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Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.
I’m worried about Nebula’s business model being profitable enough to be sustainable in the long term but given their business model includes making every creator on the platform a part-owner of the platform that does limit how bad things can get
From everything I’ve heard, they’re already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.
As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don’t get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that’s far from unlikely, but which I would describe as “catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today”, so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.
That’s super cool. I’d love to know more about Nebula’s business practices, do you know where I could find that information? I’ve seen some interviews with their leadership that didn’t go into anywhere near the depth that I’d like and that’s about it
Most of this comment was my own speculation based on the details they’ve shared publicly. The details I know of publicly are:
The seem to be profitable. Or at least in a relatively sustainable place; they talk about profit a lot, but usually in terms of how the “profit” is split between creators. I forget, maybe the Wendover “history of Nebula” video from a while back talked more specifically about profitability?
They’re choosing not to take outside investment. This is something the CEO, Dave Wiskus, talked about particularly with respect to the Lifetime subscriptions, describing those as their option for building up the sort of large amounts of cash that they might otherwise have gone to outside investment for, in order to fund bigger projects
The fact that they are, quite visibly, expanding their range of content
The rest was me speculating about how the business model would seem to work based on those factors plus my limited, layperson’s, understanding of their industry.
Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.
I’m worried about Nebula’s business model being profitable enough to be sustainable in the long term but given their business model includes making every creator on the platform a part-owner of the platform that does limit how bad things can get
From everything I’ve heard, they’re already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.
As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don’t get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that’s far from unlikely, but which I would describe as “catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today”, so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.
That’s super cool. I’d love to know more about Nebula’s business practices, do you know where I could find that information? I’ve seen some interviews with their leadership that didn’t go into anywhere near the depth that I’d like and that’s about it
Most of this comment was my own speculation based on the details they’ve shared publicly. The details I know of publicly are:
The rest was me speculating about how the business model would seem to work based on those factors plus my limited, layperson’s, understanding of their industry.