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Who Owns Nebula?

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Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#71

Post by ryzvonusef »

You have two paths for a paid youtube competitor: ____

1- Bulk Purchase, like Nebula (Sam from Wendover and other fellow youtubers); One subscription buys you access to ALL the channels in the network.

Pros:

* Single payment for users

* gets better as more creators join

* usually discounted if you consider per-channel cost

Cons:

* requires trust between the creators

* can cause clash between creators on division of funds

* requires a certain minimum output to maintain basic service

* one cancelled creator can sink the service

____

2-Per-channel subscription, like Floatplane (Made by Linus from the LinusTechTips channel); You have to pay seperately for each channel you want to get access to.

Pros:

* Can be cheaper if you only want access to a couple of specific creators

* creators are not dependent on each other to maintain the service

* you are seperate from other creator drama somewhat

Cons:

* Can become costly quickly if you want to subscribe to multiple creators

* not that competitive with youtube premium

* can cause comparison strife between creators for difference in subscription fee

* can't take advantage of the synergist effect.

_____

Basically Nebula has the advantage of having many high profile creators, and if you have a smaller following, you can take advantage of the rising tide and get a boost from them by joining the service.

Also, Nebula seems to have ~ 50-ish creators from some pretty diverse set of topics, so it's not pigeonholed as Floatplane.

Buuuuut...it's unsustainable I feel. As the number of creators increase, the disparity of what each creator brings and what they are owed will be unteneble.

--

Floatplane, OTOH, has half the number of channels as Nebula, and they are mostly tech friends of Linus, so it's not only pigeonholed, but overshadowed by the anchor store that is LTT.

By having seperate silos, you are unlikely to catch the wake of a rising ship to boost yourself.

However, I feel that by cutting money out of the equation (Floatplane gets a fixed cut, rest, you earn of your own merits) it is in theory more sustainable; you have your own silo, and if one is sinking, you are not concerned.

Also, there is a gun channel on the website, and they are there because they are tired of the censorship from Youtube. Being free from drama is a plus...don't subcribe if you don't want to watch!

but not that free; they are still bound to the whims of payment processors, so if VISA/MASTERCARD/Whatever block them, they are SoL.

They are not Only Fans level of free.

___

TBH, it's a pain to get people to pay, the friction is just too high. Nebula makes it easier than Floatplane, on the onset, even if it's not the best choice. But since when have people used logic where money is concerned?

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#72

Post by kragen »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #65
kragen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm disappointed in brian mcmanus every time i watch a 'real engineering' video and find out that it's full of factual inaccuracies, like all the previous 'real engineering' videos i watched. you'd think i'd learn, but i keep confusing him with 'practical engineering', which is actually real

Was going to say… I love the practical engineering channel but that channel doesn’t really dive deep enough into any one topic to encounter any factual inaccuracies.

admittedly, it does fall far short of being practical; if your preparation for building a railroad is watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqmOSMAtadc and your preparation for building a landfill is watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44, your trains will derail and your garbage will leach into your groundwater

but that's not really a difference between the two channels; real engineering manages to pack plenty of misstatements into videos that are equally superficial

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#73

Post by SamWhited »

wodenokoto wrote: post #15
danpalmer wrote: post #2

Interesting analysis! From the facts in this post, I'd reach the following speculation: the creators have a contract that entitles them to vote on certain types of company action, a share of 50% of the revenue, and potentially representation of their votes in the form of one or two of the existing board seats. Essentially there being some company bylaws in place to enact that "ownership" mechanism. This would match w…

I don't know about American coop laws, but in Denmark there are diary companies owned by farmers (nearly 10.000 farmers own Arla) and Coop Amba, which owns many super market chains have over 2 million members, that each have a voting right in the company. You can totally scale this type of ownership.

In the U.S. it really depends what state you're in. Some states have co-ops as a specific business vehicle and in many of them the co-op model is very different. There are big farm co-ops, EMCs, etc. in the U.S. (Land-o-Lakes and Florida Natural Oranges come to mind, I believe they're both fully farmer owned), but I'm not super familiar with them or how their model works, but in Georgia where I am at least co-ops tend to work in one of two ways:

For smaller co-ops that don't bring in members very often or who are just getting started they often create an LLC and put in the articles of incorporation that all future members will receive an equal share and equal voting rights. This does require filing paperwork for every new member, but keeps taxes easy.

For co-ops that expect to have lots of members rapidly (consumer co-ops that sell shares in their store to whomever wants one, for example) they normally form a corporation and allocate a certain number of shares up front and indicate that any member has equal voting rights, etc. this makes the taxes harder, but is a lot less paperwork since you have to file stuff about the number of shares sold at the end of the quarter (or whenever, I forget the exact reporting details, been a while since I've done this) but not every single time you add a member.

Georgia (and a lot of other states) also have specific laws for EMCs and other specific types of co-ops, so it's really fragmented. Take this with a grain of salt, it's just two examples of how a lot of smaller co-ops do things.

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#74

Post by jszymborski »

armoredkitten wrote: post #64
jszymborski wrote: post #48

I'm cancelling my subscription. I was always suspicious of the "50:50 SB/Ceator" deal. The real way to do something like this imho is via a cooperative, with investors like CuriosityStream and SB providing capital loans. That said, the "ownership" claim is apparently provably false and I've been lied to. The company has operated dishonestly, and frankly the biggest reason I had a subscription was because of what I th…

To me, there's no evidence in any of this that would indicate the creators are misinformed or being scammed. In reality, they know their primary source of revenue is coming from Youtube, and it is a frequent complaint, especially for content creators who do anything marginally political or controversial, that they are demonetized or hit with copyright strikes (even in clear cases of fair use) and have to deal with th…

I never said they were scammed, but I was indeed misled by dishonest marketing, and frankly I think creators are also to blame for spouting lies about ownership.

I supported Nebula because I think a creator's co-op is a beautiful project. I was willing to compromise on the co-op idea when I thought it was a 50:50 ownership structure but this is nothing close to equitable in my mind.

I'll spend the money I save on Nebula on monthly donations to creators. I look forward to supporting a creators co-op if a promising one is ever made.

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#75

Post by NoGravitas »

I've long had the feeling that Nebula was kind of sketchy, ever since they kicked out J.T. (Second Thought), a founding member. I'm glad it's working out for Philosophy Tube and Jessie Gender, but I will not be surprised at all if there's not a total rug-pull some time in the future.

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#76

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

ehhthing wrote: post #24
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author’s thesis is that the creators are being tricked. They own some complex bespoke right in Nebula (“an entirely new kind of cooperative corporate governance”), which they’re told and believe is equivalent to ownership, but actually it’s a sham that will break down if Standard ever wants to do something that isn’t in the creators’ interests.

The author doesn't go through this in nearly enough detail to make that argument convincing. Rather than spending the entire time trying to find what the "real" ownership amount, the author should've spent the time contextualizing the situation. The author basically spends the entirety of one sentence dismissing the idea that there could exist a corporate governance model that allows creators to have a meaningful way…

I don’t agree that was obvious in hindsight. I was familiar with Nebula before this article and I had always understood it to be something like a co-op where creators and only creators had genuine equity. When reading the first bit, I assumed as the author did that it must be something where the co-op owns a controlling share in some underlying company.

The conclusion that there’s nothing like a co-op at all is not what I would have expected and I really think does suggest that it’s all smoke and mirrors. If this “ownership” doesn’t consist of anything more than a right for creators to be paid based on their view counts, isn’t it just a YouTube contract with extra steps?

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#77

Post by xd1936 »

> Nebula the business is “Standard Broadcast LLC,” and is directly owned at the LLC level by me and 43 other creators (and growing).

> Nebula the streaming video service (which controls the streaming revenue) is Watch Nebula LLC, which is about 83% owned by Standard Broadcast LLC, with the rest held by Curiosity Stream. All control and all board seats belong to Standard Broadcast LLC.

> We use shadow equity for platform creators because assigning LLC-level equity would make signing new creators logistically impractical, and would have complex tax implications for every creator we bring in. US securities laws also are skewed in favor of the wealthy: it would be very expensive or potentially impossible for us to comply with them if we were issuing securities to small creators who aren’t accredited investors.

> If substantial control of the streaming service ever changes hands, we are contractually required to split the proceeds 50/50 with the creators on the platform. 50% of streaming profits are distributed to creators based on watch time. Additionally, 1/3 of the revenue from any subscriber is allocated to the creator responsible for bringing in that subscriber.

> Weird that he didn’t just ask.

— Dave Wiskus, CEO of Nebula https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1ffnaza/comment/lmx...

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#78

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

paxys wrote: post #58
danpalmer wrote: post #2

Interesting analysis! From the facts in this post, I'd reach the following speculation: the creators have a contract that entitles them to vote on certain types of company action, a share of 50% of the revenue, and potentially representation of their votes in the form of one or two of the existing board seats. Essentially there being some company bylaws in place to enact that "ownership" mechanism. This would match w…

The big source for confusion IMO is that there is no single universally-understood definition of "creator". The site was founded and is controlled by ~6 people who create content for YouTube and other platforms. So does that make Nebula "creator-owned" by default? Or does every content creator on the platform have to have some form of ownership? And then does that ownership have to be equitable? Or will one token sha…

Any confusion is Nebula's fault by keeping the details of ownership secret. They could clarify what they mean when they claim in bold on their front page that "Nebula is creator-owned and operated."

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#79

Post by gamblor956 »

xd1936 wrote: post #77

> Nebula the business is “Standard Broadcast LLC,” and is directly owned at the LLC level by me and 43 other creators (and growing). > Nebula the streaming video service (which controls the streaming revenue) is Watch Nebula LLC, which is about 83% owned by Standard Broadcast LLC, with the rest held by Curiosity Stream. All control and all board seats belong to Standard Broadcast LLC. > We use shadow equity for platf…

we are contractually required to split the proceeds 50/50 with the creators on the platform. 50% of streaming profits are distributed to creators based on watch time. Additionally, 1/3 of the revenue from any subscriber is allocated to the creator responsible for bringing in that subscriber.

For tax purposes, if the LLC is taxed as a partnership, these are all considered partnership interests.

Re: Who Owns Nebula?

#80

Post by Dylan16807 »

jszymborski wrote: post #66
staunton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what the scam is. The structure is opaque which indicates there might be some scam but how would one know what it is?

The accusations of it being a scam are speculative for sure, but they come from a relatable place: the inability to understand why creators would agree to take on "shadow equity" while a small handful of creators get actual real equity. It sounds like a few creators can sell the equity that is built by many creators at any time, but that all the other creators can only realize their equity if and when the company exi…

I can't really figure out how the stakes of your analogy are supposed to map to the Nebula situation. Nebula is a source of income. If it implodes, everyone still goes home.

And who would be buying shares if the company is sinking so badly? How does the ransacking work in the analogy, and does it even make a difference?

The part that sounds scary is that they're on the "first" life boat and everyone has to wait until "after" they're done ransacking, and that part doesn't sound like it maps to the real world at all.

But backing up to the more general sense, shadow equity is a reasonable way to do the profit sharing but you have to have real equity somewhere. Accepting that there are two tiers makes sense to me. And the reason it's a "small handful" with the realer equity is because those people either built the company or paid lots of money to the people that built the company, that's pretty fair.

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