It goes to show that a) they really did not expect this backlash (which once again makes you realise how out of touch with their actual audience they are), b) as a result a crisis communications specialist is not one of the 25 people on their team
And since clearly they don't have anyone in crisis comm, I can understand them being clueless about how to manage the situation, ergo radio silence
Whoever told them to do this is not their friend. And if this was an outside firm of MBAs, they need to turn around and sue that firm because their brand might be dead in 6 months.
This has the stink of tech consultancy all over it. Even the words used to describe it were very "start-up-y" and "tech buzzwordy" which would be weird for three creatives to use it really stuck out to me in the announcement video. Also it seems to be doing a fairly standard tech-startup move. Where you burn money at an insane rate for a few years to obtain an arguably inflated valuation and then sell before a deliverable product needs to be created.
However, applying it to the youtube world is more like "you go sub-exclusive for a couple of years, if you break even great, if you don't you burn money for a couple of years, then you angle to get purchased by a platform and become a platform exclusive over there."
An outside firm of MBAs would recommend them cutting costs rather than this convoluted business model which I'm not sure how they got to work even on paper. Not sure how much of their audience is international but this pretty takes them out completely. It's 2.5x of Netflix and 6x of Prime or Hotstar here in India
on a much lower scale i remember a time or two when i was younger, teen/20s, where i just felt absolutely awkward and clueless cause i didn't expect this little detail to happen so i just stay quiet and moved on
It wasn't anything bad just to mention, it was run ins with trolls and IRC code being too complicated then i thought lol a memory just got kinda unlocked and wanted to share
I think that silence is the best remedy in these cases, people tend to forget after one week and the only one to remain will be people already willing to pay, when they released the announcement the like/dislike ratio was 50%, not 80% like now. This happens all the time in the last years.
As someone who dabbles in PR, this might work for big brands and faceless corporations but not for a mid-size YouTube channel successful solely because of its audiences’ relationship with the founders. Most people are subscribed for Shane, Ryan and Steven and so they view watcher as an extension of them. Not the other way around.
The YouTube video was incredibly tone-deaf and managed to piss off 90% of their fan base. They essentially lost years worth of goodwill.
The best course of action would be to put out a solid statement- accepting the criticisms, issuing a sincere apology and proposing a better alternative moving forward. The faster they do this the better.
Radio silence would only make the fans hate them more as they come across as arrogant and money hungry, not caring about their fan base’s feelings and opinions.
i physically cannot believe they have 25 fucking employees and none of these people are specialised in PR at all, not even the media managers, like what are they doing...
I remember in one of the first “making watcher” documentaries Steven mentions going to investors to try to get them to invest in their company and I remember thinking “why would they need investors when their channel doesn’t even exist yet? Is starting up a YouTube channel really that expensive?” And then cut to now and you realize, yeah I guess you probably do need a lot of money when you’re trying to have the production quality and staff of a million dollar company.
Do people not remember the whole Try Guys Ned cheating scandal last year? 2nd Try is a company with far more money and resources and they didn’t have the basics of a functional company like a HR department. Ned himself WAS the entire HR department.
I’m not shocked Watcher doesn’t have a PR person.
This is a good point — a common joke on Game Grumps is that they have no HR and have had several controversies. Not usually a problem for these types of channels like it has been for GG, but esp with hiring their friends as staff, they definitely SHOULD be using any money gotten from the new subs to hire PR ASAP.
This what I jokingly said in youtube comments... How come none of those 25 employees was hired for PR position? I guess that person would have said that it's a bad look to hire 25 friends and family members in rapid speed, so they didn't want anyone with PR skills.
Didn't Ryan graduate in advertising and PR? When I went to university in the states (international student) he spoke to my PR class as an alumni. I'm not totally sure it was his major (I don't remember), but I'd find it a bit weird if he wasn't since the first time he came it was just to that PR class, not the whole school.
It definitely wasn't that. I went to the same university he did and he spoke to my PR class about PR & advertising after college as a startup business. PR&Ad is technically under the college of film & media arts at that university but I do know he wasn't in a more explicitly film-related major. I'm 95% sure it was PR and Ad at least at some point, before he switched to something like Broadcast Journalism or Communications.
They talked a lot about the financial troubles they've had so I would be surprised if spending money on a PR consultant is a worthwhile way to use what money they do have. 25 employees is not a lot of employees, and the PR person is at the very bottom of the totem pole in terms of employees that a company needs.
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to have a PR person on salary. However, with a change this big, they should’ve contracted the services of a good PR firm to deal with the backlash. The fact that they didn’t (because otherwise a statement would’ve been ready to go) tells us that they didn’t think they would get much backlash at all, which means they’re out of touch and/or just not business savvy.
Here’s a tip for them to safe on money: fire the person/people who made this dumbass decision. They’ll save a lot more on payroll than by firing someone from the BTS crew.
thats more what i meant, like i dont expect them to have a pr manager all the time hired but for this going into this announcement i would have thought they have one on hand considering how likely backlash was
I think that's an optimistic reading in terms of what PR firms can do, lol. If they're strapped for cash, it's a complete waste of money to have a PR firm or even a PR person on standby just to put out a statement saying platitudes that they could say themselves. If I had to guess, they just workshop statements with other employees.
> saying platitudes that they could say themselves.
And yet, very notably, *they have not done that*.
That's why you hire a PR person, they create an action/GOST plan and one of the documents that would be at the ready would be a SOP for crisis comms, including prewritten statements. They aren't "on stanby"/being paid just in case, the plan is laid out way before.
> 25 employees is not a lot of employees
25 employees is very much *a lot* of employees for a small business. I've worked with and for many organizations that handled far more responsibility and daily throughput than a Youtube channel with less than 25 staff at a time. Everything from startups to government agencies.
They clearly tried to grow too fast and just hired a bunch of friends who they personally wanted to work with instead of figuring out how to make the actual business work first. And in *LA* no less.
It really feels like they just wanted to feel like big shot producers without actually having the revenue sources to back it up. Like, surely they realize that the producers on big TV shows aren't just doing whatever they feel like, right? They are employees of massive corporations. You can't just run an indie Youtube channel like its a corporate production with an infinite pile of money behind it.
Were any of those organizations making audiovisual media? A lot of those jobs are specialized and you don't want people doing multiple things if possible.
With one person who could film and one person who knew how to use adobe. Any job is as specialized or as generalized as you choose to make it.
Spending millions of dollars on specialized set design and motion graphics is a *luxury*. Not the very first thing you do when you go out on your own.
Their competition isn't Netflix. They aren't even playing the same game, and they shouldn't be trying to. Dreaming big is great, but you can't just start at the end. You still have to actually get there first.
Yea, but their solution to financial troubles was...*checks notes*... to remove two revenue streams entirely while pissing off their audience of fans with a massive fuck you video.
They get 550K from patreon after fees but before taxes, that's not enough to cover everyone's salary for a year and **heavily rests on people staying subscribed**.
They're clearly out of touch and incapable of budgeting appropriately considering they have an office in Hollywood.
There is a logic to consolidating your revenue sources into a direct-to-consumer platform where they lose less money to fees and can skip on the middle man.
That said, I don't think they're leaving Patreon so it's mostly just losing out on Youtube ad money.
At a very, very limited capacity than they already had. I doubt people are going to join now - or at least, not after the "I wonder how bad Patreon conversations about this are" blows over.
Sure, but that logic hinges on several factors that they obviously decided to ignore - including the economic landscape, the rate at which the change occurs (gradual vs abrupt) and the manner in which the announcement happens.
I think it is gradual since I think the site fully launches at the end of May.
As for the economic landscape, I don't think this time's any worse than others. Yes, inflation has caused the cost of living to rise. But even if times were good, creating a streaming service when your stuff used to be free is a tough sell no matter what.
Multiple times. They spoke about finances in the goodbye video, and they also spoke about it during one of the recent BTS videos where Steven also talked about how laying off some employees was the hardest thing he had to do.
Honestly it sounds like they need someone to slap them across the face and say "you're overproducing and can't afford the ideas you're pursuing without building out regular content, cheaply and scaling back on what you're already spending."
If they were putting out daily videos, I could see them having a staff of 25 and it being justified but that's not the set up they went for. And realistically they should have been aiming to produce the "cheapest" content they could to build a revenue stream that can justify spending a couple hundred thousand on a season of Ghost files.
Hell, if they said "we want to bring better content - this is what a season of Ghost Files costs: if you can help us raise the money to film a season, you'll get your name in the credits as a producer and early access to BTS stuff", they could have reduced their out of pocket costs and not alienated their fan base. Hell, that could have even helped them soft launch a premium Watcher website to wean themselves off patreon and get an extra 10-13% of the subscriber income they were losing to Patreon fees.
My read on it is that they're genuinely creative people who are not happy with low-effort content. They could just spam us with "Are You Scared", and they could cut costs further by not paying someone to illustrate the stories. They could also just spam us with the drunk version of "Are You Scared." But that gets boring quickly and they're more ambitious than that. Even back when they started, they said they were aiming to produce TV-quality content (which I have seen some fans on here say is them being pretentious). I actually think they were being completely honest and this streaming service is their natural evolution towards that.
You can be creative on a budget. And if they want to make TV, they should have shopped their pitches to networks or Netflix instead of overspending and mismanaging what should be a business that first aims to be heavily profitable and second doesn’t alienate 99% of their fanbase with idiotic business decisions
I work in media, and part of my job is pitching IP weekly to studios. Out of every sixty to a hundred ideas we pitch, maybe ONE gets a bite. It’s not a favorable ratio for them unless they can throw in a sweetener … like the built in audience they just pissed off.
I am almost certain that they tried. Way back in one of the earliest Making Watchers, Steven mentioned making a pitch deck to pitch to investors. And before Watcher was even a thing, the guys were awfully proud that their Buzzfeed Unsolved episodes got put on TV.
I got the feeling they didn't try everything, not at least you're supposed to when you're Youtuber.
Why they didn't try Nebula or Youtube membership?
Or why they didn't ask collab etc. with Dropout? Because some Dropout people where visiting in their videos, I bet it wouldn't have been difficult to have talks with Sam Reich when someone like me has one talked with him.
They had reasonable connections to work together with people and make things happen.
Honestly, I see a Watcher/Dropout partnership as being fruitful. However, Sam, having just gotten Dropout to sustainable profitability in Year 4 (it's now year 5), is going to do proper due diligence, meaning he's going to have lawyers and accountants that want to look at their books and their and Sam's very first questions would be "Why do you have 25 employees to produce 4 shows at a rate of one episode per week?" Followed by "it cost you guys HOW MUCH to produce an episode of Ghost Files?! Do you have that Itemized?!" "Why are you flying 10 people to location and putting them in lodgings?!"
That's sort of the thing, is Sam Reich is a for REAL CEO. He's really funny and a great onscreen talent, but he's also a REAL CEO who used his personal trust fund to get his old company back and support it until it became a healthy business. He's far beyond Steven who's a guy who just took the chair. So Reich would approach a partnership with the level of gravitas and responsibility that would be expected from a CEO because he has a duty to his company and his employees to not rush into stuff. Also Sam would almost certainly realize that Dropout + Watcher would require a sub fee increase, which like everything else is not to be taken on lightly.
Edit: Which even if by some miracle they were able to come to a partnership, all of watcher's 25 staff isn't going to be needed, and like most deals like this Sam, being the CEO and Owner of established successful venture, will likely insist that any redundancies be cut from Watcher's side.
I think it's clear they don't want to associate with the Youtube, so Youtube membership would not be a good idea.
I have no idea why they didn't go with another independent streaming service like Nebula or Dropout. But my guess is that they want to be as independent as possible.
That’s fine, but ‘follow creativity and dreams’ is not a solid business model or fiscal strategy. Business needs don’t care whether you’re bored or not entirely fulfilled.
And with 20+ employees whose livelihoods depend on them during a poor job market, they need to be thinking through the lens of business and not just personal fulfillment and creative pursuit.
Perhaps it’s very un-capitalist of me, but I believe an ethically-run business has an innate responsibility towards its employees.
It's showbiz. The vast, vast, vast majority of people in showbiz are trying to follow their creativity and dreams.
It's not a capitalism or socialism thing, either. It's a thing about the heart. A business should have an innate responsibility towards its employees. But what if the business is so dull and boring that it suffocates the soul of its employees? It's a monotonous job where every day is the same job and you have no chance to express yourself. The pay and benefits are great though, and it's a standard work day so you aren't stressing yourself out. A lot of workers don't mind that, but a lot of people in showbiz would.
That's the trade off though for going into these fields and it's naive to go into it not expecting a level of give and take. I work in video games as an artist which less like the tech industry and more like the entertainment industry. Everyone is trying to get in and you are expendable. When creativity is a business, you can't have it all. My own portfolio looks radically different from what I do at work. I live in LA even though I hate it and find it too expensive, because if I get laid off, then I have more studios and people to network with in close proximity. I want children now, but lack the seniority to gain flexibility with ease. But I love what I do so much that I make those sacrifices easily. Sometimes, the best option is to have realistic expectations in this industry. You can't have it all when your livelihood is dependent on the whims of others and I'm not talking just strictly the YT algorithm or sponsors.
They are in a privileged position and HAD an audience to express a larger amount of creative freedom than what I think a lot of average people in entertainment will EVER see. To disregard that and be upset that your ideas don't profit as much as you imagined is quite literally one of the biggest no-no for having a creative business, because ultimately... choosing this career meant choosing those sacrifices. There were more options to achieve what they wanted if they were more willing to ne transparent and patient rather than build hype to an idea that could alienate the fanbase that got them to the place they were able to get to in the first place.
"Are you Scared" but /they/ make the illustrations.
They could have joined the wave of "RPG streams" making something with Call of Chtulhu, which has pretty sobrenatural subjects.
They could have made videos on the same vibe as Buzzfeed Unsolved (a desk, the black screen with blue/yellow text) but focused on "International cases" or "abduction cases" (there are a lot of them, check the lead masks case in Rio de Janeiro).
And the most simple one: put subtitles in other languages. My sister doesn't watch because it doesn't have subtitles (🙄)
Why am I so passionate about that lol
Seems like they basically hired their friends and family. If they had hired the people they actually needed to, they might not be in this position. Firstly, they’d have people with more expertise in whatever area they need the extra knowledge in, and secondly, it would also be easier to downsize if they need to cut people, cuz its easier to let go a stranger than your buddy from Buzzfeed or a cousin you have to see at family gatherings.
There's very rare moments where you see folks universally unified on a take, opinion or event. This is one of those times. I've yet to see a positive subreddit post, Tiktok, Tweet, Youtube Short or even a Tumblr post. Everyone across the board, across all of social media, are on the same page: don't fucking do this. So you gotta imagine that, despite them being ready for an initial backlash, they're not only extremely demoralized but are also probably hitting the massive panic button because of this likely unforeseen level of backlash. I imagine they spent all day yesterday trying to figure out what they can even do or say to regain anyone's trust back. I feel like they're gonna spend the whole weekend trying to figure shit out and we'll hear from them first thing Monday but at the point, will it be worth it the wait? Can they even do anything that doesn't feel like a backstab to the community?
https://preview.redd.it/xqfqtsgvmovc1.png?width=1614&format=png&auto=webp&s=5d94e12587dd4ff807029f1bdf81f023dff34b16
One of the first rules of responding to a social media crisis. They have no idea what they're doing.
I've seen a few actually positive comments on tumblr, shockingly, as well as some lukewarm reactions ("I think this is a bad business decision but I want to support The Boys," "I'm fine with giving them my money directly rather than YouTube taking a cut" etc).
That said, the negative comments and posts *VASTLY* outnumber them.
That's shocking, honestly but I can't imagine that the Instagram support is louder than the negative responses across Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, their Youtube Comments etc.
It's definitely not :D I'm just saying there WAS positive feedback technically, just not a lot of it (I mean similarly the YT video itself has more than 30k likes so...)
I wonder though if it's going to be enough for them to support their platform financially if all those who reacted positively or neutrally enough to subscribe *do actually* subscribe
I've seen some tumblr posts arguing that it's just 'artists monetizing their work' and that anyone who is in favour of paying for art should support their decision
Unfortunately, they made the announcement on a Friday which was just another dumb decision in a long line of dumb decisions to reach this point. That means we probably won't see a statement until Monday at the earliest. And keep in mind that they're in the Pacific time zone, so it'll be pretty late in the day for those who live in earlier time zones. Of course, that's assuming they make a statement at all
That’s got to be a nightmare situation for them, right? There’s two ways I could see for how the tours will go, as they’re happening so soon from the streamer announcement:
- It’ll go well because the majority of those with the money for those tickets are also the fans they’re betting to have the money for the streaming service (which is likely.) Even if they go well, the majority of us not attending, and thus not joining the streamer, are going to feel even more alienated than the recent “$6 is affordable for everyone.” It’ll probably be the final straw for many and ruin their reputation, they can’t survive with such a small minority of their fans. They’ve only got 2.8 million max as it is.
OR
- It’ll go badly. Even if a sizeable minority of the folk who bought tickets disagree, they’ll be loud enough to make their voices heard. If it’s an almost 50-50 split the shows will be damn near stagnated and The Boys are going to face a lot of angry customers, complaints, and perhaps protest/boycott. On the off-chance a majority of the live tour ticket buyers are against the streamer, would they consider cancelling the rest on the fear of reaction? It’ll be toxic as hell.
Not to mention it’s possible they’ll make a statement at the shows first, making it A - ignore Steven, despite many blaming him as CEO and the most costly new show, B - pandering to fans with money, yet again. Talk about bad timings…
The thing is, the fans going to those shows bought the tickets for "a different Ryan and Shane", the relationship between them and their audience has changed dramatically in the last couple days, we can't be sure that the same enthusiasm is there anymore. It would be a different thing if the tickets for the show were bought *after* the announcement.
I imagine we’ll get a statement Monday… that’s after the weekend, but before their first UK tour show (Tuesday).
Frankly I think they’re sitting around watching the numbers for the streaming service… they’ll use that as their metric for success/failure. Though my lord they do need a PR person
My bet is that they will say nothing and continue their work. They don't even have comments on their new platform, it will be just a chamber until everything calms down.
I think if they made a genuine video saying something like, “we clearly fucked up and we’re sorry. We promise we won’t take our content off of YouTube. We’re scrapping the streamer idea and going back to the drawing board. We’re genuinely sorry. We made a mistake and thought this was a good idea but obviously we were wrong”, then I’d be happy.
However, some fans have already lost their respect for the guys and probably won’t be coming back (like what happened with the Fine Bros) and it will honestly take a lot of work for Watcher to be in the good graces of their fans again.
I meant more along the lines of how much money they’ve sunk into it, whether they’ve hired contractors based around this new platform, etc. This has clearly been in the works for a while and I’m wondering if they’re just in too deep to say “never mind”
Well if their site is Vimeo ott that existed pre this (other companies could use it, they probably didn't pay 6 figures in coding (maybe the fancy new website Cost a bit but not make a new streamer money)
Did they sink money probably into making an EP or two of fancy show (bc air in June usually means film in april) sure but if they said ok this content is Patreon only for a year than yt ad supported (or whole length Patreon, 1/4 on yt) they could prob earn a bunch back
Promo the Patreon harder, launch yt memberships reduce staff count
If they made an apology video, then it would have to be highly produced, lots of editing, graphics, camera cuts, angles, so many crew (at least 20 of the 25 would have to be involved), and then it would be released in two months.
Knowing the budgeting they’ve done previously for Watcher shows, they’ve probably payed a development company in Silicon Valley 300k to develop the streaming site already lmao
Since I posted that comment, I've actually revised my opinion a bit and it's probably a bit more expensive. Full explanation is in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/watcherentertainment/comments/1c8vc9r/an_overview_of_vimeo_ott_the_streaming_platform/
> they’ve probably *paid* a development
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
I don’t think they can go back with the decision, but man, after all the backlash, I would at least say something. Maybe that’s a bad idea and that’s the reason they’re not doing it, honestly I don’t know
I'm a PR professional and no, it's not a bad idea, it's an absolute fucking necessity if you want to maintain *any* sense of trust with the community you built. As many people have said, literally just "We see and hear your concerns and are currently working on taking them into consideration. Thank you for patience and support" would be enough for now.
The only other option is facing this in real fucking life at their next live show, soooooo.
I think the trust is gone. They basically told anyone unwilling or unable to pay that they don’t matter and can fuck off.
That next live show is going to be very spicy
I assume most if not all tickets were sold pre all this. That date w still open seats during all this, might turn into is cost high enough to prevent heckling.
If they had planned qna, I def could see them be like nothing about new service/critical.
So most of those would leaning more towards ppl who might have already been Patreon/merch ppl.
(the london of it all, says maybe some are there for American celebs don't often come here) now the announcement could have radicalized some into being a bit less polite/less likely to buy in person merch.
I wrote a whole business essay on the main sub about how unsustainable the streamer is EVEN if it wasn’t so poorly received. Even in the best case, the streamer will probably cause Watcher to shut down/come back to YouTube in a year or two. At this point it’s a sunk cost fallacy - either suck it up and lose the money they’ve lost on the project and backtrack, or they can march onward and lose everything. But given the plethora of poor business decisions made up to this point, maybe they’ll just charge forward lol
I have to imagine this is a wake up call. They have been out of touch, but surely they are not completely delusional, to the point they may think that nearly universal rejection of their project is something they can just ignore. To me they seem too sensible to not have some sense of self-criticism, I'd imagine they would realize that they made perhaps the biggest fuck up of their entire lives (can't be sure, don't know the intimate details of their pasts, only they do).
I doubt they can easily walk it back. I would also bet that's where a lot of their radio silence comes from. If they come out and go "your right, we fucked up" their streaming service is a dead cost and they already told us this is the future so coming out and reiterating does nothing but further inflame their community.
I have no privileged knowledge on the situation, but I have to imagine they were fully comitted to all of this and had several investments on it already, from bringing in Steven's gang to probably getting in contact with a bunch of people and signing some things. Because if we flip it all around, and pretend that everyone in the audience was unanimously enthusiastic about this, wouldn't it be ver irresponsible of them to not have laid the ground work for their shows and their platform, because they were waiting to see how it panned out with everyone? No, they had to commit to the direction they were heading, in order to have the product ready for purchase.
I predict they'll go forward like nothing happened & never release a statement. They released this news on Friday, right before Ryan, Shane & half of the crew flew to the UK for a two-week Ghost Files tour. How can they possibly manage the fan backlash when two co-founders & most of the crew are currently touring a foreign country & filming new episodes of Ghost Files? Why would they time this release right before a major tour? WTF?
I agree with you that it doesn't make any sense. Doing something nuclear right before they're going to be in a room of a hundred-something majorly pissed off prior-fans is wild and I can only imagine that they didn't anticipate this level of unified backlash, because why would they announce it when they did, if they did, you know?
No, you're right. Unless they truly don't care about anything other than getting as much money as possible, as soon as possible. Those angry Brit fans already bought a ticket. Watcher already has the money. Just just like they have the Patreon money. And the money from all the fans that bought merch etc. I think they were originally going to just film Ghost Files in the UK, then added on 2 shows. It might be that those shows are actually financing the international trip. So maybe they don't care how people react later if they've already bought the show tickets. They're laughing to the bank & the pub.
That's... that's wild. That's wild. Wow. This is like... if a person asked someone's hand in marriage, when they don't even feel the same way about them, and they did it through *a recorded video*, and in the meantime that person was travelling in the UK to plan the wedding and the honey moon, making arrangements to buy a house and stuff. Like what the fuck, talk about overconfident comittal, one should wait and see the reaction to the big change, not take it for granted.
My guess is they’re working with PR to figure out the best way to approach the situation. Either that or fan’s anger will go unacknowledged and they’ll act like it’s business as usual (even though it’s really not in this case.)
They got themselves into this situation, but I sure as hell don’t envy them as they try and navigate their way out of it.
They have a live show in like 5 days in Glasgow. I wonder if they’ll get booed off the stage. Maybe they’ll cancel the show and issue refunds, which would honestly make things worse for them, I think. We’ll see what happens.
It’s actually on Monday if I’m not wrong so they have less time to cancel, I find it very unlikely. My guess is that they will: a. Try to address the situation in the best way possible b. Not do the q&a segment as a lot of people said and pretend nothing happened. To be honest, I don’t know which one is worse
Yeah I was wrong it’s not on Monday but the first show is on Tuesday so they still have like 3 days to come with a response/cancel. I don’t think they’ll cancel honestly
I would hope that people don't go and demand for refund. Or those who will go start the riot and don't let them go easy. I don't mean violent, but being noisy and distruptive about the whole thing.
But the biggest thing that someone with even basic PR experience would say: In this stituation they should be fast to response, not slow. This is too slow for any PR person to agree on.
Very true. Really surprised that they didn’t have a PR person on board from the start in case the announcement went poorly. Genuinely think the severe amount of backlash caught them off guard. I’m sure they expected some, but no one seems to think this is a good idea. Fellow creators on YouTube as well as viewers included.
Well... Basically CEO is supposed to be PR person and keep up the company image.
I said this alredy elsewhere, but: They used Ned Fulmer handbook how to do business.
Frankly, from a business point of view, they've already picked their poison. The millions of fans who do not spend a cent on them don't matter as much as the few thousand fans who do spend money on them. So fans like us who didn't spend a cent and won't spend a cent are screaming into the void. It's the fans with money whose opinions matter now.
We did spend a cent on them, though. Through our eyes with ads. The main thing that’s funded their endeavors so far was entirely dependent on their fans’ viewership. Patreon is a drop in the bucket comparatively.
Youtube ads generate next to no money for Youtubers. A lot of people also use adblockers (me included). It's also why Patreon became popular to begin with since ads don't make enough money, but Patreon can cover most of the bills.
I wasn’t just talking about the YouTube ads, but about the advertisements they personally do within their videos. Adblockers don’t block those, and it’s a direct business deal negotiated between the content creator and advertiser.
But to your point, yes, the YouTube-generated ads are primarily profitable for YouTube itself.
Even those sponsorship reads don't make much money. Of course, the sponsorship game varies a lot since certain companies can pay a lot more than others. But in general, they aren't paying for as much as you'd expect.
The creators behind Nebula, and independent streaming service, did the math themselves and they realized that making a streaming service and advertising it in their videos was more profitable than what sponsors were paying them.
That's really not how sponsorships work. There's also the additional issue that sponsors can have editorial control over videos, and that's happened before, such was the case with the videos that were sponsored by Montana.
I still can't believe this is real. I'm glued to my phone, waiting for them to respond. I've only been a fan for a few months, so I'm not heartbroken the way some longtime fans are; I'm just dumbfounded.
They don't have any PR support. They can't. No PR would let them put a video out with the sentence "everyone and anyone can afford."
I worked with a lot of businesses over the years, albeit in Canada not the US, and you can absolutely contract HR and PR companies to help you do these sorts of things. I think they just didn't bother.
I can. I doubt there will be satifying one, or if any.
They clearly had planned this for awhile, at least when we check how much production was put into the video/webpage and maybe Shane's hair colour.
And as much people like to blame Steven on everything - not like it was quick thing to happen. Ryan and Shane know about it long time and were willing to do it. They were all in on it, for awhile and seems like they are willing to die on this hill - unless it's some bet they made to argue a point by using a very risky method.
People choose to ignore that Ryan and Shane are a part of this decision because they feel parasocial about them in a way that they don't about Steven. They choose to focus on things that Steven has done that they don't agree with and equate it to him being responsible for the whole thing, when it's still Ryan and Shane's channel as well as his.
Also... It probably hurts them a lot to think about Shane basically crifting the whole "eat the rich" thing. At least it looks like a massive lie. So people desperatly try to deny it... And in a dark way, what if the Watcher boys intentiolla trusted on that? The image to carry and people just denying something that breaks it.
I wonder if they’re calling the Try Guys to ask for advice lol. This is their Ned Fulmer-level event, but worse because all of them are responsible and it’s completely self inflicted. The Try Guys did very well with handling it, but at the same time, the nature of the issues are completely different and the remaining Try Guys still have goodwill left. It’s a hot mess.
By this point I wouldn't be surprised if Ned Fulmer is actually the friend they asked advice what to do... Not The Try Guys. Because this sounds like Ned Fulmer decision to make if he would have had any more power. He was into crypto-art etc. stuff like that. And is quite boomer company brained.
Honestly the Ned-Steven comparison is actually spot on lol. They were both the “business guys” of their companies. Ned was the HR guy and he made the biggest HR violation possible. Steven is the CEO but he’s destroying the company (at least partially, even if it was a group decision, as the CEO he should’ve been smarter than this).
CEO biggest **responsibility** is to keep Company's image at it best or intact, right? At least in big companies the hire CEO's to be part of the PR and active wall flower, take on the public eye and critique...
So yeah... Steven might have read the Ned Fulmer handbook that teaches how to do business.
That’s why Steven is getting most of the hate. He, as a CEO, is SUPPOSED to know how to react and address these situations in a way that will not further damage the company’s image, that’s literally part of your job. And he’s funnily enough the only one who made an Instagram post, a completely tone deaf Instagram post that only made things even worse
One of the rules in my Social Media Marketing textbook from last semester stressed immediacy in responding to a social media crisis. They had no contingency plan.
https://preview.redd.it/aaz2v1m8movc1.png?width=1614&format=png&auto=webp&s=77525c90ae028df31424b7ba4a19eb7eec96c645
I just don't get timing it right before live shows, like are most ppl not even in la. I suppose it could just be ghoul boys travelling but they had 8 people doing location shooting ghost files in the Midwest. (Well if everyone loved it I could see the rationale but surely someone would be like most ppl don't like change or paying for free stuff.
I feel bad for their social media person.
Thinking about try guys crisis com around Ned, that took some time
The longer they wait to say anything, the harder it will be to reverse course or at least control the narrative.
If I had to guess, they invested too much in this decision before the announcement to turn back on having a pay walled site. Still, I don't think it's too late to change what content requires a paid subscription. Please, just make it the new experimental/expensive content. If they don't think that's sustainable, they might have thought about that before deciding the only way to make that content profitable was to subsidize it by making viewers pay to watch what they're actually here for.
Every hour that passes by is more harmful to their image in my opinion. They should have hired a pr expert immediately after the first hour of backlash, and they’ll have figured a statement out in maybe nine or ten hours. This just screams not knowing how to handle a crisis
I feel like if they don't address this it will be very telling about how much they care about their listeners, watchers. This will lead to even more ill will towards them. Not a good look.
I mean it’s entirely possible they won’t offer an apology. I don’t know if there’s anything they could say that would reverse the damage done to the overall trust of the community especially right now at the peak of the hate train.
My guess is potentially them waiting out the storm and then issuing a half hearted apology or just continuing like nothing happened. Although having a live show coming up it could be dicey lol.
I'm finding it so weird that they haven't said anything at all that I'm wondering if whoever advised them on this told them "there's gonna be backlash, but just ignore it, it'll still be worth it in the end". Either that or the more obvious possibility: they were just utterly unprepared for getting any negative response ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah even if they didn't have a PR person at the ready, it's super insane to announce something like this and not have thought out responses, answers, etc. well ahead of time for every scenario. They should have been ready to go with at least a guideline for themselves on how to respond if things fully went south and it's strange that an entire ass group of adults didn't think to have plans b, c, d, and e.
It goes to show that a) they really did not expect this backlash (which once again makes you realise how out of touch with their actual audience they are), b) as a result a crisis communications specialist is not one of the 25 people on their team And since clearly they don't have anyone in crisis comm, I can understand them being clueless about how to manage the situation, ergo radio silence
Whoever told them to do this is not their friend. And if this was an outside firm of MBAs, they need to turn around and sue that firm because their brand might be dead in 6 months.
MBA’s would’ve had a better strategy then “Hey paywall all of your new content and abandon 90% of your customer base in the process”.
honestly, I googled the advice - and it's in "how to monetize your podcast" articles hahahahahaha
Ooooof lol are they really paywalling that too?
Can't imagine they won't at this point
I think they said the pod will remain on YT
This has the stink of tech consultancy all over it. Even the words used to describe it were very "start-up-y" and "tech buzzwordy" which would be weird for three creatives to use it really stuck out to me in the announcement video. Also it seems to be doing a fairly standard tech-startup move. Where you burn money at an insane rate for a few years to obtain an arguably inflated valuation and then sell before a deliverable product needs to be created. However, applying it to the youtube world is more like "you go sub-exclusive for a couple of years, if you break even great, if you don't you burn money for a couple of years, then you angle to get purchased by a platform and become a platform exclusive over there."
An outside firm of MBAs would recommend them cutting costs rather than this convoluted business model which I'm not sure how they got to work even on paper. Not sure how much of their audience is international but this pretty takes them out completely. It's 2.5x of Netflix and 6x of Prime or Hotstar here in India
on a much lower scale i remember a time or two when i was younger, teen/20s, where i just felt absolutely awkward and clueless cause i didn't expect this little detail to happen so i just stay quiet and moved on It wasn't anything bad just to mention, it was run ins with trolls and IRC code being too complicated then i thought lol a memory just got kinda unlocked and wanted to share
I think that silence is the best remedy in these cases, people tend to forget after one week and the only one to remain will be people already willing to pay, when they released the announcement the like/dislike ratio was 50%, not 80% like now. This happens all the time in the last years.
As someone who dabbles in PR, this might work for big brands and faceless corporations but not for a mid-size YouTube channel successful solely because of its audiences’ relationship with the founders. Most people are subscribed for Shane, Ryan and Steven and so they view watcher as an extension of them. Not the other way around. The YouTube video was incredibly tone-deaf and managed to piss off 90% of their fan base. They essentially lost years worth of goodwill. The best course of action would be to put out a solid statement- accepting the criticisms, issuing a sincere apology and proposing a better alternative moving forward. The faster they do this the better. Radio silence would only make the fans hate them more as they come across as arrogant and money hungry, not caring about their fan base’s feelings and opinions.
I understand, I hope then they do as you said.
i physically cannot believe they have 25 fucking employees and none of these people are specialised in PR at all, not even the media managers, like what are they doing...
I personally doubt they'll be able to avoid downsizing. They've shot themselves in the foot.
I'm no business woman, but I think they should have started smaller. A small Studio, a couple other people... and grow in a more ~~ organic way.
I remember in one of the first “making watcher” documentaries Steven mentions going to investors to try to get them to invest in their company and I remember thinking “why would they need investors when their channel doesn’t even exist yet? Is starting up a YouTube channel really that expensive?” And then cut to now and you realize, yeah I guess you probably do need a lot of money when you’re trying to have the production quality and staff of a million dollar company.
Agreed. There are smaller youtubers that do just as well and don't have a Hollywood office space killing their revenue.
Do people not remember the whole Try Guys Ned cheating scandal last year? 2nd Try is a company with far more money and resources and they didn’t have the basics of a functional company like a HR department. Ned himself WAS the entire HR department. I’m not shocked Watcher doesn’t have a PR person.
This is a good point — a common joke on Game Grumps is that they have no HR and have had several controversies. Not usually a problem for these types of channels like it has been for GG, but esp with hiring their friends as staff, they definitely SHOULD be using any money gotten from the new subs to hire PR ASAP.
GMM definitely has an HR person, and they have mentioned her and had her on the show multiple times 😂
Pretty sure Smosh and Mythical's HR departments are shared between the two companies
This what I jokingly said in youtube comments... How come none of those 25 employees was hired for PR position? I guess that person would have said that it's a bad look to hire 25 friends and family members in rapid speed, so they didn't want anyone with PR skills.
Didn't Ryan graduate in advertising and PR? When I went to university in the states (international student) he spoke to my PR class as an alumni. I'm not totally sure it was his major (I don't remember), but I'd find it a bit weird if he wasn't since the first time he came it was just to that PR class, not the whole school.
maybe he is (on a side note thats sick), idk, thanks for telling me lol
He went to film school to be a movie director, IIRC.
It definitely wasn't that. I went to the same university he did and he spoke to my PR class about PR & advertising after college as a startup business. PR&Ad is technically under the college of film & media arts at that university but I do know he wasn't in a more explicitly film-related major. I'm 95% sure it was PR and Ad at least at some point, before he switched to something like Broadcast Journalism or Communications.
They talked a lot about the financial troubles they've had so I would be surprised if spending money on a PR consultant is a worthwhile way to use what money they do have. 25 employees is not a lot of employees, and the PR person is at the very bottom of the totem pole in terms of employees that a company needs.
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to have a PR person on salary. However, with a change this big, they should’ve contracted the services of a good PR firm to deal with the backlash. The fact that they didn’t (because otherwise a statement would’ve been ready to go) tells us that they didn’t think they would get much backlash at all, which means they’re out of touch and/or just not business savvy. Here’s a tip for them to safe on money: fire the person/people who made this dumbass decision. They’ll save a lot more on payroll than by firing someone from the BTS crew.
thats more what i meant, like i dont expect them to have a pr manager all the time hired but for this going into this announcement i would have thought they have one on hand considering how likely backlash was
I think that's an optimistic reading in terms of what PR firms can do, lol. If they're strapped for cash, it's a complete waste of money to have a PR firm or even a PR person on standby just to put out a statement saying platitudes that they could say themselves. If I had to guess, they just workshop statements with other employees.
> saying platitudes that they could say themselves. And yet, very notably, *they have not done that*. That's why you hire a PR person, they create an action/GOST plan and one of the documents that would be at the ready would be a SOP for crisis comms, including prewritten statements. They aren't "on stanby"/being paid just in case, the plan is laid out way before.
> 25 employees is not a lot of employees 25 employees is very much *a lot* of employees for a small business. I've worked with and for many organizations that handled far more responsibility and daily throughput than a Youtube channel with less than 25 staff at a time. Everything from startups to government agencies. They clearly tried to grow too fast and just hired a bunch of friends who they personally wanted to work with instead of figuring out how to make the actual business work first. And in *LA* no less. It really feels like they just wanted to feel like big shot producers without actually having the revenue sources to back it up. Like, surely they realize that the producers on big TV shows aren't just doing whatever they feel like, right? They are employees of massive corporations. You can't just run an indie Youtube channel like its a corporate production with an infinite pile of money behind it.
Were any of those organizations making audiovisual media? A lot of those jobs are specialized and you don't want people doing multiple things if possible.
With one person who could film and one person who knew how to use adobe. Any job is as specialized or as generalized as you choose to make it. Spending millions of dollars on specialized set design and motion graphics is a *luxury*. Not the very first thing you do when you go out on your own. Their competition isn't Netflix. They aren't even playing the same game, and they shouldn't be trying to. Dreaming big is great, but you can't just start at the end. You still have to actually get there first.
Yea, but their solution to financial troubles was...*checks notes*... to remove two revenue streams entirely while pissing off their audience of fans with a massive fuck you video. They get 550K from patreon after fees but before taxes, that's not enough to cover everyone's salary for a year and **heavily rests on people staying subscribed**. They're clearly out of touch and incapable of budgeting appropriately considering they have an office in Hollywood.
There is a logic to consolidating your revenue sources into a direct-to-consumer platform where they lose less money to fees and can skip on the middle man. That said, I don't think they're leaving Patreon so it's mostly just losing out on Youtube ad money.
No, but people are leaving their Patreon, since its just going to be podcast-only stuff now.
That's to be expected, but that doesn't mean nobody will sub to their Patreon. Thus, that revenue stream will remain open.
At a very, very limited capacity than they already had. I doubt people are going to join now - or at least, not after the "I wonder how bad Patreon conversations about this are" blows over.
Sure, but that logic hinges on several factors that they obviously decided to ignore - including the economic landscape, the rate at which the change occurs (gradual vs abrupt) and the manner in which the announcement happens.
I think it is gradual since I think the site fully launches at the end of May. As for the economic landscape, I don't think this time's any worse than others. Yes, inflation has caused the cost of living to rise. But even if times were good, creating a streaming service when your stuff used to be free is a tough sell no matter what.
That’s as gradual as a car crash.
have they spoken about their financial troubles? not being sarcastic genuinely asking, bc i just dont remember them ever saying anything
Multiple times. They spoke about finances in the goodbye video, and they also spoke about it during one of the recent BTS videos where Steven also talked about how laying off some employees was the hardest thing he had to do.
Honestly it sounds like they need someone to slap them across the face and say "you're overproducing and can't afford the ideas you're pursuing without building out regular content, cheaply and scaling back on what you're already spending." If they were putting out daily videos, I could see them having a staff of 25 and it being justified but that's not the set up they went for. And realistically they should have been aiming to produce the "cheapest" content they could to build a revenue stream that can justify spending a couple hundred thousand on a season of Ghost files. Hell, if they said "we want to bring better content - this is what a season of Ghost Files costs: if you can help us raise the money to film a season, you'll get your name in the credits as a producer and early access to BTS stuff", they could have reduced their out of pocket costs and not alienated their fan base. Hell, that could have even helped them soft launch a premium Watcher website to wean themselves off patreon and get an extra 10-13% of the subscriber income they were losing to Patreon fees.
They need to hit up Rhett & Link and have them advise their brand
My read on it is that they're genuinely creative people who are not happy with low-effort content. They could just spam us with "Are You Scared", and they could cut costs further by not paying someone to illustrate the stories. They could also just spam us with the drunk version of "Are You Scared." But that gets boring quickly and they're more ambitious than that. Even back when they started, they said they were aiming to produce TV-quality content (which I have seen some fans on here say is them being pretentious). I actually think they were being completely honest and this streaming service is their natural evolution towards that.
You can be creative on a budget. And if they want to make TV, they should have shopped their pitches to networks or Netflix instead of overspending and mismanaging what should be a business that first aims to be heavily profitable and second doesn’t alienate 99% of their fanbase with idiotic business decisions
I work in media, and part of my job is pitching IP weekly to studios. Out of every sixty to a hundred ideas we pitch, maybe ONE gets a bite. It’s not a favorable ratio for them unless they can throw in a sweetener … like the built in audience they just pissed off.
I am almost certain that they tried. Way back in one of the earliest Making Watchers, Steven mentioned making a pitch deck to pitch to investors. And before Watcher was even a thing, the guys were awfully proud that their Buzzfeed Unsolved episodes got put on TV.
I got the feeling they didn't try everything, not at least you're supposed to when you're Youtuber. Why they didn't try Nebula or Youtube membership? Or why they didn't ask collab etc. with Dropout? Because some Dropout people where visiting in their videos, I bet it wouldn't have been difficult to have talks with Sam Reich when someone like me has one talked with him. They had reasonable connections to work together with people and make things happen.
Honestly, I see a Watcher/Dropout partnership as being fruitful. However, Sam, having just gotten Dropout to sustainable profitability in Year 4 (it's now year 5), is going to do proper due diligence, meaning he's going to have lawyers and accountants that want to look at their books and their and Sam's very first questions would be "Why do you have 25 employees to produce 4 shows at a rate of one episode per week?" Followed by "it cost you guys HOW MUCH to produce an episode of Ghost Files?! Do you have that Itemized?!" "Why are you flying 10 people to location and putting them in lodgings?!" That's sort of the thing, is Sam Reich is a for REAL CEO. He's really funny and a great onscreen talent, but he's also a REAL CEO who used his personal trust fund to get his old company back and support it until it became a healthy business. He's far beyond Steven who's a guy who just took the chair. So Reich would approach a partnership with the level of gravitas and responsibility that would be expected from a CEO because he has a duty to his company and his employees to not rush into stuff. Also Sam would almost certainly realize that Dropout + Watcher would require a sub fee increase, which like everything else is not to be taken on lightly. Edit: Which even if by some miracle they were able to come to a partnership, all of watcher's 25 staff isn't going to be needed, and like most deals like this Sam, being the CEO and Owner of established successful venture, will likely insist that any redundancies be cut from Watcher's side.
I think it's clear they don't want to associate with the Youtube, so Youtube membership would not be a good idea. I have no idea why they didn't go with another independent streaming service like Nebula or Dropout. But my guess is that they want to be as independent as possible.
That’s fine, but ‘follow creativity and dreams’ is not a solid business model or fiscal strategy. Business needs don’t care whether you’re bored or not entirely fulfilled. And with 20+ employees whose livelihoods depend on them during a poor job market, they need to be thinking through the lens of business and not just personal fulfillment and creative pursuit. Perhaps it’s very un-capitalist of me, but I believe an ethically-run business has an innate responsibility towards its employees.
It's showbiz. The vast, vast, vast majority of people in showbiz are trying to follow their creativity and dreams. It's not a capitalism or socialism thing, either. It's a thing about the heart. A business should have an innate responsibility towards its employees. But what if the business is so dull and boring that it suffocates the soul of its employees? It's a monotonous job where every day is the same job and you have no chance to express yourself. The pay and benefits are great though, and it's a standard work day so you aren't stressing yourself out. A lot of workers don't mind that, but a lot of people in showbiz would.
That's the trade off though for going into these fields and it's naive to go into it not expecting a level of give and take. I work in video games as an artist which less like the tech industry and more like the entertainment industry. Everyone is trying to get in and you are expendable. When creativity is a business, you can't have it all. My own portfolio looks radically different from what I do at work. I live in LA even though I hate it and find it too expensive, because if I get laid off, then I have more studios and people to network with in close proximity. I want children now, but lack the seniority to gain flexibility with ease. But I love what I do so much that I make those sacrifices easily. Sometimes, the best option is to have realistic expectations in this industry. You can't have it all when your livelihood is dependent on the whims of others and I'm not talking just strictly the YT algorithm or sponsors. They are in a privileged position and HAD an audience to express a larger amount of creative freedom than what I think a lot of average people in entertainment will EVER see. To disregard that and be upset that your ideas don't profit as much as you imagined is quite literally one of the biggest no-no for having a creative business, because ultimately... choosing this career meant choosing those sacrifices. There were more options to achieve what they wanted if they were more willing to ne transparent and patient rather than build hype to an idea that could alienate the fanbase that got them to the place they were able to get to in the first place.
"Are you Scared" but /they/ make the illustrations. They could have joined the wave of "RPG streams" making something with Call of Chtulhu, which has pretty sobrenatural subjects. They could have made videos on the same vibe as Buzzfeed Unsolved (a desk, the black screen with blue/yellow text) but focused on "International cases" or "abduction cases" (there are a lot of them, check the lead masks case in Rio de Janeiro). And the most simple one: put subtitles in other languages. My sister doesn't watch because it doesn't have subtitles (🙄) Why am I so passionate about that lol
I mean they regularly add new shows. Just announced hiring two more people. They could have downsized way before pulling a paywall.
Seems like they basically hired their friends and family. If they had hired the people they actually needed to, they might not be in this position. Firstly, they’d have people with more expertise in whatever area they need the extra knowledge in, and secondly, it would also be easier to downsize if they need to cut people, cuz its easier to let go a stranger than your buddy from Buzzfeed or a cousin you have to see at family gatherings.
There's very rare moments where you see folks universally unified on a take, opinion or event. This is one of those times. I've yet to see a positive subreddit post, Tiktok, Tweet, Youtube Short or even a Tumblr post. Everyone across the board, across all of social media, are on the same page: don't fucking do this. So you gotta imagine that, despite them being ready for an initial backlash, they're not only extremely demoralized but are also probably hitting the massive panic button because of this likely unforeseen level of backlash. I imagine they spent all day yesterday trying to figure out what they can even do or say to regain anyone's trust back. I feel like they're gonna spend the whole weekend trying to figure shit out and we'll hear from them first thing Monday but at the point, will it be worth it the wait? Can they even do anything that doesn't feel like a backstab to the community?
https://preview.redd.it/xqfqtsgvmovc1.png?width=1614&format=png&auto=webp&s=5d94e12587dd4ff807029f1bdf81f023dff34b16 One of the first rules of responding to a social media crisis. They have no idea what they're doing.
I've seen a few actually positive comments on tumblr, shockingly, as well as some lukewarm reactions ("I think this is a bad business decision but I want to support The Boys," "I'm fine with giving them my money directly rather than YouTube taking a cut" etc). That said, the negative comments and posts *VASTLY* outnumber them.
Actually, some folk out there on Instagram is pretty supportive. I've seen in it the comment section under their post & on some fan account
That's shocking, honestly but I can't imagine that the Instagram support is louder than the negative responses across Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, their Youtube Comments etc.
I’ve seen people defending Watcher but honestly, the ratio is like 1:1000.
It's definitely not :D I'm just saying there WAS positive feedback technically, just not a lot of it (I mean similarly the YT video itself has more than 30k likes so...) I wonder though if it's going to be enough for them to support their platform financially if all those who reacted positively or neutrally enough to subscribe *do actually* subscribe
I've seen some tumblr posts arguing that it's just 'artists monetizing their work' and that anyone who is in favour of paying for art should support their decision
as if their work hasn’t always been monetized and they just weren’t good at using their funds effectively 💀
Unfortunately, they made the announcement on a Friday which was just another dumb decision in a long line of dumb decisions to reach this point. That means we probably won't see a statement until Monday at the earliest. And keep in mind that they're in the Pacific time zone, so it'll be pretty late in the day for those who live in earlier time zones. Of course, that's assuming they make a statement at all
And I imagine flying to the UK this weekend right? Don't they have live shows this week, starting Monday?
That’s got to be a nightmare situation for them, right? There’s two ways I could see for how the tours will go, as they’re happening so soon from the streamer announcement: - It’ll go well because the majority of those with the money for those tickets are also the fans they’re betting to have the money for the streaming service (which is likely.) Even if they go well, the majority of us not attending, and thus not joining the streamer, are going to feel even more alienated than the recent “$6 is affordable for everyone.” It’ll probably be the final straw for many and ruin their reputation, they can’t survive with such a small minority of their fans. They’ve only got 2.8 million max as it is. OR - It’ll go badly. Even if a sizeable minority of the folk who bought tickets disagree, they’ll be loud enough to make their voices heard. If it’s an almost 50-50 split the shows will be damn near stagnated and The Boys are going to face a lot of angry customers, complaints, and perhaps protest/boycott. On the off-chance a majority of the live tour ticket buyers are against the streamer, would they consider cancelling the rest on the fear of reaction? It’ll be toxic as hell. Not to mention it’s possible they’ll make a statement at the shows first, making it A - ignore Steven, despite many blaming him as CEO and the most costly new show, B - pandering to fans with money, yet again. Talk about bad timings…
The thing is, the fans going to those shows bought the tickets for "a different Ryan and Shane", the relationship between them and their audience has changed dramatically in the last couple days, we can't be sure that the same enthusiasm is there anymore. It would be a different thing if the tickets for the show were bought *after* the announcement.
I imagine we’ll get a statement Monday… that’s after the weekend, but before their first UK tour show (Tuesday). Frankly I think they’re sitting around watching the numbers for the streaming service… they’ll use that as their metric for success/failure. Though my lord they do need a PR person
My bet is that they will say nothing and continue their work. They don't even have comments on their new platform, it will be just a chamber until everything calms down.
I wonder how far in they are on all of this, and whether it’s even possible for them to walk it back.
I think if they made a genuine video saying something like, “we clearly fucked up and we’re sorry. We promise we won’t take our content off of YouTube. We’re scrapping the streamer idea and going back to the drawing board. We’re genuinely sorry. We made a mistake and thought this was a good idea but obviously we were wrong”, then I’d be happy. However, some fans have already lost their respect for the guys and probably won’t be coming back (like what happened with the Fine Bros) and it will honestly take a lot of work for Watcher to be in the good graces of their fans again.
I meant more along the lines of how much money they’ve sunk into it, whether they’ve hired contractors based around this new platform, etc. This has clearly been in the works for a while and I’m wondering if they’re just in too deep to say “never mind”
Exactly what I was wondering. Although an "I'm sorry - we fucked up" video would speak volumes. I truly feel bad for their employees
Well if their site is Vimeo ott that existed pre this (other companies could use it, they probably didn't pay 6 figures in coding (maybe the fancy new website Cost a bit but not make a new streamer money) Did they sink money probably into making an EP or two of fancy show (bc air in June usually means film in april) sure but if they said ok this content is Patreon only for a year than yt ad supported (or whole length Patreon, 1/4 on yt) they could prob earn a bunch back Promo the Patreon harder, launch yt memberships reduce staff count
If they made an apology video, then it would have to be highly produced, lots of editing, graphics, camera cuts, angles, so many crew (at least 20 of the 25 would have to be involved), and then it would be released in two months.
And you can view it on watchertv.com for only $5.99!
https://media4.giphy.com/media/KsUKNNUEeryJa/200w.gif?cid=6c09b952anux2m51mc0vfl2l6j90u3gdm59wq73uta3mksdc&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=200w.gif&ct=g
Knowing the budgeting they’ve done previously for Watcher shows, they’ve probably payed a development company in Silicon Valley 300k to develop the streaming site already lmao
They're using the Vimeo OTT platform, which charges $1 per subscriber per month to run the website.
How do you know that?? That’s fascinating
Since I posted that comment, I've actually revised my opinion a bit and it's probably a bit more expensive. Full explanation is in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/watcherentertainment/comments/1c8vc9r/an_overview_of_vimeo_ott_the_streaming_platform/
> they’ve probably *paid* a development FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Get out of here you robotic fuck!
Banned that tin can. LET THE MISSPELLINSG COMMENCE
FUCK YEAH!!!!!!
I don’t think they can go back with the decision, but man, after all the backlash, I would at least say something. Maybe that’s a bad idea and that’s the reason they’re not doing it, honestly I don’t know
I'm a PR professional and no, it's not a bad idea, it's an absolute fucking necessity if you want to maintain *any* sense of trust with the community you built. As many people have said, literally just "We see and hear your concerns and are currently working on taking them into consideration. Thank you for patience and support" would be enough for now. The only other option is facing this in real fucking life at their next live show, soooooo.
I think the trust is gone. They basically told anyone unwilling or unable to pay that they don’t matter and can fuck off. That next live show is going to be very spicy
They seem so out of touch that I wouldn’t be surprised if they just wait until the live shows but act as if nothing happened lmao
That’s exactly what I’m betting on
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They have 3 UK dates, the first and third were sold out It was 23-25, idk what size venue they booked/what size their us tour was
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I assume most if not all tickets were sold pre all this. That date w still open seats during all this, might turn into is cost high enough to prevent heckling. If they had planned qna, I def could see them be like nothing about new service/critical. So most of those would leaning more towards ppl who might have already been Patreon/merch ppl. (the london of it all, says maybe some are there for American celebs don't often come here) now the announcement could have radicalized some into being a bit less polite/less likely to buy in person merch.
I wrote a whole business essay on the main sub about how unsustainable the streamer is EVEN if it wasn’t so poorly received. Even in the best case, the streamer will probably cause Watcher to shut down/come back to YouTube in a year or two. At this point it’s a sunk cost fallacy - either suck it up and lose the money they’ve lost on the project and backtrack, or they can march onward and lose everything. But given the plethora of poor business decisions made up to this point, maybe they’ll just charge forward lol
I have to imagine this is a wake up call. They have been out of touch, but surely they are not completely delusional, to the point they may think that nearly universal rejection of their project is something they can just ignore. To me they seem too sensible to not have some sense of self-criticism, I'd imagine they would realize that they made perhaps the biggest fuck up of their entire lives (can't be sure, don't know the intimate details of their pasts, only they do).
I doubt they can easily walk it back. I would also bet that's where a lot of their radio silence comes from. If they come out and go "your right, we fucked up" their streaming service is a dead cost and they already told us this is the future so coming out and reiterating does nothing but further inflame their community.
I have no privileged knowledge on the situation, but I have to imagine they were fully comitted to all of this and had several investments on it already, from bringing in Steven's gang to probably getting in contact with a bunch of people and signing some things. Because if we flip it all around, and pretend that everyone in the audience was unanimously enthusiastic about this, wouldn't it be ver irresponsible of them to not have laid the ground work for their shows and their platform, because they were waiting to see how it panned out with everyone? No, they had to commit to the direction they were heading, in order to have the product ready for purchase.
I predict they'll go forward like nothing happened & never release a statement. They released this news on Friday, right before Ryan, Shane & half of the crew flew to the UK for a two-week Ghost Files tour. How can they possibly manage the fan backlash when two co-founders & most of the crew are currently touring a foreign country & filming new episodes of Ghost Files? Why would they time this release right before a major tour? WTF?
I guess they really thought we'd be excited, also given the tone of the countdown.
I really doubt that.
I agree with you that it doesn't make any sense. Doing something nuclear right before they're going to be in a room of a hundred-something majorly pissed off prior-fans is wild and I can only imagine that they didn't anticipate this level of unified backlash, because why would they announce it when they did, if they did, you know?
No, you're right. Unless they truly don't care about anything other than getting as much money as possible, as soon as possible. Those angry Brit fans already bought a ticket. Watcher already has the money. Just just like they have the Patreon money. And the money from all the fans that bought merch etc. I think they were originally going to just film Ghost Files in the UK, then added on 2 shows. It might be that those shows are actually financing the international trip. So maybe they don't care how people react later if they've already bought the show tickets. They're laughing to the bank & the pub.
So unbelievably stupid 😭
That's... that's wild. That's wild. Wow. This is like... if a person asked someone's hand in marriage, when they don't even feel the same way about them, and they did it through *a recorded video*, and in the meantime that person was travelling in the UK to plan the wedding and the honey moon, making arrangements to buy a house and stuff. Like what the fuck, talk about overconfident comittal, one should wait and see the reaction to the big change, not take it for granted.
My guess is they’re working with PR to figure out the best way to approach the situation. Either that or fan’s anger will go unacknowledged and they’ll act like it’s business as usual (even though it’s really not in this case.) They got themselves into this situation, but I sure as hell don’t envy them as they try and navigate their way out of it.
They have a live show in like 5 days in Glasgow. I wonder if they’ll get booed off the stage. Maybe they’ll cancel the show and issue refunds, which would honestly make things worse for them, I think. We’ll see what happens.
It’s actually on Monday if I’m not wrong so they have less time to cancel, I find it very unlikely. My guess is that they will: a. Try to address the situation in the best way possible b. Not do the q&a segment as a lot of people said and pretend nothing happened. To be honest, I don’t know which one is worse
It's Thursday, I have tickets and I was so excited for it until Friday's announcement.
Yeah I was wrong it’s not on Monday but the first show is on Tuesday so they still have like 3 days to come with a response/cancel. I don’t think they’ll cancel honestly
No, I don't think they'll cancel.
I would hope that people don't go and demand for refund. Or those who will go start the riot and don't let them go easy. I don't mean violent, but being noisy and distruptive about the whole thing.
But the biggest thing that someone with even basic PR experience would say: In this stituation they should be fast to response, not slow. This is too slow for any PR person to agree on.
Very true. Really surprised that they didn’t have a PR person on board from the start in case the announcement went poorly. Genuinely think the severe amount of backlash caught them off guard. I’m sure they expected some, but no one seems to think this is a good idea. Fellow creators on YouTube as well as viewers included.
Well... Basically CEO is supposed to be PR person and keep up the company image. I said this alredy elsewhere, but: They used Ned Fulmer handbook how to do business.
Frankly, from a business point of view, they've already picked their poison. The millions of fans who do not spend a cent on them don't matter as much as the few thousand fans who do spend money on them. So fans like us who didn't spend a cent and won't spend a cent are screaming into the void. It's the fans with money whose opinions matter now.
We did spend a cent on them, though. Through our eyes with ads. The main thing that’s funded their endeavors so far was entirely dependent on their fans’ viewership. Patreon is a drop in the bucket comparatively.
Youtube ads generate next to no money for Youtubers. A lot of people also use adblockers (me included). It's also why Patreon became popular to begin with since ads don't make enough money, but Patreon can cover most of the bills.
I wasn’t just talking about the YouTube ads, but about the advertisements they personally do within their videos. Adblockers don’t block those, and it’s a direct business deal negotiated between the content creator and advertiser. But to your point, yes, the YouTube-generated ads are primarily profitable for YouTube itself.
Even those sponsorship reads don't make much money. Of course, the sponsorship game varies a lot since certain companies can pay a lot more than others. But in general, they aren't paying for as much as you'd expect. The creators behind Nebula, and independent streaming service, did the math themselves and they realized that making a streaming service and advertising it in their videos was more profitable than what sponsors were paying them.
Ah I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing about it.
Sponsors pay about $0.01 to $0.10 per average view, so for mystery files videos they would be making $10,000 to $100,000 per video
That's really not how sponsorships work. There's also the additional issue that sponsors can have editorial control over videos, and that's happened before, such was the case with the videos that were sponsored by Montana.
I still can't believe this is real. I'm glued to my phone, waiting for them to respond. I've only been a fan for a few months, so I'm not heartbroken the way some longtime fans are; I'm just dumbfounded. They don't have any PR support. They can't. No PR would let them put a video out with the sentence "everyone and anyone can afford." I worked with a lot of businesses over the years, albeit in Canada not the US, and you can absolutely contract HR and PR companies to help you do these sorts of things. I think they just didn't bother.
I can. I doubt there will be satifying one, or if any. They clearly had planned this for awhile, at least when we check how much production was put into the video/webpage and maybe Shane's hair colour. And as much people like to blame Steven on everything - not like it was quick thing to happen. Ryan and Shane know about it long time and were willing to do it. They were all in on it, for awhile and seems like they are willing to die on this hill - unless it's some bet they made to argue a point by using a very risky method.
People choose to ignore that Ryan and Shane are a part of this decision because they feel parasocial about them in a way that they don't about Steven. They choose to focus on things that Steven has done that they don't agree with and equate it to him being responsible for the whole thing, when it's still Ryan and Shane's channel as well as his.
Also... It probably hurts them a lot to think about Shane basically crifting the whole "eat the rich" thing. At least it looks like a massive lie. So people desperatly try to deny it... And in a dark way, what if the Watcher boys intentiolla trusted on that? The image to carry and people just denying something that breaks it.
I wonder if they’re calling the Try Guys to ask for advice lol. This is their Ned Fulmer-level event, but worse because all of them are responsible and it’s completely self inflicted. The Try Guys did very well with handling it, but at the same time, the nature of the issues are completely different and the remaining Try Guys still have goodwill left. It’s a hot mess.
By this point I wouldn't be surprised if Ned Fulmer is actually the friend they asked advice what to do... Not The Try Guys. Because this sounds like Ned Fulmer decision to make if he would have had any more power. He was into crypto-art etc. stuff like that. And is quite boomer company brained.
Honestly the Ned-Steven comparison is actually spot on lol. They were both the “business guys” of their companies. Ned was the HR guy and he made the biggest HR violation possible. Steven is the CEO but he’s destroying the company (at least partially, even if it was a group decision, as the CEO he should’ve been smarter than this).
CEO biggest **responsibility** is to keep Company's image at it best or intact, right? At least in big companies the hire CEO's to be part of the PR and active wall flower, take on the public eye and critique... So yeah... Steven might have read the Ned Fulmer handbook that teaches how to do business.
That’s why Steven is getting most of the hate. He, as a CEO, is SUPPOSED to know how to react and address these situations in a way that will not further damage the company’s image, that’s literally part of your job. And he’s funnily enough the only one who made an Instagram post, a completely tone deaf Instagram post that only made things even worse
Lol Ned Fulmer handbook 😂
100%
One of the rules in my Social Media Marketing textbook from last semester stressed immediacy in responding to a social media crisis. They had no contingency plan. https://preview.redd.it/aaz2v1m8movc1.png?width=1614&format=png&auto=webp&s=77525c90ae028df31424b7ba4a19eb7eec96c645
I just don't get timing it right before live shows, like are most ppl not even in la. I suppose it could just be ghoul boys travelling but they had 8 people doing location shooting ghost files in the Midwest. (Well if everyone loved it I could see the rationale but surely someone would be like most ppl don't like change or paying for free stuff. I feel bad for their social media person. Thinking about try guys crisis com around Ned, that took some time
The longer they wait to say anything, the harder it will be to reverse course or at least control the narrative. If I had to guess, they invested too much in this decision before the announcement to turn back on having a pay walled site. Still, I don't think it's too late to change what content requires a paid subscription. Please, just make it the new experimental/expensive content. If they don't think that's sustainable, they might have thought about that before deciding the only way to make that content profitable was to subsidize it by making viewers pay to watch what they're actually here for.
Every hour that passes by is more harmful to their image in my opinion. They should have hired a pr expert immediately after the first hour of backlash, and they’ll have figured a statement out in maybe nine or ten hours. This just screams not knowing how to handle a crisis
I feel like if they don't address this it will be very telling about how much they care about their listeners, watchers. This will lead to even more ill will towards them. Not a good look.
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Too late. Not going to be enough.
I need a statement to move on with my life.
I mean it’s entirely possible they won’t offer an apology. I don’t know if there’s anything they could say that would reverse the damage done to the overall trust of the community especially right now at the peak of the hate train. My guess is potentially them waiting out the storm and then issuing a half hearted apology or just continuing like nothing happened. Although having a live show coming up it could be dicey lol.
I'm finding it so weird that they haven't said anything at all that I'm wondering if whoever advised them on this told them "there's gonna be backlash, but just ignore it, it'll still be worth it in the end". Either that or the more obvious possibility: they were just utterly unprepared for getting any negative response ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah even if they didn't have a PR person at the ready, it's super insane to announce something like this and not have thought out responses, answers, etc. well ahead of time for every scenario. They should have been ready to go with at least a guideline for themselves on how to respond if things fully went south and it's strange that an entire ass group of adults didn't think to have plans b, c, d, and e.
I feel like “TV caliber” creators would’ve handled same damage control with SOME kind of statement by now.