EDIT (thought of something else lmao): put extended or even uncut versions of ghost files on there. Paranormal Detour on Detune's twitch channel has shown that people will willingly sit through 6+ hours of a ghost investigation.

EDIT: idk, do livestreams once a week where you watch scary movies with fans on discord or twitch.

(side note: the fact that they're not taking down their patreon and instead shifting all of their podcast content on there, something the patreons who have been loyally giving them money for years didn't ask for, is ridiculous and greedy. add to this the fact that they don't even get a free sub to the new website, instead get 40% off - a measly 10% more than anyone else who subs before the official launch).

the thing for me is that they're claiming they want to make "television" and "television-grade content". that's completely fine. what's not completely fine is acting like your four episodes a month is equal to netflix's entire catalogue.

this really felt like it should have been something they told us they were progressing towards, not something they revealed to be on the imminent horizon. idk, it just feels out of nowhere. no, they don't owe us all of the info about their company. but something had to be better than this.

final thought - it's okay and valid to be upset at the team for this. for a lot of people, it's a complete betrayal (especially the comment that $6 a month is something "anyone and everyone can afford", i mean yikes). i do think some people's anger got the best of them, and some of the comments i've seen across youtube, twitter, and tumblr are plain bullying, racism, and harassment. until we have the whole story, we can't decide that one founder (aka steven in a lot of people's minds) is solely responsible. i know a lot of these awful things are only coming from a small minority of the fandom, but they still get seen.

at the end of the day, all three of them got up in front of a camera and made this video, together. that can only lead us to the conclusion that they made this decision together. acting like these men in their 30s couldn't stand up against it if they truly wanted to, is so strange and parasocial lmao.

tl;dr there were much better ways of going about this announcement, if it even needed to be made at all. however, that doesn't excuse the hateful shit being spewed at the team. for now, all we know is the three founders decided they were done with youtube, and done with their loyal youtube audience.

(i have so many more thoughts on this but i need to stop lmao. however i do wonder how different things could have been if 1. they had hired someone with actual business experience as their CEO from the jump, and 2. this video was more of a "hey we're broke! this is a last-ditch effort to save our company!". guess those questions will remain ... well ... you know ...).

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Am I happy Watcher rolled back their plan and apologized? Yes. Have I still lost any desire to watch their videos? Yes. Do I think people are being too harsh towards Steven, singling him out and such? Yes. Do I think Steven and Andrew bringing back worth it in the middle of a global cost of living crisis is extremely out of touch? Yes.

All of these things can coexist. Feelings towards the situation can be complex. It happens.

[embeedoesstuff]

Absolutely AMAZING response by Watcher imo.

They acknowledged that they made a mistake, made the wider context more clear, and addressed basically all of the criticisms brought forward by the community as far as I know.

Anyone who already subscribed to the streaming service who no longer wants it gets a refund.

Patrons get a free subscription to the streaming service.

The service now only offers early, ad-free episodes that will still be released on YouTube.

They acknowledged the insensitivity of the original pitch and how the price is not something that everyone can afford.

THIS is how you respond to backlash, especially this widespread. Take time to collect your thoughts, take the criticism into account, and change your actions going forward.

Great job Watcher 👏

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[embeedoesstuff]

The most important comment in this whole mess

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and alright, here's my last (let's hope) and boldest take yet. lots of people have been talking about the level of staff (around 25-ish people) at watcher, and whether downsizing that number could have been a potential avenue of reducing costs before just jumping to a subscription model. at first i was like yeah, i'm not sure that there needs to be 18 people involved in making a lets play. i was in the fucking trenches in the unus annus days and i'm still amazed how markiplier and ethan nestor managed to put out pretty well edited videos every day for a whole year with only a handful of editors and a couple people filming. what unus annus was trying to do and what watcher is trying to do are obviously pretty different, but the point is that you really don't need a whole crew of people to make lots of different types of content and do it well.

i still think there probably doesn't need to be a whole production crew involved with the creation of some of the simpler types of content watcher puts out. however, i don't think the size of the staff is the real problem. in fact, i think the staff of watcher probably should have been larger.

let me explain. if i begrudgingly go to one of my most detested websites (linkedin. *bleeegh*) and look up watcher, i can see that pretty much every person on staff is in a creative role of some sort by their own admission. at first glance, its like, oh, that makes sense. they're making creative products, it's natural that they should all be in creative roles. however, once you think about it for a little longer from a business perspective, that fact is really concerning.

after all, by watcher's own definition, this is a production studio. this is a company. So in this sea of creative roles, who's doing corporate planning? Who's managing finance? Who's doing payroll? Or brand outreach? Or human-freaking-resources??? you can hire outside groups for all this. i'm aware. but those services cost a lot of money to contract too. i'm just finding it concerning that there is pretty much no one on full time staff that is there to at least do some of this stuff. if watcher wants to be a big-boy company, that's fine, but that means you have to pay some people to be part of your company to do the not-fun business stuff like accounting. or resource management.

if they want to be a real company, they should actually have a lot more people on staff to deal with all the non-creative parts of running a company. even if they contract out most of it, you want at least a few people that are your people and don't actually work for someone else. that's how you don't get screwed over or end up in a contract you can't get out of.

which leads me to my last train of thought. like, as i go through the staff of watcher and look at what they do, it really seems like one of the ONLY people who's job it was to look at the business side of things WAS steven lim in his role as CEO. and thinking about that, i'm like god, can you imagine?? here's a guy who just wants to create cool stuff too but as one of the few people who has to think about the realities of Brand and the Business, HE has to be the one to burst the bubble. He as CEO has to say no to people and make decisions to make sure the company survives. In a group of creative people who just want to make things they're interested in, no expense spared, he was probably the guy who had to stay at least a little tethered to reality.

I'm not about to say that steven lim isn't to blame here. everyone involved in making the decisions that have led up to this point is part of this. but shit, it absolutely sucks to have to be the person at the end of the brainstorm session when everyone is coming up with their best ideas and to have to say "guys, i don't think any of these things are possible unless we make some big decisions."

is that what happened at watcher HQ? i don't know. at this point, with radio silence from everyone, speculation is all we've got. but if you follow the thread of a bunch of creatives striking out on their own to make their own business after being burned by their former employer, despite not knowing really how to run a business, and then only hiring fellow creative people and not other people who actually run business things... well, all of this starts to make slightly more sense in WHY none of watcher's actions make sense. everybody wants to stick it to the man and be their own boss with their own business, until it actually comes to the hard parts of doing that. at that point people start to realize, "oh, maybe some of the things that existed at my old job were there for a reason, actually."

all this is why lots of creatives striking out and starting their own businesses don't work in the end. they're thinking about in terms of creative products still, when they really need to be focusing more on the "business" part of the "creative business." it's sad. it sucks. it destroys a lot of good ideas and good people, because one person in every company like that has to be the one who thinks practically. could this have been avoided if watcher had been hiring people all along to manage this business and not just adding people to add to the creative output? maybe. even then it might not have been enough to curb other predictable impulses that led us down this path.

i feel bad for watcher, and i feel bad for the fandom. but i can't help but wonder if this was always the kind of situation we were going to end up in, and we just missed some of the warning signs because ALL of us were thinking, "well, that could never happen to us. we're different. not the Ghoul Boys."

[embeedoesstuff]

Ch👏

[embeedoesstuff]

The Beast that Bothers

#cats #funny cats #my nightly suffering

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can’t wait for the next season of Make Some Noise

[embeedoesstuff]

like i'll be honest, steven was never my favorite person to watch. i was fine with the food specific videos but i never loved when he was in other videos. so don't take this as me defending my favorite dude.

there are three people there. even if ryan and shane aren't ceos anymore, they are still founders and company decision makers. steven isn't forcing them to do anything. they are grown men who can make their own decisions and if they hated this That much, they could make the decision to fight back against it or find something else to do. they are content creators in la. it wouldn't be hard for them to do.

just like. i don't like this decision - i think it's stupid, will backfire, and will eradicate a lot of trust fans have. that being said, acting like steven is the Only person making these decisions and that he's forcing poor old ryan and shane like girl be serious. hold All three of them accountable and stop trying to make excuses for grown adults. stop trying to baby ryan and shane.

[embeedoesstuff]

I'm sorry to everyone who follows me for other shit but I'm going to keep posting about the Watcher situation because marketing fascinates me. I find advertising to be sickening and exploitive, but marketing as a concept is fascinating.

I'm just majorly wondering what the FUCK is going on at Watcher HQ right now. It's still relatively early on the West Coast (almost 8 am at the time I am writing this) but their lack of response is throwing up a lot of interesting markers to me (not necessarily red flags but flags all the same.)

The immediate pull back on response speaks that they knew what they were doing in terms of PR at least initially. They had their employees delete any interactions with dissenting fans, there was radio silence except for clarification on what will remain on the Youtube. Their only mistake was making that Patreon announcement with sneak peaks for the site (I can only guess they were banking that the Patrons were most likely to follow them in the move and sorely miscalculated it). Steven's post was... problematic. But he posted it before all of the backlash started so while it didn't help it wasn't a doubling down when faced with a lot of backlash.

While saving face is almost always a smart thing to do, this silence has gone on a little bit too long. They have lost tens of thousands of Subscribers in 24 hours. Their announcement video has over a 1:4 Like/Dislike ratio. Fans are talking and starting to spin the situation in ways that are actively detrimental to the company. It should be top priority to get a response out. This is crisis mode y'all. They had all day to secure a PR representative if they didn't already have one to try and salvage this and yet? Still more radio silence from the official channel.

That creates the question: are we going to see a response today or have they chosen to wait until the traditional work-week starts again? I can't help but think that waiting is a terrible idea. The fanbase is getting out of hand. They need to salvage what they can and letting the situation fester isn't going to help. Or, the even worse option is that they are going to continue like this isn't happening, which is an EVEN WORSE idea.

Whatever happens I'm watching with a perverse fascination. Its been a long time since I've seen a media blunder like this.

[embeedoesstuff]

some of my fave comments so far

ghoul boys its been an honor 🫡

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“oh its all about paying artists until you have to foot the bill” actually it’s more about doing zero market research and jumping to an almost exclusively behind-a-paywall method of content creation. if they had announced that they were doing new series’ with a platform like nebula, that they would be doing kickstarters to fund shows a-la starkid, or that they would be adopting a world of wonder model where they release content 1-2 months early for paying subscribers (but it still eventually is posted for free), i don’t think the backlash would be this severe.

of course creatives deserve to be fairly compensated, and i empathize (as a creative working two jobs to make ends meet) with El Capitalismo ruining everything. but instead of figuring out what their audience wants and trying to prioritize that, they keep trying to ball on a buzzfeed budget despite the fact that leaving buzzfeed for creative freedom means giving up some of the luxuries (cough cough Steven Lim’s Fucking Gold Leaf).

tldr i sympathize deeply with watcher not wanting to lay off employees or sacrifice the “tv level quality” they’ve been trying to uphold. however. they never stopped to consider that most of their fanbase fell in love with their content when they made most of their videos in a basement at buzzfeed with a static camera, and don’t want to (or straight up can’t) foot the bill for expenses that they don’t even really care about.

[embeedoesstuff]

in light of recent news, and in fear of losing one of the only things that brings me joy in my stupid baka life, here's all episodes of puppet history.

pls rb :)