Hey Guys, I've Got A Great Idea, Hear Me Out...

6$ IS nothing but 6$ times the hundreds of channels I watch (I counted), that is not nothing.

Here is the thing that made me angry about this They have a Patreon. They were getting money from 13,000 members of it. It has a $5/month plan. If they wanted to encourage people to give them money, then they had a platform existing. Instead they wanted to keep the Patreon AND add this other subscription service I mean... Netflix doesn't have a Patreon. They had to make a choice - be a streaming service and make money from that and drop the Patreon. Or keep the Patreon and be a youtuber. You can't do both without being seen as greedy. They could, of course, simple offer a new tier to their Patreon and say "Hey, if you wanna see episodes of this new show XYZ then sign up for our $7/month Patreon tier since we will be releasing it exclusively on that!"

As someone who supported the boys since before they created Watcher and followed them from BF, you pretty much hit it on the head. They have a massive Patreon as well, and a lot of us, including me, canceled our support there in protest because they missed not only that $6 is more than some u.s. viewers could afford, but also that many of the international fans would've been completely screwed by the exchange rate. They made a lot of missteps. They'd hyped up the announcement as something exciting for a few weeks, and for them it probably was, but for us it kinda came across as a shocking slap in the face. What they ended up going with satisfied most of the fans, and had they done that initially, there probably wouldn't have been much of a backlash.

a nuanced opinion that expresses critical thinking in a you-tube video? preposterous!

They also made the mistake of thinking that because they wanted to do new and different things that their audience therefor wants to see that new and different thing. It's not that uncommon for companies/channels to believe they can force their users into 'the new thing' just because the companies/channels thinks it's good. Personally I think it's because channels start to lump people into a category of 'viewer' and think less about the complexity of all the individual people.

Many of us stopped paying for cable because eventually $100 seemed excessive. I don't mind ads or sponsorship ads on podcasts or YouTube because people deserve to make money for their work. Just a lot of us can't afford $5-10 for 1 show every month

FWIW the phrasing of Hanlon's Razor is "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." So yeah, correct word. And you rock too!

I mean....imho they did kinda do it for greed. Their ceo was and still is pushing a new show no one wants to watch which is him flying around the world and eating expensive food in expensive places.

In relation to 12:30, I think it speaks volumes of your channel, your personality and your way of discussing a range of topics, that I watch ALL your videos. I'm dyscalculic, and I struggle with a lot of mathematical and scientific topics (finding them hard to understand/inaccessible), but the way you talk about things is always in such an excited and curious way that makes me excited and curious to learn more. So thank YOU for being you!

I do believe they are mishandling their finances in some form. Rather than attempt to make a new platform to get more money, a financial advisor or manager would have sufficed. Its just as expensive to maintain a streaming service and I worry about their future.

My impression of the Watcher debacle was that they did it for the money, but not out of greed. They have a large team, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and they scaled up to it very quickly. I suspect that they over hired based on their early growth rate, and now have too many people. So going for more money to cover payroll rather than cut personnel.

I miss the ghoul boys but I don’t want to support what they did. Literally just one community poll could have helped. The issue stands in the fact that they didn’t consider the many of their long time fans that got them to where they were. They didn’t engage with their audience at all about this decision. It felt disingenuous when they spoke, like they didn’t care about those of us who couldn’t pay. My issue with it was the tonedeafness of that announcement, the fact their website was broken on day one, and that they never discussed it with their audience prior or mentioned it before now. It felt like they couldn’t care less about what their audience wanted, and what was good for them.

Music industry is a good example. Bands for sure can make music for themselves. That works. But if they change their style then that's the end of the band, like 99% of the time.

I know nothing about this stuff, but my first thought is... if you're going to ditch youtube and start your own streaming service - how do you attract new viewers? You're going to initially bring a certain number of people over, but after time people will start dropping out. Then how do you bring in new viewers/customers to take their place? The youtube algorithm, for what it's worth, is basically free advertisement.

The whole "we'll make our own platform" thing never goes the way creators want it to (RoosterTeeth being my best example), the vast majority just aren't going to incorporate another paid (or even free) service to their content rotations. I pay for YouTube premium because I find ads very annoying, if someone is gonna move their whole content library and all future content to a totally different, new paid site, they will just leave my content rotation. Now if they offer additional stuff, such as extended content or exclusive podcasts or whatever, I might go out of my way to pay for that (I paid for RoosterTeeth's premium website sub for years because videos dropped early, weren't censored, and there were a few exclusive shows that I liked), but yeah if the feeling is that you are taking content away rather than offering additional content at a premium, aint no way. Also I know from experience with RoosterTeeth that these alternative "YouTube" platforms end up just being YouTube but worse, you REALLY gotta love someones content to stomach paying for a worse version of a free thing that you also already use every day for every other video you watch. Not to mention that it probably won't have a mobile app, or if it does it'll be worse, and it might not have all the stuff we take for granted like background playback. YouTube is like this magic thing that always works, but hosting videos on your own website is no simple task, especially when you aren't a trillion dollar company.

The idea that $6 or $4 or whatever a month is affordable kind of misses the point that it adds up when you're expected to give that amount or more to multiple content creators across multiple platforms. Then it starts getting expensive & inconvenient. Right now 3 of the streaming platforms we've had for quite a while have begun running limited ads even tho they are paid subscriptions. Wtf. I find myself missing cable at this point. At least I could watch a large number of network tv shows & movies in real time & record them if I wanted to skip the commercials. Streaming also seems geared to smaller screens(phones & tablets) for the most part. What about all those HD big screen TVs? The video quality is definitely lacking in streaming.

I don't blame anyone for trying to make more money for the work they do without oversite from a company that imposes their own arbitrary form of cencorship or monitization. The public will either support what you do or not. There are YouTube channels I love but I will survive nomatter who decides to pull the plug. That said, I do wish there was a better YouTube competitor that is content creator friendly and doesn't oppressivly beat down viewers with ads.

Love the Shirt! Buy 9 spatulas and get the 10th one for just 1 penny!!

Joe has a spatula city shirt!? Yooooooooo! As a 1989 baby I need one UHF is a cinematic masterpiece

I'm a fan of watcher and it was a bit shocking when that first video came out. I hope that they stick to what they said in the apology. Also liked your point of view of this situation!