YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Wiskus

lines on the record: 103
first: 2022-05-17
most recent: 2022-05-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Knows. But everything comes at a cost. We could take money, but we'd give up control. And so much of what I think makes the machine work is that the creators are running it. I answer to the creators. The platform answers to the creators. And that's not the case for most platforms. YouTube, they don't see themselves, I think, as answering to the creators. They have shareholders. They have their own internal business needs. They're a mega tech company that is a smaller piece of a much bigger mega tech company. So it's hard to imagine, and I don't think that YouTube in particular has anything against the creators. I think they do a really great job there. But they're still answerable to others. So for us to do the things that we want to do, I think we need to keep that accountability. Whatever happens next, it will have to happen with that accountability maintained.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, growth trajectory, the growth curve could be anything, right? Maybe if you injected a billion dollars of cash into our bank account, we grow a lot faster or we do bigger and more interesting things and we take over the world and beat Elon to Mars.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a ton of bullshit that comes with that. And that might be less exciting. And then are we truly creator owned at that point? There's a lot of philosophical questions we'd have to ask ourselves. Right now our operational profit trajectory is great and we don't really see a need to do that. We don't really see a need to exit. I get plenty of emails from VC people. And they're all very nice. I don't want to throw shade there. But I think that there's plenty of people out there who are looking for opportunities to extract value from creators. We're in a position where our fundamental reason for existence is to add value to creators. And it's hard to imagine what an exit looks like that doesn't hurt the people that we're here to serve.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or if Mr. Beast came in and wanted to buy it all for the lulls and give it away in a video like a chocolate factory, I couldn't say yes to that. There would have to be voted on. There'd have to be discussions around it. So we can imagine all sorts of things. Would it be neat for us to be the first creator economy startup to go public?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really up to me. The way that the companies are structured, you had asked earlier about decision making. I have the executive team that I answer to. I have standards 30-something owners that I answer to. I have 160 creators that I answer to, 80 employees that I answer to, Curiosity Stream has a minority stake in Nebula. They're a publicly traded company. I have to answer to them. The end of the day, we have structures in place so that if I don't know some foreign billionaire with blood money came in and wanted to just buy the whole thing up, I might be tempted personally, but I couldn't, there's structures in place. The creators that have to sign off on that.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fine as long as you're using an iPhone. Whatever the thing is, using all of the products isn't necessarily the point. Getting you into the ecosystem and then showing you how great the other stuff is over time and slowly winning you over with the improvement of experience, much more interesting. In that regard, I think Nebula is kind of modeled after iTunes for nerds.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us, nebula classes is just baked into nebula. If you sign up for nebula, you get classes in there as part of the deal. It's not an extra or anything. We did raise the price to account for this, but it's not a separate fee. So it's much more of a we're going to keep adding value to the platform that we've already built unless how do we come up with a new thing to sell because if when I look at who our model for success is on the technology side and on the distribution side, I don't really look at YouTube. I look at Apple's philosophies. Apple is an ecosystem company and their purpose for existence, according to their behavior and the way they tend to model their products is do opinionated things get you into the ecosystem and look if you use an iPad but you don't use a Mac, that's fine. If you don't sign up for Apple TV Plus, that's fine.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where it's much more about look at how successful I am. Don't you want to be like me, people who make YouTube videos about how much money they make, that kind of stuff. Not there's anything necessarily wrong with that, but it's a way of doing things. The selling classes a la carte tends to be people who are more, they have professional and lived experience before they became a YouTuber that is applicable to their audience or what the audience wants to do. People like Friend of the Family Rick Biato selling courses on how to train your ear to develop perfect pitch. I think that's one of his classes. Him selling stuff like that, he sells at a flat fixed rate. People go, they buy that class. He's very successful. These models work. The other model that isn't really being tested out by creators on mass yet is more of like the masterclass model. A bunch of creators getting together on a platform, building things that are part of a subscription.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the execution that I have a problem with there. People selling classes, most online classes are either the creator is selling one class, like a la carte. You go to my website by my class or like a cohort-based thing where you pay some number of thousands of dollars and I get on a Zoom with 100 people once a week and tell you how smart I am. Most of the cohort-based stuff is highly parasocial creators who are selling the idea that you can be successful like them. These sort of like Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris type people.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes or no. Generally speaking, I think you're absolutely correct. I think that the creators using the free ad supported platforms as a way to promote things they own, that is, frankly, the future of the creator economy. The only way this is going to be interesting and sustainable, the future of the creator economy needs to be owned by the creators. It shouldn't be owned by trillion-dollar mega tech companies. It shouldn't be owned by finance bros or tech bros. It should be owned by the creators. And there's going to be lots of sharks in the water and there's going to be lots of big ideas that fizzle out. There's going to be lots of people who try. And I think that as more of the creators themselves try things, the future is more likely to be you start on one platform and then build your own. I think that's a good thing. And there's an entrepreneurial spirit, I guess, around NFTs that is healthy.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is becoming a very common model. And the comparison I'm making is you need something to sell directly. And I'm wondering if classes were okay, this is a thing that you like that adds value that you can sell directly.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was huge in Brazil. I just want to put that. No, but let me look, I'm very skeptical of crypto. I think all of our listeners know that. I'm just abstractly what I'm saying is I can identify one problem it's solved, which is artists had something to sell in a way that they cannot sell songs anymore, or they cannot sell movies anymore, right? All that stuff has been wrapped up into streaming subscription bundles. And so if you say, I can sell a thing that's a very powerful tool to give an artist, whether or not the tool exists or has longevity or is technically real, right? And I'm just putting that next to classes because we also interview creators in the show and they say, okay, we sell classes. That's actually the revenue and the stuff we do on the platform is marketing to sell the classes.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go nuts with crypto. It is not going to age well. It's already not aging well. If we want to make sure that nobody ever takes us seriously, that the creator economy is a tech bro flash in the pan that fizzles out, this is the best way to do it. I find it horrifying. Genuinely. It's perplexing. It's confounding and it's horrifying that smart people are doing this. And I think honestly it comes down to not even malice necessarily. I think it's inexperienced. Like I said, a lot of these people are younger and I don't mean that in a dismissive way. They're incredibly smart, but they don't have the kinds of experience and context in, especially the tech industry. A lot of YouTubers, a lot of big-name YouTubers are not from the tech industry. And if you've been in the tech industry for a while, as I think you have been, I remember lots of things that were too big to fail. I remember AOL. I remember Yahoo. I remember Friendster. I remember MySpace.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where all you're doing, all you're really doing, remember all that shit I said earlier about what you're really selling is access to the trust that the audience has in the creator. If you want to sell all of your trust up front,”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. If you're selling a class, you're teaching someone something. If you're selling access to a video, you're selling time and entertainment. You sell crypto, you're selling nothing. It doesn't even solve the problem it claims to solve. It's a JSON entry on the blockchain that points to a file on somebody else's server. It doesn't even do the thing it pretends to do, let alone solve a problem that anyone actually has. I find it increasingly frustrating watching influencers promote crypto bullshit. I find it increasingly frustrating watching people who I regard as being very smart, buying into this bizarre ass Ponzi scheme.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recently launched classes. I've had a number of people on the show talk about creators with me and they immediately bring up Web3 and NFTs. This is I told you I was going to say I love it all. We've just described this incredibly complex revenue model because in many cases, the asset itself is not saleable directly. Like you can't sell a YouTube video. You got to have something to sell. And for whatever reason, the market has decided that classes are a thing you can just pay for. And for whatever reason, the market has decided that NFTs are a thing you can pay an increasingly smaller amount of money for. But it's a thing you can sell directly to the consumer as opposed to having this architecture of revenue streams around an asset that you can't sell. Is that how you think about classes? Like we just need to open up a thing where we're selling more things directly. Is that how you might think about NFTs?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their platforms. And even for me personally, or the job that I have, the more understanding I can have of what the story, the experience of being an online content creator, what that experience is, that's a good thing for me.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that as Nebula becomes a more interesting story to the world and not just this niche of creators, we will need to expand. My big picture vision dream for Nebula is it should be the home of independent creator content, high quality, curated independent creator content. So I'm not interested in getting every creator in the world to put stuff on Nebula. There's plenty of thoughtful, at least intellectually sincere and passionate content out there that would be a great fit. So I'm not saying add tens of thousands of channels, but hundreds maybe, maybe thousands. Hard to say. If the direction of the platform is that, then we have to at some point start appealing more to the kinds of creators who might have different relationships with their audience or a different relationship with their content or a different relationship.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I work with people who have audiences in the millions who can walk down any street in the world and not get recognized because they're not really on camera talent. And I have friends who, if we're out anywhere, we get stopped constantly. And I don't yet fully understand what it must be like to have to deal with that second set of problems. So I don't know, I can't really say it.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, honestly. I've been chatting with some bigger celebrity type YouTubers about this, trying to get my head around how their businesses work. It's unclear to me exactly how the pieces fit together. A friend of mine, Dr. Mike, not somebody we work with, but a friend, he just did a tour where he went around the east coast of the country doing a live stage show as, you know, the internet's a people magazine's sexiest doctor alive, getting up on stage and doing game shows and sort of sketch comedy style things for an audience of people who truly love him and watching him interact with fans and thinking about the way those tickets would sell or the kinds of people who would go to that sort of show is that something that would apply to creators like the folks we work with? What are the needs? What are the demands and what are the challenges?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have structures in place. So, a lot of what we try to do is help them build structures so they can take some time off or they can get an outside editor working on their videos so they're not spending 100 hours a week making a video to get cranked out so that the algorithm will be happy or that they're meeting sponsored deadlines or whatever. Building businesses rather than just successful channels.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you look through our roster, it's mostly nerds making explainer videos and video essays. It's a little bit less. Know, look at me, and the folks who are going to burn out, you look at like he who shall not be named, Logan Paul, he was making daily or whatever vlogs where it's just cameras following him around and he had to constantly be on. For our audience, they go watch a Marvel movie, they come home and they think about it, they argue with their friends on the internet, and then they sit down and they write an essay and they record that into a microphone. Or they go out and they build something interesting and they show off what they've built. It's less follow me around with a camera, look at me, look at me vlogger stuff, and a little bit more thoughtful. And that sounds dismissive of other kinds of content. I don't mean it that way. It's more intentionally, intellectually driven, and less celebrity driven. And I think that matters, at least for us. So I don't see that kind of burnout from creators. I do definitely see burnout. Most of the folks we work with are in their 20s, and this is their first or second job. And they just”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You worry about the flip side of that? Because one thing I hear from creators all the time is they're burned out, that the audience, especially when they start paying them in different ways, the expectations go up, the desire for constant content, the need to open the doors to your entire life, ratchet up as you become more successful in that way. And that leads to burnout. Do you think about that with the nebula group?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that those relationships, I think there's fame relationships, but parasocial, and there's going to be some of that. And there's going to be like us magazine. I don't know Kate Hudson buying groceries. Look, they're just like us. I don't know why I picked her. But there's a celebrity attachment, I think, feeling personally invested in somebody else's story. I think parasocial is all about feeling like that person is a character in your story. Brad Pitt is a character in the world story. I don't feel like I know him or I'm friends with him. I know things about him because I've read them in magazines. But when I'm a fan of, I don't know, Thomas Frank and I watch his videos every week and I learn about his life, I feel more deeply connected. And people, the audience is signing up for Nebula and they're staying signed up for Nebula because of that connection. They get invested in the projects because they're invested in the creator.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They care who he's dating. I mean, to an extent, people will care about celebrities, but it's not the same. Like, do you know Paul Rudd's wife's name?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do the magic of it is that the audience is invested in the creator. They want the creator to succeed. Nobody signs up and pays for Netflix because they're personally invested in the financial security of the Stranger Things kids. Nobody is paying for Netflix because they want to make sure that Dave Chappelle's making money. Nobody cares about Tom Hiddleston's private life and his financial security and whether or not he's able to keep making shows.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stretch of time, it was just curiosity stream giving us funding for originals. So we got to play around a lot. And as long as they would see an increase in conversions, it was worth it to them to throw money at things. So they were paying our marketing budget and our content budget. You can see why we like them. Now the new stage of life, we have a much better understanding of the world. We have more access to marketing tools of our own. We have audience awareness. We have audience affinity. We have a brand that people recognize and appreciate. And we have an understanding of how to develop the content. So we've taken on over time more and more of this ourselves. And we've had to build a machine specifically for looking at projects and making a decision. Is this something that the creator is going to be proud of? Is this something that they can promote that will lead users over here? I think the secret sauce, the secret ingredient, the thing that is, if you look at the Netflix model or the Apple TV Plus model or even the Spotify model, the thing that's different about what”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have our chief content officer, Nikki Levy. She comes from a traditional studio background, the guy we've got running the studios team right now comes to us. He was a producer with Marvel Studios. People who understand creator stuff, but also understand a more traditional Hollywood system. We did that specifically because the way YouTubers work is very fast loose, get it done so that I can ship the video tomorrow. And Hollywood will spend a year or two years making something and it spends half that time in post-production and then half the budget goes into marketing, et cetera. We needed to get to a point where we could have a little bit more thought put into how do we develop the content? How can we be useful to the creator in developing content? Where can we add value? And so now we have a structure. For a long time, it was kind of me and my gut and looking at something this would work, this wouldn't work. And frankly, for the first”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's multiple ways in which each piece of content, for lack of a better word, gets valued, there's different ways for those things to make us money. There's different ways The creator to make money off of each of those, and depending on the structure of any one given thing, standard or nebula may be in a commission chain or a licensing chain on any one of those things. If we make sure that at the end of the day it all comes down to Creator needs to be making more money. The creator needs to be seeing more of the value. One thing that might confuse you even further is those videos, the assets, we don't own them the creators do. Will pay money. We will provide funding for a creator to go out and make something that they own. I don't know of anyone in Hollywood who does that.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much does a car cost Really depends how big is the thing, how well does it perform? I guess cars perform. What's it made out of? There's a bunch of different factors who's the creator behind it. How many people are likely to come over and watch it? Is this something that people are still going to be watching in a year? When we spend money to produce an original anything, we're spending money and we have to decide, is this an amount of money that is going to be returned to us in some way? The economic machine isn't as simple as people pay us for the service, therefore we have money coming in and we can spend accordingly. It is more, I think beautifully complex than that There's the relationship with the sponsor, Curiosity Stream, and standard makes a commission on the sponsor rate. So standard as a company is making a cut of that fee that comes in. So we have incentive to do things, to invest in making that fee go up. Then we get every month curiosity stream pays us based on the number of active users who are in through the bundle. So we have an incentive for that number to go up.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'll pay you to make a thing. I'll pay you to promote that thing. I'll pay you based on how many people watch the thing, and then you own equity in the platform. So you're getting paid four times over if Nebula ever sells.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. He was sending that many people over to Curiosity Stream that it was worth $300,000. He was at $5,000 less than a year ago. He just leaned hard on doing stuff on Netla that was exclusive. More people went and signed up. So the $300,000 more than covers the production of that show dramatically more than covers the production of the show that he's doing as a Nebula Original. And because the actual production work is handled by our studios team, we get a cut of that so that we can pay the people. The whole machine is kind of designed where the economics I want to say this we have a whole machine to make these things and a machine to make sure that all of the different parts of the machine are making money.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creators make money. The sponsor rates are based on how many people went and signed up for the last one. And when we're promoting something that is so deeply rooted in the parasocial connection, the audience wants more of the things that these creators are making. We end up in a situation where more people go sign up. Sponsor rates go up. We have one creator who was making $5,000 per video. His most recent video was $300,000. His sponsor rate went up that much. Based on actual performance, real numbers.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a fun economics thing that has happened here. I've talked about and hinted at pieces of the relationship that we have with curiosity stream. They pay us to go promote Nebula. So this whole podcast now is a secret ad for Curiosity. You sign up for the bundle, you get Nebula included. So at the end of the videos, the creators will say, you know, I've got this original series or I've got this thing or this really cool, interesting thing happening, this platform that I'm helping to build meet a bunch of creators got together. It's called Nebula, and you get it when included when you sign up for Curiosity Stream. They have been paying for these sponsorships for two and a half, a little over two and a half years now. When people go sign up,”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the first episode went to YouTube and it's made zero dollars. He would have canceled the entire project and he'd be out a very large sum of money. It just wouldn't work.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll throw a little bit of shade at. They're also very concerned with what advertisers will enjoy, and they don't really do a lot of work to find advertisers who are more interested in that kind of content. Fair enough, right? But that is a show that Brian from Email Engineering, he did upload the first episode of Logistics of D-Day to YouTube to promote the whole series. And it was demonetized and it's made no money. So he spent, I don't know if I can say how much money he spent on that, a lot of money was spent on that show.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Battle of Britain. Real engineering made a series called Battle of Britain that's airing now, and it's a follow up to a series that he made on Nebula called Logistics of D-Day. This is content about wars There's no graphic violence shown, but things blow up. There are weapons. There is discussion of death, there is discussion of violence. Those videos on YouTube would be demonetized. They would be age restricted. They would not make money. It wouldn't work on YouTube because the platform itself is, and I think rightfully so, conscientious of how things are presented to the audience. They have to assume the widest possible collection of human beings seeing this, and that includes children. And I understand that I'm not throwing shade.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're kind of describing the same thing, right? You're saying we're going to get a bunch of YouTube catalog content that you can pay for maybe window it early, but that's just the basics. What we're going to do is spend money on production for creators. And then you keep saying this phrase that I want to push on, on things that might not work on YouTube. And that to me is”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very much obligated to disclose at this point that I'm the EP of a Netflix show that's coming out in a couple weeks, but that's neither here nor there. We just made the show. It's great. My responsibility to that show was helping to predict the future. So I feel good about that. That's your disclosure. Here's my question about that, though, right? That Netflix curve is well known. The catalog content, you buy a bunch of catalog content on the cheap, you monetize it against access, basically. People couldn't get friends easily before you paid Netflix. You get friends really easily. And then you spend your profits on originals and hopefully lock people in. Like that was the model for Netflix. It is in many ways the models for everyone else except Apple TV, which has no catalog content. They're just buying the premium stuff, but they make the iPhone. So I feel like their economics are different.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jump forward a couple years. You know what? Those five shows are excellent. Every single one of them. And every time they put something new on Apple TV, it's excellent. And you can laugh that they don't have the biggest library in the world. It's actually pretty decent now. But you know that anytime they put something up, it's at least worth trying. Severance is amazing. Ted Lasso universally loved. Meanwhile, what does Netflix have? They're scrambling to get a season two of Squid Game because they need a hit. Do they have stranger things?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have the big obvious collection of hits. But if you look at switching the model, early days, we have to kind of Netflix it up and we recognize that that's the position that we've been in. Going forward, I think Netflix is a terrible role model. I think the reason that Netflix is bleeding subscribers and bleeding money and now bleeding staff is because they don't value the creators. Their business model is to take billions of dollars, go out and produce every noodle of spaghetti and throw them all at the wall and anything that doesn't stick gets canceled. And that has worked for years. But it doesn't scale. And remember a couple years ago when we all laughed at Apple TV Plus because they only had like five shows.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in the early days for Netflix, they were all about catalog content and slowly adding originals. People came over because you could watch all of the movies on Netflix, and even that was built off of a system where they were literally mailing you DVDs. So they said, okay, we're going to put all this stuff onto servers. You can watch it on your TV over the internet or on your computer over the internet. And here's all the stuff. And you didn't go there because they had stranger things in Squid Game, those things didn't exist yet. You went there because they had, I don't know, friends. And our early days are a similar position. We don't have stranger things. We don't have severance. We don't have squid game or peacemaker. I don't know.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're spending millions of dollars this year on original content. We've got these classes. We've got Fully produced original productions, documentaries that never would have been made, series that never would have been made on YouTube. And we think that over time, it's more and more interesting for the audience to come get that stuff than it is to just watch the video early. Again, that's a feature. And I think it's a big one. But if we look at Netflix as a template, and we can only do that for so long.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe, maybe. I'll be honest and say that we just haven't really thought through that scenario, at least our audiences don't necessarily work that way. I guess there's no perfect model. I'm sort of thinking through it now. Point of clarification. I don't know if this needs clarification, but just for the record, the value proposition in our mind for somebody watching the video on Nebula versus on YouTube or watching things on Nebula versus YouTube, getting the video early and without ads is something, but just being YouTube premium premium isn't the most exciting thing in the world for us. That is a feature, but I don't think of it as really being our core feature.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that is a potential danger, right? That the army of teenagers probably doesn't have as much disposable income. So you add the content to your platform. The army of teenagers says, whatever, we're going to wait a day to watch it with ads on YouTube. And then the paying nebulae audience, I'll just watch this stuff early and you've ended up in that bad position. Maybe that's not a realistic concern. I'm just saying from the way you're describing the model, it's a potential concern.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe everyone who currently has, maybe the half million people that are currently paying for nebulous subscriptions. Decide that they're only going to watch Mr. Beast. But if that's all they want, then the audience is voting with their time.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See if you get Mr. Beast. He's the biggest creator on YouTube. And what happens if he were to start putting stuff on Nebula and his audience, his army of 100 million teenagers all starts watching everything on Nebula, but not paying? How would that happen? How could they possibly watch his stuff on Nebula without paying us?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You gotta have some model where you're like, I'm gonna bring somebody over, we're gonna add them to the team. Our watch time, some watch time will go to them, so they will get some money out of the pie, but they have to bring X number of subscribers to the mix to balance that out and make it equal. Otherwise, you could just have the farthest way you could think about this, which would probably never happen, but just for the sake of the argument, you add a super popular creator that brings no subscribers and they take all the money.”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is this new person going to add value in like a clinical or cynical business sense? I only have to think about, is this person a good social fit and is this somebody that we're going to be excited to have on the team, so to speak?”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of just trust the creators. If somebody comes to me and says, hey, there's this channel that I'm friends with the creator, and they do really good stuff. I think they'd be a good fit. I take the call. If I get a cold email from a YouTuber saying, hey, I've got 100,000 subscribers, I want to be on Nebula. I don't reply to those emails. Not because I want to be a jerk. Not because I want to ignore those people, but because I just don't have a mechanism for vetting them. If the creators come to me and tell me about what they're watching, what they're excited about, they're the best filter system I could ever hope for. So if one of the creators who's doing stuff on Nebula and owns a piece of Nebula, if they come to me and say, this person should be here too, I trust that that creator is smart enough to know that they should only be making recommendations if they're going to add value. And as long as, again, it all comes down to trust and relationships. If I trust that creator, then I don't have to think any more about”
2022-05-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business, with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT