On Friday, the three creators of “Watcher,” a leading YouTube channel with around 3 million subscribers, announced that they would be leaving the platform to create their own paid subscription website, dubbed “Watcher Entertainment. “
Steven Lim, Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara’s decision to leave YouTube comes after more than a decade of creating videos and content. Fans reacted to the news with anger and frustration, with many blaming Lim or YouTube itself for the questionable resolution.
– Shu (@Shu2600) April 19, 2024
Bergara, Madej and Lim at Buzzfeed in the mid-2010s, pioneering many genres of viral videos.
Like the Try Guys and other creators who started using BuzzFeed, all three turned to YouTube when BuzzFeed lost popularity and value. Shows like Ghost Files and Puppet History have gained popularity.
The new subscription service costs $6 per month, a fee for the lowest Patreon subscription tier of the bunch.
After the announcement video, many enthusiasts expressed their anger only at the three creators, but also at YouTube. Watcher is just the newest in a series of prominent and well-established YouTube channels leaving the platform, adding MatPat and Tom Scott.
The reasons for leaving are varied, but many of them resemble changes to the ruleset that would lead to reduced prospects and salaries, as well as a lot of AI-generated festival that makes it harder for human creators to get to work. connect. Public.
Making videos for never has been a very solid or lucrative career for most people looking to do so, however, the changes in the platform’s economics in recent months seem to make it even more complicated than it used to be. viewers, advertisers, and algorithms alike.
Watcher concluded that if they stayed on YouTube, “we created content for enthusiasts and for advertisers,” but if they left, they would create content for enthusiasts.
Some claim that the challenge falls on author Steven Lim, one of the three core members of Watcher. A segment of fans claims that Lim’s food-based series and more experimental content involving higher-budget concepts repeat the mistakes made at BuzzFeed, where a viral video-doing business has become too ambitious and overblown.
Others see BuzzFeed’s story from a broader perspective: It has replaced and the BuzzFeed style has stopped working. Some see the growing number of creators leaving YouTube as evidence that a similar shift may be underway.
He has researched the history of early Internet arts with the Electronic Literature Lab and is co-author of Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 4. He writes hypertext poems in wordways. us and helps keep up with meme news for this internet site.
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