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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“How do you decide? You could add another 160 people the nebula. You have to assume they're going to bring nebulous subscribers with them, right? How do you make that decision to say, okay, we want to sign up our 161st creator? We know they're going to add watch time to the denominator, but we have to increase the numerator as well.”
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 at all to do with the size of the audience. The equitable split of how people are making money on Nebula, it comes down to like how excited did they make their audience about Nebula and how good a job are they doing convincing that audience to go watch their stuff on Nebula? Are they releasing extra content? If that video contains snippets of an interview and you tell folks that if they go over to Nebula, they can watch the whole unedited interview, then you're probably going to get people coming over and watching more stuff on Nebula. And when that happens, you get more of the watch time split. And as more and more creators do that, the split, the percentage split, will constantly be rebalancing. But if all of those people are coming over to Nebula and they're spending more time on Nebula and we've got all this retention, then revenue goes up, the pie gets bigger.”
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
“Do that, what you need is a discovery system, and YouTube's algorithm gets a lot of guff from creators, I think, in some ways deservedly so, but they're constantly working on it. It is a system where you know as well as anybody. If you put a podcast out there until you tell somebody about it, nobody listens. If you release a brand new podcast, your first hundred thousand, 10,000 listeners are people that you told about the show. On YouTube, you put out a video and your first million viewers might just be people who showed up. It's much more like being a store at a mall than it is just releasing an indie magazine and putting it up in record stores or something. There's like a true discovery system. And so the way the audience is attached to individual creators will vary wildly by creator and really doesn't have”
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
“YouTube did something really interesting that I don't think they get enough credit for. And I find it strange as a representative of creators to be out here talking about how great YouTube is. But I don't think that YouTube's position is fully understood yet. For the entirety of human history until 17 years ago, there was no such thing as a middle class content creator. There's never been a moment in time for people where somebody could wake up in the morning and go produce something that would be seen, heard, consumed by an audience of potentially millions of people sustainably with no gatekeepers. That's brand new. And it's really cool.”
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
“Versus 50,000 people who all buy a thing to 50,000 guy is just worth more. His audience is more engaged. His audience is more excited. They're more attached. When that guy goes out and promotes something or talks about something he's working on, more of the audience activates. So what we see on Nebula is when creators are promoting like, look, I've got a thing over here, come check it out, the audiences that are most activated or most excited, they come over and check it out. And some of those really big creators, they'll bring in about the same number of people to come check things out because maybe their views are primarily driven by news and search and viral algorithmic views. So it really depends. I think that on the YouTube side,”
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
“The Rev Share month over month is based on watch time. I love this question so much. There's so much to unpack here. I apologize if I go off a little bit. There's a lot in this. It's based on watch time and there's going to be rumors. There's going to be losers. That's how life works. Equity is not equality. We can't say everyone gets the same slice of pie here. Different people contribute differently. And there's nothing inherently good or bad about that. But what might surprise you is that the people you think are small often outperform the people that you would think are big. We have creators on YouTube who will get 50,000 views a video but make $10,000 for sponsorship. And we have people who will get a million or two million views per video who will only make $5,000 per sponsorship. Because views are not conversions. Audience size does not turn into money from sponsors. The sponsors, what they care about is how many people click the link and bought the thing. And if you've got 2 million people who don't buy a thing,”
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, exactly. What are you going to put on your LinkedIn man? Let's talk about winners and losers just for a second because I want to talk about how the RevShare works on Nebula. If I look at any of the big platforms, there are the big, big stars, there's the medium tail, I guess you would call it, that are doing okay, but they're cranking every day just to do okay. And then there's the long tail people who make no money. For a platform like Nebula, you've got some big stars. You've got some people in the sort of middle tail. How do you make sure the rev split is equal, right? Because you've got half a million people paying somewhere between $10 and $12 a month. That's only a finite amount of money. How do you split that into an equitable split for all the creators on platform?”
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 we know that at the end of the day, the sponsor makes more money if the audience trusts the creator. We know that at the end of the day YouTube gets more views if the audience is happy. We know that Nebula gets more signups if the audience is happy. The common thread here is how do we make the audience happy? And so if we can get everybody on that same page of doing things that make the audience happy, we're just kind of like having conversations and balancing needs, I guess. And if we approach it as just simply a relationship business, and how do we make sure that everyone can end up a winner, not saying that simple, but it helps to, I guess, simplify the way we think about it. The decision making process is just talk to everyone and think a lot.”
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
“If at all possible, we're here to make sure that the sponsors add value to the show. And we've seen over the last several years that it went from being people grossed out about sponsorships to now if you run a curiosity stream sponsorship or an audible sponsorship or whatever it is, there's a prestige that comes with that. The audience sees that as you've leveled up. These audiences are very savvy and they understand much more than I would have expected the way the business side of being a creator works. I think the transparency works in everyone's favor, but it is still, again, buzzword, but it is still a parasocial relationship, and we have to be respectful of that. And so if we approach the sponsor relationships as guardians of trust, and if we approach the platform relationships as guardians of trust, that sounds like I'm glorifying our position. I guess what I'm trying to say here is the balance that needs to be struck.”
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 a lot of conversations. It really comes down to relationships. This is a relationship business in every facet. How am I building these relationships? How are these people being taken care of? And if we recognize that with sponsorships, what we're really selling is an airtime on a show. What we're selling is access to the trust that the audience has in the creator. Okay, well, we can make better decisions and build better relationships off of that one piece of knowledge or I don't know, understanding. We can say that, okay, our philosophy is that we are here to protect that trust, not to sell ads. We're not here to sell sponsorships. We're here to keep the sponsors from ruining the 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
“The trigger on building that until we had a real understanding of what it was they would want and a sense of assurance from ourselves that we could actually build that. And we needed to make sure that whatever pipeline we built, there'd be enough content over a period of time that we could live up to at least internal promise and I think now external promise of one new class comes out every week. But that had to come out of the conversations with the creators, not just we go into a back room somewhere, dream up what it is, and come out and hand down orders”
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 all one big conversation with the creators. And we discussed things very openly. We have a Slack channel with the creators where we specifically just talk about Nebula and the business and how we should build things. Before we built Nebula classes, we had a long talk with the creators about how should this work? What are the features that we care about? What kinds of classes do we want to make? And we didn't.”
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
“Nebula is literally creator owned in that standards cap table is 100% creator. There's like 30-ish creators total who own standard, and our operating agreement stipulates that only standard creators can own standard. On the nebula side, there's the 50-50 split monthly and in totality out to the creators. So there's both literally it is creator-owned and spiritually it's creator-owned. The inmates run the asylum. So we see it as a partnership. The creator is provide the videos and we build structures so those videos can make more money and we provide the platform and the support. So we approach it not as like how do we convince creators or how do we negotiate them to put their videos on the thing. So I've never really negotiating with myself.”
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 also a structure in place that if Nebula is ever sold, 50% of the proceeds go to the creators as a pool. So a form of what's called like shadow equity or phantom equity. It means that there's no tax implications today, but like if we sell a thing, we got to share the money. The arrangement, like we don't pay licensing for the videos. Instead, there's that guarantee that if this thing blows up, you're cut in. And the spirit of this is very simply we're building it together.”
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 just a meadball. That's very good. Need to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about the money. So standard, kind of in its purest form, right represents a bunch of creators as talent, goes to the platforms. You know, you can lobby the platforms for different changes. You can go get ad deals. You have the leverage to not do the dirtiest possible ad deals and do good ones. But then you're also selling the videos to Nebula, right? Do you ever get in the point where Dave Wiskas, the CEO standard, is negotiating with Dave Wiskas, the CEO of Nebula?”
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
“If you want, I realize this is an audio podcast, but if you'd like to mentally visualize our org chart, imagine a plate of spaghetti.”
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
“Around the same number of production people and engineering, meaning iOS development, Android development, web front end, web backend, Roku. And then we have like a handful of project management and QA people. We have around 30 production people, including motion graphics, editing. We have an in-house composer. We have 3D people. We have thumbnail designers. So I think around 30 of those folks in total, and then a small handful of content strategy people and syndication people like carving up content, moving on to other platforms, managing Facebook accounts for creators, things like that. The Activision, I don't know. I'd have to see an org chart. And even then, like we've been discussing lately what an org chart even means for us. Apparently there's a different version of an org chart. So instead of top down, it kind of just goes off into different directions.”
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 have, let's see, across department heads, people running in digital departments, I think it's nine or ten. Oh God, somebody needs to be mad at me if I forgot them. I want to say we have about 30 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
“It's like here's what we're doing to get from point A to point B, sort of a thing we recognize that those are all nebula employees, the engineering team, it's all nebula employees, were just like kind of like on the creator side when we have a certain number of 160 creators, we have leverage. Similarly, a lot of our employees are in the US and we do 401k and all of this stuff. And because we have 80 of them, we get a little bit more leverage than if we were two companies who had 40 each or whatever. So we're kind of navigating what the exact right answer will be in the end, making sure that employees are all taken care of. And we can still behave as one team. We see ourselves as one team. There's just, you know, corporate structures and legal entities. It's needlessly confusing, especially for our accounting team.”
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've been huge supporters of everything we do. It felt right to acknowledge their role in us building this. And they don't have a controlling stake. It's all very much on the up and up, and the creators still run everything. But it made sense to build the relationship out that way. And with that, Nebula gets spun off into its own company. At that point, the corporate structure of Nebula, and it's an LLC. We have to go do these other things. And we have to figure out, well, we have all of these standard employees, our entire engineering team, our content team. They're all standard employees. How do we do this? So where we are in the middle of this phase is Nebula simply contracts standard to do the development at cost.”
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
“Nebula has potential to grow more. We didn't need the cash. We weren't desperate. We were profitable. It was fine. But we knew that some cash injection would be good. It meant that we could spend more on content development and try new kinds of marketing. We built classes out of that. We knew that the relationship, if we wanted to be respectful to the relationship investment that they had made, it's weird to think of a publicly traded company as a friend, but we no joke, we truly do see them that way.”
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
“The answer is yes. It's weird. We're in this sort of middle stage of history right now. We were the same company for a long time. And then last summer, our biggest sponsor partner, Curiosity Stream, after two years, two and a half years of hounding us trying to like, hey, this thing's really cool. We'd love to buy in. We'd love to buy in. We finally hit a point where we realized that because of this bundle arrangement that we've had with them, for the last two and a half years or whatever it's been, all of our marketing, they've paid for. Every time one of our creators goes out and promotes the curiosity stream bundle, they're promoting Nebula. And so we have all of this awareness and we just hit half a million paid users. And it's because curiosity stream has been truly a partner to us the entire way, making sure that these creators are getting time on their dime to tell their audience about the thing. And it's all very mutually beneficial. But we sort of stopped and recognized 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
“It's a noble goal. I feel like I have to unpack the structure of standard nebulae here a little bit because. You said 80 people. We're mostly talking about standard, which is the management company. Nebula is the video streaming platform company. They're not the same company. Of those 80 people, how many are at standard and how many are at nebula? And how does that all 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
“Acknowledging that reality. They have that power. I mean, I can imagine a universe, and I think most companies who are in a similar position to us, the MCNs or a lot of the agencies, they see that as a risk. They see that as an existential threat. We see it as that is the exact thing that gives us power. Those creators, if we represent them, we can either be afraid that they leave, or we can use that energy to build better things to make sure that they don't want to leave, and then take that exact same power imbalance that the bigger world doesn't necessarily recognize yet, and do our best to hold the mirror up to the platforms to ensure that they recognize that the only reason people watching YouTube is for the videos. And maybe they should be a little bit nicer to the people who make them.”
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
“Converge, I guess. We're in a position where we can see the mistakes that other people have made. The MCNs were all about gather up a bunch of channels, lock them up under our banner, and extract value for as long as possible. And their deal was that we would occasionally bring you sponsorships, and you'll be happy to get them, and we'll take a cut of those, and we also get a cut of your AdSense revenue. So all day, every day you're making us money, and sometimes we bring you value. That is a very old media, traditional media way of looking at the world. The one nice thing about the talent agency structure, the talent management company structure, is that the inmates run the asylum a little bit more. The talent has the power. If the people who make the shows, the people who are putting all of the banger content on YouTube or on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, if those people all leave, then we have nothing. So for me, it's just a matter of simply”
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 like them being my boss and not the other way around. Because the creators hold the cards here. And I think that as, I mean, I hate to keep using the buzzwordy term, the creator economy, but it's for simplification. As you look across the creator economy and the players who are coming into this space and the way they're approaching this space, there's a lot of old media people, and there's a lot of ad media people, and there's a lot of technology people. There's a lot of traditional talent people. Nobody really quite understands all of it. The talent people don't understand the tech. And the tech people don't understand the talent. And Hollywood doesn't understand anything. And the way these things kind of”
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 that's really interesting the way you've described your functions, right? You've described a media company, but like any big media company has a bunch of core services at the middle, like content strategy or platform relationships or whatever. And then it usually the people who make this stuff work at the media company. The people who make this stuff for you do not work for you. They're your clients in much more direct way. How do you think about that balance?”
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. As a rule in business and in life, I just don't want to be in a relationship with somebody who doesn't want to be in a relationship with me. And I feel that locking somebody in, it's easy to get lazy. If I know that there's always a 30-day tick and clock, it means that I and at this point, I think 80 employees, we have to constantly be in a mode of proving our value. We have to earn it every day. And I think it's a good way to live. I think that's a good way to, it's why we built Nebula. It's why we've expanded beyond sponsorships into handling merch, into building the largest, as far as I'm aware, the largest production company in the world specifically catering to YouTubers. It's why we build a content strategy team. It's why we built a syndication team because we know that along the way we have to keep coming up with ways to add value for the folks that we work with or eventually someone else will catch up with 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
“This is valuable, and it was so you pay us this much money. And there's no room for argument. A lot of our philosophy is never negotiate for money, negotiate for data. If you negotiate for data, the money is just math. Everything cleaner. So because we have these structures in place, and frankly because our contract with the creators is only a 30 day rolling contract and because we have a strong reputation, it's really easy for the creators to look at our roster and look how we work, who we work with both on the creator side and on the sponsor side and the things that we've built. And take that first step into trusting 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
“They will never sign any contract other than with us. So all of the documents that get signed with the sponsors, we handle that. And we have a master documents that the sponsors sign with us to govern how the relationship works. And then we have the contracts that we sign with the creators to be very transparent here. Our fiduciary responsibility always is to the creator. We are never working for both sides. In every scenario all the time, 100% of the time we represent the creator and the creator's interests. So when we sign a document with the sponsor, it's us making them say that they understand that this is how it works and this is what they're going to have to do if they want these things to happen. And because of that, we can go to the creators and we can explain. We get performance data. If a sponsor is going to run on your show, they have to tell us how well you performed. There's no magical mystery pricing where they come back and say that was good, give us another one and we say pay us more and they go no. Like we're going to show them their own data and say, well, you wanted it to be.”
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 that how that plays out that you're saying? Oh, yeah Is what I've got, and if you want to do is how do you get the creators to participate in that, right? Like that, this is kind of the business structure question. You've got to get a bunch of people 160 people to say, okay, we're going to give up some of the outs that would make us deals otherwise. But you've got to protect us. Like, what does a protection look like?”
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
“Contract that requires us to do a make good if the video doesn't get enough views. We know that sponsor value is not determined by how many people saw the video. It's determined by conversions. So not getting enough views is not a good reason for somebody to have to do another video for free. We will not sign that. And one creator saying I won't do that means that the sponsor goes away. 160 of the biggest creators saying they won't do that means the sponsor goes, okay, whatever you want, sir.”
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
“Exclusivity. The creators that we represent, we represent exclusively. So for the folks on our roster, if you want to do deals with them, you have to go through us. And that is not about giving us or me as an individual power. It's about giving those creators power. If you want to do something with Devin from Legal Eagle, you have to answer to all of the restrictions and all of the requirements of how we do deals. And it's all things that have been developed and designed over a course of years, seeing how bad actors or the shady sharks of the world will approach creators, like the influencer world, the creator economy is filled with people who are looking to extract value, seeing how they work, how they behave, we've developed systems. Like, for example, we will not sign a contract.”
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 you'd bundle up a bunch of channels, you'd get some leverage over the YouTubes of the world, and you would get a better deal for yourself. And mostly YouTube is like too big to get leverage over. And all the MCN deals fell apart. Why do you think you've been successful at standards?”
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 feel like this core idea behind standard, right? You're going to bring together a bunch of creators, you're going to handle their business affairs in particular, their sponsorship deals and their platform relationships. This idea that's been around for a while, I feel like every media company went through their multi-channel network phase, the MCN phase. Decoder, like maybe this is like way too in the weeds for the regular decoder listener, but if Media people listening to Decoder when I say MCN, like they all broke out in hives, right? Like every company tried to do this thing where you'd bundle up a bunch of Vox Media tried to do 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
“Them. And then in the other direction to YouTube lobbying on behalf of the creators. We represent 160 creators. So the weight that I can walk into that room with is a little bit different than any one individual creator can. So we sort of act as a, I don't want to say a lobbying arm or a union, but kind of spiritually along those lines where if a stronger position you have more leverage when you work as a 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
“Because he's a friend and we can just get on Discord and argue about things. So if the creators have a problem with the video being demonetized, we know the people to go to. If they have a problem with the video, even up to and including a glitch in the video and the file needs to be replaced, that's a really tough thing to do. And you have to be able to make a very strong case for it because we have the relationships, we can go to the right people and we can lobby for it. It doesn't guarantee it would happen, but we can lobby for it. So anything that is a creator better understanding how the system works, a lot of it comes down to the algorithm itself or the functions around demonetization or content restriction, content ID, things that the creators feel are a very opaque black box and can be as an independent creator very scary. A lot of what we do with the platform relationships are working to help the creators understand how the things actually work and humanize YouTube to”
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, for example, I was up late last night arguing with the guy who runs the YouTube algorithm about how a thing should 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
“Standard, we sort of manage the business relationships for the creators, primarily sponsor bookings, that sort of thing. We do a lot of platform relationship development. We handle merch. We handle...”
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, I want to talk about that. I definitely want to talk about the structures that kind of protect creators. But to be a successful creator, you got to go get an audience, right? Like you have a big marketing start problem to get people to watch your stuff. The easiest way to do that is obviously to participate in the big platforms, whether that's YouTube, whether it was Vimeo at that time, whether it's the podcasting ecosystem. You started out managing creators on those platforms and running businesses for them. That's still your company standard. How did that work and how do standard and nebula play together?”
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
“This great big, ugly, well, yeah, the last time we tried to do this, the whole thing collapsed. Not a good look for the creators, not a good look for the audience. And so coming into this, they were very concerned. If this thing collapses, what happens? If it fails, if it goes away. So we had to put a lot of structures in place on the business side to make sure that we were accounting for that. But bottom line, knowing that we could even keep the thing, it would cost like two or three grand a month just to keep it running. So the optics would never be failure. The optics would just be like a slow trailing off. Not the worst thing in the world. And we all kind of agreed, all right, that's fine. So we built it up over, I think, the next six months, got the 1.0 out the door, and figured, we'll just see what happens from here.”
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 they had a bunch of creators signed on. There's no equity or ownership. They just had creators signed on to make shows. Contracts were in place. Content was being made, and they got bought by Verizon for about $50 million. And as soon as they got bought by Verizon, first thing Verizon did shut the whole thing down. And so for the creators, there's like a big L on the record now.”
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
“Who was paying monthly? And he's got a Patreon. He does find on Patreon. What is the incentive for anybody in this scenario to do a bunch of work, to move to a new platform and give Vimeo money? In the email I was typing, the only way this would make any sense at all is if we had all of the creators building, oh, oh, we should do that. That's not a bad idea. How far off are we on the technology? How long would this take to build? And so I kept talking to their team, like exploring the options, thinking it through. And as it became clear that there really was a pretty, I don't want to say easy, but a straightforward path. Like the technology was there. We wouldn't be paying for bandwidth. We'd be paying per user, so there wasn't an infinite costs without infinite revenue scenario. And we realized it would be relatively cheap to get it up and running and relatively cheap to keep it running forever. Years ago, there was a thing called vessel that attempted to do something similar to what Nebula does.”
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
“The idea for Nebula came up about three and a half years ago, I think November ish, about three and a half years ago. And it started as a company had reached out to us, one of the over-the-top streaming provider companies reached out to us saying we would love for one particular creator to build a streaming service on our platform. And I looked at that, and I won't name the creator, but I looked at this. Sure, if you want me to. Yeah. It was Vimeo. Yeah, Vimeo reached out. There's this one creator we really like. They should build a streaming platform. That guy makes one video every six months”
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
“That's really fascinating, right? You've now got tiered pricing, you've got different products inside of the platform. I feel like the beginning of this was very simple in that you were managing a bunch of creators, YouTube's economics were not necessarily great, and you could make your own platform. How long has that process been”
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 depends on how you come in. We just launched Nebula Classes, which is our online courses addition to the platform. And that kind of marks the moment where we're spending a lot more money on content, and so we had to bring the price up a little bit. Right now, list price is, I think, $10 a month, $100 a year. If you come in through one of the creators, like you just go to any creator page and then sign up, I think it's $8 a month or $80 a year. Or if you don't care about the classes bit, you can come in through the Curiosity Stream bundle and then it kind of varies depending on their pricing.”
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
“Already doing independently individually on Patreon, but in a more condensed, subscribe to this service, get all the things, and we can all share the benefits together, sort of a setup.”
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, Nebula is we are sometimes, I guess, accused of being a YouTube competitor, which we don't see it that way at all. We're more like an expansion pack to YouTube. It's not education content, but education-ish. Like the kinds of things you would watch on YouTube, the kinds of creators you would watch on YouTube where you go to learn something or nerd out about something that you love, those creators all got together and built their own thing. And it's sort of a Netflix-ypple TV plus-y sort of view of the world where we can take all of the things that we're going out there on to YouTube and condense them here with no ads, post things early on our own platform. We have control of how it all runs, and then we can use the money that it makes to produce original content, like full-on original productions or exclusives, things that wouldn't necessarily work on YouTube and kind of go for a bit more of a premium vibe. Not far off from what people were all”
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 am very excited to talk to you for the listeners before the show. Dave and I have run in the same circles for years, but we're actually, this is the first time we're meeting. So this, I think this is going to be a good episode. There's a lot of familiarity, but also who are you? I think it's going to be a good one. Let's start with some context. A few weeks ago, CNN Plus announced that it was going to be shut down. It just shut itself down. And in response, you tweeted, our self-funded indie streamer Watch Nebula is about to hit half a million paying subscribers. That's obviously a pretty wide dichotomy of things, right? CNN Plus, massive billion dollar investment, your indie streaming service nebula, which is a paid service.”
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 like this conversation. Okay, Dave Wiskis, CEO of Standard and Nebula. Here we go. Dave Wiskas, you are the founder and CEO of Standard, which is a company that manages creators and of Nebula, a streaming service for those creators. Welcome to Decoder.”
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