November 13, 2024 • 34 mins
CEO Dave Wiskus details the growth ambition of the four-year-old streamer that is home to the buzzy original series "Jet Lag" and backed by management company Standard with a minority stake held by Curiosity Stream.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Book of a strictly business varieties weekly podcasts featuring conversations
about the business of media and entertainment.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm TV business writer Jennifer Moss.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Nebula, which launched in twenty nineteen, describes itself as a
creator focused, creator built, creator first premium streaming service akin
to a Netflix or Hulu, but with the athos of Patreon.
The four year old indie streaming service, which is backed
by creator owned management company Standard and a minority stake
held by Curiosity Stream, costs five dollars a month or
(00:39):
fifty dollars a year to subscribe to. It currently tolls
six hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and past one hundred
thousand daily active users in October. Nebula is home to
the popular amazing race style online competition series Jetlag The Game,
which is half a million subscribers on YouTube, as well
as the Theater in the Round, Shakespearean trans Coming Out
(01:00):
Story of the Prince, and Night of the Coconut, the
debut film from Patrick Wilms. Unlike other streamers, Nebula sees
YouTube as a partner, not a competitor, with episodes of
Nebula series usually seeing a week long exclusive window on
Nebula before creators post them to YouTube and use them
to in turn promote Nebula. In August, Nebula named jet
(01:22):
Lagstar Sam Dunby its first chief content officer, and is
currently promoting its fall lineup of originals. We'll be back
with Dave after this break here to talk about the
growth of the indie platform and plans to expand on
(01:42):
its slate of original series on today's Strictly Business podcast
is Nebula CEO Dave Whiscus. I'd like to start with,
just for our audience members who might not be familiar
with Nebula, what is it in your own roof?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
There should be an easier answer to this question. Makes
it complicated is that nothing like this has really been
achieved before. And I don't necessarily mean that in a
grand standing sort of way. It's just that it always
ends up being like a tech company who tries to
do a thing with creators, or an entertainment media company
(02:17):
who tries to do user generated content stuff like Quibi
or something. It's never the creators starting their own thing
and then like really landing it. And in our case,
it's a group of creators who got together because we
saw that very simply on a creator career path, step
(02:38):
one is YouTube or whatever, and step say ten is Netflix.
The problem is where are steps two through nine? If
we want that to exist, we want to build that bridge.
We have to build it. And so the purpose of Nebula,
the thing that we're building, the thing that we have built,
it is intended to be a way for the creators
(02:59):
to to sort of traverse the the vast space between
user generating content and more traditionally accepted forms of media
and entertainment. And it's it's almost a fraught answer to
say to focus on, like what the creators get out
of this, But what we've learned is that so much
(03:20):
of the relationship, so much of what makes this this
kind of thing powerful, is the relationship between the audience
and the creator. That's where we win. It's that sort
of parasocial dynamics. So for the audience at the base level,
earliest days, it's about getting access to things early, it's
about getting access to behind the scenes content. Not this
(03:41):
similar from like the value proposition of a Patreon or
something like that. As we look out into the future,
we've always been building up our originals, building up our
stable of you know, content that is made here and
in the case of like a jet lag might end
up also on YouTube as a way to pull people in,
but things that have our logo on it. The idea
(04:02):
is a little bit less Patreon, a little bit more
a twenty four which can be a brand definition here's
what creators are capable of. And then step three in that,
I guess, is Nebula being more of a Netflix style
destination home for really great things that are made by
(04:23):
people who might not have had the opportunity or the
means to do those projects within the traditional Hollywood system
or traditional media system.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
What is again asking you to define here?
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Standard which is a company that is behind Nebula and
existed preceded Nebula's launch.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Very simply a talent management company. We work with a
bunch of creators. We book sponsors on their shows and
help them develop their businesses. And along the way we
realize that there are some gaps in the industry, like
around licensing and things like that, and we had been
working We've been chatting with YouTube back when they were
still doing originals. They had asked us for some pitches
(05:05):
for original shows. We sent them over and they kind
of never got back to us. So we decided, no, what,
We're going to start our own streaming video platform.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
So standard is there to help creators build and guide
and run their business operations, and Nebulas is kind of
a consequence of that.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
When we're exactly if you remember where and when where
Nebula came from and what was part of the we
can actually make this work when something like a Vessel
did not work.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, I think Vessel was like as a technology driven
technology solution made by technology people. There's business, there's technology,
there's maybe some entertainment media in there. I don't want
to comment too hard on them. But for us, it
came organically. We had been approached by the group that
was building what became Peacock in the end, wanting to
(06:03):
bring like user generated content stuff onto a new platform
they were building. They wanted to talk licensing, but how
they approached the licensing deals it sort of didn't make
much sense because it would be wildly different from creator
to creator, and we kind of wanted to take the
collective bargaining power, the leverage that we had as a
as a group and kind of get everybody a more
(06:25):
consistent deal. At the same time, we were being approached
by Vimeo, the lovely people at Vimeo who they were saying,
they picked one creator and they said, this person should
have their own streaming service. We can build an over
the top solution and empower that streaming service as well.
That guy makes a video every three months. What kind
of streaming service would that be? You're paying what five
(06:48):
dollars a month for a content catalog of sixteen videos?
Come on like that doesn't And they said, do you
have any other creators who are more frequent, who for
whom that would make sense? And said, well, no, The
only way that would really make any times as if
it were all of the creators, And oh, oh, that's
an idea. What if we did that? And looking at
the over the top streaming solutions at the time, how
(07:10):
cheap it had gotten, and how doing something like that
could provide a content licensing engine. Potentially there were multiple
problems that could be solved at once, the licensing thing
and you know, building out some sort of test bed
of a new business venture for creators. And I took
the idea to it. This would have been i want
to say, November of twenty eighteen October November of twenty eighteen.
(07:35):
I took to the creators and I've put this long
email like here's kind of what I'm thinking, here's my
vision for this. And I expected it would be a
six month climb to convince everybody like, let's get it,
let's get everybody on board. I knew that I could
because it was just it was inexpensive enough that there
wasn't a ton of risk in it, which had to
come up with enough value proposition to the creators. So
(07:58):
I figured out, well, give me six months and I'll
eventually get everybody there. I sent out the email and
instantly every single creator was like, we have to do this.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Let's go getting going doing that. I know you will.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Started with I think it's one hundred thousand dollars to
get Nebiella actually ready for a launch.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Where did that from? I know you didn't have venture capital.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
The extent that that can be true, it is true
because the calculus there is how much were we paying
the engineer who was working on it for the time
that they are the engineers who were working on it
over the time that they spent working on it. It
wasn't like we wrote a hundred thousand dollars check. It's
more like we as a business standard. We have a
(08:47):
whole what you can call it. We have a back
end software that we developed, the help power like Creator Things,
this booking of sponsors and voicing stuff like that. It
was sort of like a little mini sales force for
Creator Things, and we've been building that since twenty seventeen,
(09:08):
twenty eighteen, oh, twenty seventeen. The engineering team was working
on it when we were looking at doing an over
the top video solution. Well, like I said, we're talking
to Vimeo, but they wanted to own the credit card relationship.
And coming from my years of working with Apple as
a designer, I was keenly aware and my years of
(09:31):
being a musician, I was keenly aware that what made
the iTunes music store work is that when you want
another song, Apple already has your credit card number, you
just press a button. And what made the app store
work is that when you want that new app, Apple
already has your credit card number and you press a button.
(09:53):
By giving Vimeo full ownership of the credit card relationship,
we would potentially be cutting ourselves off future opportunities where
we could do cool, interesting you know, integrations of sorts
by virtue of just you know, we don't even own
the actual relationship, and you know what if things fell
(10:14):
apart with that company, anything had happened, we don't want
to We don't want to cut off all future possibilities.
And so we found a different partner instead, and it
required a little bit of development effort on our side.
So we just we knew we could either reassign an
engineer or make one more higher, and so we just
made one more higher onto the team. And then as
(10:36):
the project developed, it became a little bit more complex
when we made a second higher and I think we
only had the two people. By launch, there was like
two engineers working on it, which is where we came
up with the number like those two engineers over that
period of time, roughly one hundred k. Not an exact
science on that. It's hard for it to because they
were also working on other stuff at the same time,
but the money came from Standard was profitable. We had
(10:59):
those resources and the intent was always let's keep reinvesting
our successes into building more successes. And this was a
thing that felt like it could potentially become something. We
had no idea that it would turn into this. I mean,
I guess we had hopes, but even our hopes, it
never quite This never seems possible, this never seemed.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Realistic talking about what it has turned into. This is
and correct me if any of this is out of date.
But currently Nebula is valued at one hundred and fifty
million and there are six hundred and fifty thousand paying
users and that's still with no venture capital funding.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Pretty close Standard. The valuation is on Standard because it's confusing.
Standard is the company that owns Nebula, and while Nebula
is technically a separate LLC for a handful of reasons,
when we talk valuation, we're talking about the entirety of
the machine. So much of the creator relationships and audience
relationships and partnerships and everything happened up at the stand
(12:00):
undred level, so it's kind of it's hard to fully
disconnect the two. But in that number, when we came
up with the number, it was based on like the
totality of everything that we're doing, okay, and then the year, Yeah,
six hundred and at the moment, like six hundred and
eighty thousand, okay, And.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Then I believe you tweeted recently that Nebula just passed
one hundred thousand daily active users.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Yeah, that was a fun one, and we're we're getting
close to three hundred thousand monthly active all right.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
So with that behind it, you know, we've talked a
lot about the business mechanics of getting it launched first,
but where are those views coming from the content on Nebula?
What can you explain what the system is and the
current funneling of the exclusive window of this content before
creators post it elsewhere like on YouTube.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
It's really to choose your own adventure story as a creator.
If you want to make things that only live on Nebula,
you can. If you want to make things that live
on Nebula for a week and then go to YouTube,
you can. We have different naming structures for these things
to try to disambiguate it for the audience, but the
intent is that Nebula is like the canonical home of
the things that these creators make. And in the case
(13:17):
of jet Lag, the business model is built around the
YouTube version that every video ends with a cliffhanger that
makes you want to go sign up for Nebula that
was baked in from day one. That's always been the plan,
and that works very effectively. And there are some creators
who they were able to get ahead on schedule, and
(13:38):
you know, maybe they make one video per month, but
they got a head on schedule. So the video always
goes to Nebula, and then last month's video goes to
YouTube at the same time, and we call those Nebula. First,
there's full on Nebula original productions which will only ever
be on Nebula, and then there's like bonus content kind
of DVD extras we call Nebula. Plus. The way that
(14:01):
the audience comes in sort of depends on the creator.
For some creators, they sign up because they really want
to see the next video. For some creators, the audience
signs up because there's bonus stuff that they really want
to see. For some creators, many creators, it's talking about
the originals is what pulls people in. And then there's
of course the people who come and sign up just
(14:23):
because they want to support the creators. Again, I think
that what makes us so different and what's hard for
more traditional systems to it's hard to fit us in
with more traditional systems because the audience, a large portion
of the audience signs up for Nebula because they believe
in us and they want to support these creators. I
don't think Disney has that kind of relationship. I don't
(14:45):
think Netflix has that kind of relationship.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
We'll be back with more from Dave after this break
into Netflix. I know there was a stot that.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Nebula is second only to Netflix and customer retention.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
How do you guys measure that churn?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
We're using antenna data for that. I believe Netflix is
three point six percent churn rate and the purported number
two Disney plus is around four and a half percent
turn rate based on the last numbers that we saw,
and we, depending on where we are in a month,
hover between like three point eight to four percent. So
(15:33):
according to Antenna data, if they were to classify us
in the same ranking, we would be number two for
customer attention, behind Netflix.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
What would you say is the biggest factor keeping that
churn rate for you?
Speaker 3 (15:47):
I think the audience just really loves the creators. They
want to see the creators succeed, and when they come in,
they stay because they're they're invested in the story. And
the cheap cop out retort to that would be that
so many of our customers come in like overall, a
little over fifty percent of the people who sign up
for Nebula sign up for annual plans, So of course
(16:09):
monthly train is going to be low. And Netflix doesn't
offer an annual plan. I don't believe many of the
big streamers don't, which is weird. I've got thoughts on that,
But I would argue that the reason that our customers
sign up for annuals so heavily to begin with is
(16:30):
because they they know what they're getting into, they're committing.
They know that we get more money up front, they
know that things are going to grow and evolve over time.
They know that they're going to get more stuff. Why
wouldn't they spend thirty bucks? And I think that's what
it comes down to. They believe in what we're doing.
They want to see how this unfolds, and they're making
(16:52):
a one year investment.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
In that story, we mentioned jet Lag, but I'm going
to go into a little more specifically now, the travel
game show that I'm obsessed with and the reason I
signed up for Nebula. When I first discovered jet Lag,
I watched everything currently available on YouTube, and I believe
we were in the middle of one of the seasons
at that point. Then I went and signed up Fornibula
(17:14):
because I wanted to see what was currently there. We
got you, Yeah, you got me, and I watched Crime Spree,
which for people to know that was like the unoffsual
first season that's only available to stream on Nebula. So
I'd love to get an idea during a season of
jet Lag or if you have another example of another
show that has that same format on Nebula, what do
(17:35):
sign ups look like? What is kind of the bump
that you get from something like that, especially given that
if I wanted to, I could wait and watch it
all on YouTube, you.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Could, or you could sign up. It's thirty bucks a year,
which comes out to be two dollars and fifty cents
a month. You know, we've done premiere events where if
you're a Nebulus subscriber you get to it's first come
for serve. But if you're a Nebula subscriber, you can
just come to the premiere let us know. We'll get
you to the spot, and the spots usually I say
(18:09):
sell out, they're free. The spots sell out like within minutes,
and we'll get every single time we'll get one or
two people who are like, if I'm not signed up
for Nebula, can I just buy a ticket? And the
answer is yeah, it's thirty dollars and it comes with
a free year of Nebula. Like, it's thirty dollars. Your
uber to the venue is going to cost you. That
(18:32):
the price point is so low, especially relative to other streamers.
I'm not saying that this is no money, and I
don't want to ignore that that there's income disparity. I
don't want to make that assumption. But when you consider
the emotional attachment that the audiences tend to have, and
for a show like jet Lag, people really love Sam
(18:55):
and Ben and Adam, they love them. The jet Lags
are kind of intense about it. They're the they have
a lot of fun. We get fan art. I get
fan art. I'm not even on the show. Jet Lag.
Fans drop pictures of all of us and they are
(19:16):
constantly discussing us on Discord and on Twitter, and they
just really, really really love the show and that kind
of emotional attachment. Of course, they want to see the
next episode. When something can reach people and bring a
little bit of joy like that, and it has that
spirit of independence. It's not a big budget Hollywood style
game show production that's all full of spectacle, and like,
(19:39):
this is people doing a thing that it looks like
you could do that. We get people asking all the time,
can you make like a home version that I could
play with my friends, or can will you sell the
cards so that I can do the same thing. But
we're careful about that because I don't want to encourage
people to jump on planes or do anything that annoys
other people. And a bigger conversations we had about how
(20:02):
a thing like that could be done ethically. I know
that the jet Lag team works really hard to make
sure that anything they do, like when they film, they're
always consciously people's privacy. They're not out there to be
like you know, jerk YouTubers getting everybody's way, and so
coming up with a way to share that that isn't
encouraging people to be obnoxious as something, but that kind
(20:23):
of relationship when an audience loves to show that much,
and when it's that easy to project yourself in or
feel like you're friends with these people, of course you
want to hit the button. That's not the hill to climb,
you know, A five dollars a month or thirty dollars
a year hill to sign up for that not insurmountable,
and so we do see a pretty big bump obviously
(20:44):
when jet Lags on air, we conversions sign ups for
jet Lag go up dramatically, but it kind of happens
that way. We have shows that drive huge numbers. Interestingly,
by various metrics, jet Lag is not our number one show.
(21:04):
It is, I think by audience engagement in terms of
just people being excited about it and sending us fan art,
certainly our number one show, but not always by watch time,
not always by sign ups. So whenever certain kinds of
projects go out, I think jet Legs are our only
travel or game show style thing at the moment in
(21:26):
that format. We're working on some stuff, handful of things.
We don't want to just make jet Lag two. We
want to be really careful about one not saturating, but
two not like, I don't know, diluting, if that makes sense.
We want to reinvest our success into doing something creatively interesting,
not just doing the same thing again. But there's a
(21:49):
number of formats. Different creators work on different things. It's
more about like audience depth and audience love will drive
the big numbers.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
So with that all that said, why is.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Jet LaGG not exclusively on Nebula, And that same question
going for any really high trafficking Nebula stuff, and if
those conversations have ever been had with those creators and
why from a business standpoint, someone would see, well, obviously
this does very well and it could do better if
it only existed here.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
It's easy to think that what we're building is a
YouTube competitor, and if you imagine it as a YouTube competitor,
it's easy to think that anything we do from any
creator we work with, the goal should be for it
to be exclusively on Nebula. What we're really building is
(22:43):
a Netflix competitor, and the path we're going to have
to take to get there. YouTube is our biggest partner.
YouTube is our closest ally. YouTube is the top of
the funnel for us. We're just sold bit further down,
and the way that the audience dynamics work, the YouTube algorithm,
(23:06):
much maligned, is our greatest champion. It's out there finding
new fans for us. It's out there finding new people
who love the things that our creators make. And so
we've designed our system, our entire business model around leveraging
that to bring those fans to us. How often do
(23:29):
you get, like an egga corporation building you a free
machine to bring you audience first. I'm going to take
advantage of that. Someday. It's entirely possible that any of
our shows become exclusive to Nebula, not really by design,
at least at the moment we have folks. Lindsay Ellis
is one hundred percent exclusive to Nebula, not really by
(23:51):
our request so much as hers. She sort of got
tired of the way she was in the public eye,
and she sort of wanted to approach her career differently,
and we were supportive of that. He absolutely kills on Watschteim.
Her fans love her too. But it wasn't because we're like,
we must collect all of the things and they must
all be hours. We're not like Thanos out there grabbing
(24:14):
all the Infinity stones. We're not here to catch them all.
I'm back to Pokemon. The goal rather is to build
a bridge. I want to occupy a much more a
twenty four style space where we work with the creators,
we help them make the We help them make the
things that they want to make, we help them develop
(24:36):
as creators. I'm in La right now on set with
Jesse Earl Jesse Gender, who's directing her first larger, larger
budget short film, sci fi production, narrative fiction. We've got
like panavision, camera and the actors you've heard of and
(24:58):
all of this. And the idea is that if we
provide Jesse with a structure that can help her become successful,
she can actually become a real filmmaker. She has the talent,
she has the skill, she has the ambition. It's for
most of our creators, those aren't the gap. For most
people on YouTube, those aren't the gap. It usually comes
down to connections, funding and experience. And so what we're
(25:23):
trying to do with Nebula is build a system that
can provide the connections the funding and the experience and
build a bridge so not everything has to be exclusive here.
I would love it if we could live in a
world where Jesse or other filmmakers we work with Patrick
Williams start making movies that go to a wide theatrical
release and there's some segment of the audience where the
(25:45):
only thing they know Nebula as is the you know,
the stinger that comes up before the movie starts, the
same way that you would see the A twenty four
logo or the sky Dance logo, Amble and Entertainment like
these kinds of things. I guess the closest analog for
the division is something like if A twenty four had
(26:05):
their own streaming service, you can see everything everywhere, all
at once on any of the things. But if you
go to A twenty four saying you can see all
of their productions, That's kind of how we're thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Okay, with that, I'm wondering if you can explain what
the difference is between original content that lives on Nebula
and a Nebula original.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Is there a difference? Well, make sure.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Underting you guys have a state of Nebula originals that
you've announced coming in the fall, So I wonder what
they are and why they're labeled that way, and what
that means. A Nebula versus a creator whose content exists
on Nebula if there are things commissioned by Nebula and
that are owned by Nebula versus content that does a
creator own it when it exists on there and is on.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
Nebula Ooh, there's a part of this question I'm really
excited to answer. I'll save that part. So there's the
it's a yeah, this isn't entirely intuitive and there's not
a great solution for this. But the best way to
think of this is if we are paying for it
in total or you know, in majority, and we are
(27:14):
providing our own production resources. We have an entire Nebula
Studios team, which is headed up by a former Marvel
Studios producer, that exists specifically to help creators make the
things that they want to make. So, like for Identities,
the Nebula original film that we're working on here in
La this week, we have an entire production team working
(27:37):
together to support Jesse in making this film that is
very clearly a Nebula original, writing, production, support, with providing funding,
and it'll live exclusively on Nebula for a creator who
they made a video and they also made like a
five minute companion piece that doesn't really fit on YouTube.
So they're going to make it like a Nebula exclusive
thing that's not really an original, not in not in
(28:00):
the way that you'd think prestige original. It's more of
like bonus content, like a DVD extra, So we kind
of break it down like that. If it's its own
thing and stands alone and you could imagine, you know,
sitting down and hitting play on just that and we
help to make it, then that's an original. If there's prestige,
(28:20):
that's an original. But if it's like a thing that
kind of needs the rest of the system to make
any sense, that's more of a plus kind of thing.
But the other part of your question, like who owns it,
Every single thing that the creators make that go on Nebula,
including every single one of our originals, are owned by
(28:41):
the creators. We do not own the intellectual property. If
it's a Nebula original, we get an exclusive an exclusive
streaming license, but we don't own the IP. So if
in the case of the short film that we're working
on now, Identities, it could be treated as a pilot
episode of a show, and Jesse could take that pilot
to Netflix, to HBO, to whomever and sell the show.
(29:06):
They would have to buy their rights to the pilot
from us, the streaming rights to the pilot from us,
but Jesse could sell the entire show. We don't get
a penny. You can develop merchandising around it. We don't
get a penny. Ask George Lucas how valuable that can be.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
So does that pose, you know, concerns to Nebula as
a company that you don't own the IP and could
a creator take their content off Nebula anytime they wanted to.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Concerns? No, No, I think that trust has to be
at the core of what we do. Like I don't
want to be in business with anybody who doesn't want
to be in business with me. I don't want people
locked into a relationship for a creator. They either they
believe in what we're doing and we're all on the
same team, or they don't. And it's helpful to note
that Nebula fifty perc of Nebula is owned by the creators.
(30:03):
If we were to ever sell it, we have to
contractually give fifty percent of that money to the creators.
Whenever there's there's profit, we have to give fifty percent
of that profit to the creators. This is a partnership.
So when we bring a new creator in, we're not
signing talent. We're bringing in a new business. It's part
of the reason why we're so slow and methodical and
(30:25):
how we grow our roster, like we're we're not signing
random deals to get content. We are. You know, these
are new roommates we're interviewing. These are longer term relationships.
So because of that, because of the nature of the relationships,
we don't see a lot of people leave. There's not
a ton of hard requirements for things people are have
(30:46):
to do. So for the folks who maybe don't have
the bandwidth or aren't seeing returns, then you know, they
can kind of just coast on it and keep uploading
to both places and still get some level of reward. Also,
we're the largest sponsor for all of our creators. We
literally every month, our largest line item is we pay
(31:07):
all of our creators to go tell our audience that
they're on Nebula. So there's not a ton of incentive
for anyone to walk away from that relationship. So we're
not really worried about it. I think we have to
lock people into anything. If the deal is good enough,
if the relationship is good enough, they'll stay. And hanging
on to intellectual property licenses doesn't get us out of that,
(31:29):
it doesn't solve any problems. In fact, by not doing that,
it helps us at a tempo of like we're in
this together. We're helping you build things. Our mission is
not to own all of the things in the world.
Our mission is to help an extremely talented and ambitious
group of young creators. I say young not because they're twelve,
(31:50):
but because the industry is young, help them make the
things that they want to make because we know they can.
And if we're a hit maker, and if we are,
if we build our reputation on trust and our ability
to help achieve those goals, then that's where we're going
to win. Not because we have an infinitely deep content
(32:11):
catalog of things we own. We don't need to own everything.
It's better if we don't.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Thank you for joining me today, Bab.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
In closing, is there anything else you want our audience
to know about Nebula?
Speaker 3 (32:22):
There's this uphill battle we've been fighting for years to
get any kind of recognition outside of our bubble. And
we talked to going back to the thing with Sam
and doing Netflix stuff, or you developing shows for other
platforms and all of that. We've had similar conversations. We've
been approached by major Hollywood development companies like yeah, we
(32:46):
want to put your show, your creators on Netflix. We
do these things and we go through the exercise like Okay,
well how long would development take? What does the money
look like? And it ends up being like, okay, so
you want us to You want this creator to commit
two years of their life to developing a thing that
they sell for fifty thousand dollars and they maybe get
a roll on for another maybe one hundred two hundred k,
(33:07):
setting aside everything else they could be working on. You
want them to spend two years on this for a
show that you're going to cancel after one season because
it's Netflix two hundred and fifty k, right, Or we
could just stay on YouTube, reach hundreds of millions of
people and make millions of dollars a year. Why the
hell are we even talking to you? It just doesn't
(33:27):
make any sense. Hollywood treats us as a farm league.
They treat us like cheap talent. My number one goal
in starting doing like real pr work and getting our
name out there in a different way was getting coverage
and Variety.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of
Variety Strictly Business podcast. You can find new episodes weekly
on Apple Podcasts.
Book of a strictly business varieties weekly podcasts featuring conversations
about the business of media and entertainment.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm TV business writer Jennifer Moss.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Nebula, which launched in twenty nineteen, describes itself as a
creator focused, creator built, creator first premium streaming service akin
to a Netflix or Hulu, but with the athos of Patreon.
The four year old indie streaming service, which is backed
by creator owned management company Standard and a minority stake
held by Curiosity Stream, costs five dollars a month or
(00:39):
fifty dollars a year to subscribe to. It currently tolls
six hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and past one hundred
thousand daily active users in October. Nebula is home to
the popular amazing race style online competition series Jetlag The Game,
which is half a million subscribers on YouTube, as well
as the Theater in the Round, Shakespearean trans Coming Out
(01:00):
Story of the Prince, and Night of the Coconut, the
debut film from Patrick Wilms. Unlike other streamers, Nebula sees
YouTube as a partner, not a competitor, with episodes of
Nebula series usually seeing a week long exclusive window on
Nebula before creators post them to YouTube and use them
to in turn promote Nebula. In August, Nebula named jet
(01:22):
Lagstar Sam Dunby its first chief content officer, and is
currently promoting its fall lineup of originals. We'll be back
with Dave after this break here to talk about the
growth of the indie platform and plans to expand on
(01:42):
its slate of original series on today's Strictly Business podcast
is Nebula CEO Dave Whiscus. I'd like to start with,
just for our audience members who might not be familiar
with Nebula, what is it in your own roof?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
There should be an easier answer to this question. Makes
it complicated is that nothing like this has really been
achieved before. And I don't necessarily mean that in a
grand standing sort of way. It's just that it always
ends up being like a tech company who tries to
do a thing with creators, or an entertainment media company
(02:17):
who tries to do user generated content stuff like Quibi
or something. It's never the creators starting their own thing
and then like really landing it. And in our case,
it's a group of creators who got together because we
saw that very simply on a creator career path, step
(02:38):
one is YouTube or whatever, and step say ten is Netflix.
The problem is where are steps two through nine? If
we want that to exist, we want to build that bridge.
We have to build it. And so the purpose of Nebula,
the thing that we're building, the thing that we have built,
it is intended to be a way for the creators
(02:59):
to to sort of traverse the the vast space between
user generating content and more traditionally accepted forms of media
and entertainment. And it's it's almost a fraught answer to
say to focus on, like what the creators get out
of this, But what we've learned is that so much
(03:20):
of the relationship, so much of what makes this this
kind of thing powerful, is the relationship between the audience
and the creator. That's where we win. It's that sort
of parasocial dynamics. So for the audience at the base level,
earliest days, it's about getting access to things early, it's
about getting access to behind the scenes content. Not this
(03:41):
similar from like the value proposition of a Patreon or
something like that. As we look out into the future,
we've always been building up our originals, building up our
stable of you know, content that is made here and
in the case of like a jet lag might end
up also on YouTube as a way to pull people in,
but things that have our logo on it. The idea
(04:02):
is a little bit less Patreon, a little bit more
a twenty four which can be a brand definition here's
what creators are capable of. And then step three in that,
I guess, is Nebula being more of a Netflix style
destination home for really great things that are made by
(04:23):
people who might not have had the opportunity or the
means to do those projects within the traditional Hollywood system
or traditional media system.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
What is again asking you to define here?
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Standard which is a company that is behind Nebula and
existed preceded Nebula's launch.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Very simply a talent management company. We work with a
bunch of creators. We book sponsors on their shows and
help them develop their businesses. And along the way we
realize that there are some gaps in the industry, like
around licensing and things like that, and we had been
working We've been chatting with YouTube back when they were
still doing originals. They had asked us for some pitches
(05:05):
for original shows. We sent them over and they kind
of never got back to us. So we decided, no, what,
We're going to start our own streaming video platform.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
So standard is there to help creators build and guide
and run their business operations, and Nebulas is kind of
a consequence of that.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
When we're exactly if you remember where and when where
Nebula came from and what was part of the we
can actually make this work when something like a Vessel
did not work.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, I think Vessel was like as a technology driven
technology solution made by technology people. There's business, there's technology,
there's maybe some entertainment media in there. I don't want
to comment too hard on them. But for us, it
came organically. We had been approached by the group that
was building what became Peacock in the end, wanting to
(06:03):
bring like user generated content stuff onto a new platform
they were building. They wanted to talk licensing, but how
they approached the licensing deals it sort of didn't make
much sense because it would be wildly different from creator
to creator, and we kind of wanted to take the
collective bargaining power, the leverage that we had as a
as a group and kind of get everybody a more
(06:25):
consistent deal. At the same time, we were being approached
by Vimeo, the lovely people at Vimeo who they were saying,
they picked one creator and they said, this person should
have their own streaming service. We can build an over
the top solution and empower that streaming service as well.
That guy makes a video every three months. What kind
of streaming service would that be? You're paying what five
(06:48):
dollars a month for a content catalog of sixteen videos?
Come on like that doesn't And they said, do you
have any other creators who are more frequent, who for
whom that would make sense? And said, well, no, The
only way that would really make any times as if
it were all of the creators, And oh, oh, that's
an idea. What if we did that? And looking at
the over the top streaming solutions at the time, how
(07:10):
cheap it had gotten, and how doing something like that
could provide a content licensing engine. Potentially there were multiple
problems that could be solved at once, the licensing thing
and you know, building out some sort of test bed
of a new business venture for creators. And I took
the idea to it. This would have been i want
to say, November of twenty eighteen October November of twenty eighteen.
(07:35):
I took to the creators and I've put this long
email like here's kind of what I'm thinking, here's my
vision for this. And I expected it would be a
six month climb to convince everybody like, let's get it,
let's get everybody on board. I knew that I could
because it was just it was inexpensive enough that there
wasn't a ton of risk in it, which had to
come up with enough value proposition to the creators. So
(07:58):
I figured out, well, give me six months and I'll
eventually get everybody there. I sent out the email and
instantly every single creator was like, we have to do this.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Let's go getting going doing that. I know you will.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Started with I think it's one hundred thousand dollars to
get Nebiella actually ready for a launch.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Where did that from? I know you didn't have venture capital.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
The extent that that can be true, it is true
because the calculus there is how much were we paying
the engineer who was working on it for the time
that they are the engineers who were working on it
over the time that they spent working on it. It
wasn't like we wrote a hundred thousand dollars check. It's
more like we as a business standard. We have a
(08:47):
whole what you can call it. We have a back
end software that we developed, the help power like Creator Things,
this booking of sponsors and voicing stuff like that. It
was sort of like a little mini sales force for
Creator Things, and we've been building that since twenty seventeen,
(09:08):
twenty eighteen, oh, twenty seventeen. The engineering team was working
on it when we were looking at doing an over
the top video solution. Well, like I said, we're talking
to Vimeo, but they wanted to own the credit card relationship.
And coming from my years of working with Apple as
a designer, I was keenly aware and my years of
(09:31):
being a musician, I was keenly aware that what made
the iTunes music store work is that when you want
another song, Apple already has your credit card number, you
just press a button. And what made the app store
work is that when you want that new app, Apple
already has your credit card number and you press a button.
(09:53):
By giving Vimeo full ownership of the credit card relationship,
we would potentially be cutting ourselves off future opportunities where
we could do cool, interesting you know, integrations of sorts
by virtue of just you know, we don't even own
the actual relationship, and you know what if things fell
(10:14):
apart with that company, anything had happened, we don't want
to We don't want to cut off all future possibilities.
And so we found a different partner instead, and it
required a little bit of development effort on our side.
So we just we knew we could either reassign an
engineer or make one more higher, and so we just
made one more higher onto the team. And then as
(10:36):
the project developed, it became a little bit more complex
when we made a second higher and I think we
only had the two people. By launch, there was like
two engineers working on it, which is where we came
up with the number like those two engineers over that
period of time, roughly one hundred k. Not an exact
science on that. It's hard for it to because they
were also working on other stuff at the same time,
but the money came from Standard was profitable. We had
(10:59):
those resources and the intent was always let's keep reinvesting
our successes into building more successes. And this was a
thing that felt like it could potentially become something. We
had no idea that it would turn into this. I mean,
I guess we had hopes, but even our hopes, it
never quite This never seems possible, this never seemed.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Realistic talking about what it has turned into. This is
and correct me if any of this is out of date.
But currently Nebula is valued at one hundred and fifty
million and there are six hundred and fifty thousand paying
users and that's still with no venture capital funding.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Pretty close Standard. The valuation is on Standard because it's confusing.
Standard is the company that owns Nebula, and while Nebula
is technically a separate LLC for a handful of reasons,
when we talk valuation, we're talking about the entirety of
the machine. So much of the creator relationships and audience
relationships and partnerships and everything happened up at the stand
(12:00):
undred level, so it's kind of it's hard to fully
disconnect the two. But in that number, when we came
up with the number, it was based on like the
totality of everything that we're doing, okay, and then the year, Yeah,
six hundred and at the moment, like six hundred and
eighty thousand, okay, And.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Then I believe you tweeted recently that Nebula just passed
one hundred thousand daily active users.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Yeah, that was a fun one, and we're we're getting
close to three hundred thousand monthly active all right.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
So with that behind it, you know, we've talked a
lot about the business mechanics of getting it launched first,
but where are those views coming from the content on Nebula?
What can you explain what the system is and the
current funneling of the exclusive window of this content before
creators post it elsewhere like on YouTube.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
It's really to choose your own adventure story as a creator.
If you want to make things that only live on Nebula,
you can. If you want to make things that live
on Nebula for a week and then go to YouTube,
you can. We have different naming structures for these things
to try to disambiguate it for the audience, but the
intent is that Nebula is like the canonical home of
the things that these creators make. And in the case
(13:17):
of jet Lag, the business model is built around the
YouTube version that every video ends with a cliffhanger that
makes you want to go sign up for Nebula that
was baked in from day one. That's always been the plan,
and that works very effectively. And there are some creators
who they were able to get ahead on schedule, and
(13:38):
you know, maybe they make one video per month, but
they got a head on schedule. So the video always
goes to Nebula, and then last month's video goes to
YouTube at the same time, and we call those Nebula. First,
there's full on Nebula original productions which will only ever
be on Nebula, and then there's like bonus content kind
of DVD extras we call Nebula. Plus. The way that
(14:01):
the audience comes in sort of depends on the creator.
For some creators, they sign up because they really want
to see the next video. For some creators, the audience
signs up because there's bonus stuff that they really want
to see. For some creators, many creators, it's talking about
the originals is what pulls people in. And then there's
of course the people who come and sign up just
(14:23):
because they want to support the creators. Again, I think
that what makes us so different and what's hard for
more traditional systems to it's hard to fit us in
with more traditional systems because the audience, a large portion
of the audience signs up for Nebula because they believe
in us and they want to support these creators. I
don't think Disney has that kind of relationship. I don't
(14:45):
think Netflix has that kind of relationship.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
We'll be back with more from Dave after this break
into Netflix. I know there was a stot that.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Nebula is second only to Netflix and customer retention.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
How do you guys measure that churn?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
We're using antenna data for that. I believe Netflix is
three point six percent churn rate and the purported number
two Disney plus is around four and a half percent
turn rate based on the last numbers that we saw,
and we, depending on where we are in a month,
hover between like three point eight to four percent. So
(15:33):
according to Antenna data, if they were to classify us
in the same ranking, we would be number two for
customer attention, behind Netflix.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
What would you say is the biggest factor keeping that
churn rate for you?
Speaker 3 (15:47):
I think the audience just really loves the creators. They
want to see the creators succeed, and when they come in,
they stay because they're they're invested in the story. And
the cheap cop out retort to that would be that
so many of our customers come in like overall, a
little over fifty percent of the people who sign up
for Nebula sign up for annual plans, So of course
(16:09):
monthly train is going to be low. And Netflix doesn't
offer an annual plan. I don't believe many of the
big streamers don't, which is weird. I've got thoughts on that,
But I would argue that the reason that our customers
sign up for annuals so heavily to begin with is
(16:30):
because they they know what they're getting into, they're committing.
They know that we get more money up front, they
know that things are going to grow and evolve over time.
They know that they're going to get more stuff. Why
wouldn't they spend thirty bucks? And I think that's what
it comes down to. They believe in what we're doing.
They want to see how this unfolds, and they're making
(16:52):
a one year investment.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
In that story, we mentioned jet Lag, but I'm going
to go into a little more specifically now, the travel
game show that I'm obsessed with and the reason I
signed up for Nebula. When I first discovered jet Lag,
I watched everything currently available on YouTube, and I believe
we were in the middle of one of the seasons
at that point. Then I went and signed up Fornibula
(17:14):
because I wanted to see what was currently there. We
got you, Yeah, you got me, and I watched Crime Spree,
which for people to know that was like the unoffsual
first season that's only available to stream on Nebula. So
I'd love to get an idea during a season of
jet Lag or if you have another example of another
show that has that same format on Nebula, what do
(17:35):
sign ups look like? What is kind of the bump
that you get from something like that, especially given that
if I wanted to, I could wait and watch it
all on YouTube, you.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Could, or you could sign up. It's thirty bucks a year,
which comes out to be two dollars and fifty cents
a month. You know, we've done premiere events where if
you're a Nebulus subscriber you get to it's first come
for serve. But if you're a Nebula subscriber, you can
just come to the premiere let us know. We'll get
you to the spot, and the spots usually I say
(18:09):
sell out, they're free. The spots sell out like within minutes,
and we'll get every single time we'll get one or
two people who are like, if I'm not signed up
for Nebula, can I just buy a ticket? And the
answer is yeah, it's thirty dollars and it comes with
a free year of Nebula. Like, it's thirty dollars. Your
uber to the venue is going to cost you. That
(18:32):
the price point is so low, especially relative to other streamers.
I'm not saying that this is no money, and I
don't want to ignore that that there's income disparity. I
don't want to make that assumption. But when you consider
the emotional attachment that the audiences tend to have, and
for a show like jet Lag, people really love Sam
(18:55):
and Ben and Adam, they love them. The jet Lags
are kind of intense about it. They're the they have
a lot of fun. We get fan art. I get
fan art. I'm not even on the show. Jet Lag.
Fans drop pictures of all of us and they are
(19:16):
constantly discussing us on Discord and on Twitter, and they
just really, really really love the show and that kind
of emotional attachment. Of course, they want to see the
next episode. When something can reach people and bring a
little bit of joy like that, and it has that
spirit of independence. It's not a big budget Hollywood style
game show production that's all full of spectacle, and like,
(19:39):
this is people doing a thing that it looks like
you could do that. We get people asking all the time,
can you make like a home version that I could
play with my friends, or can will you sell the
cards so that I can do the same thing. But
we're careful about that because I don't want to encourage
people to jump on planes or do anything that annoys
other people. And a bigger conversations we had about how
(20:02):
a thing like that could be done ethically. I know
that the jet Lag team works really hard to make
sure that anything they do, like when they film, they're
always consciously people's privacy. They're not out there to be
like you know, jerk YouTubers getting everybody's way, and so
coming up with a way to share that that isn't
encouraging people to be obnoxious as something, but that kind
(20:23):
of relationship when an audience loves to show that much,
and when it's that easy to project yourself in or
feel like you're friends with these people, of course you
want to hit the button. That's not the hill to climb,
you know, A five dollars a month or thirty dollars
a year hill to sign up for that not insurmountable,
and so we do see a pretty big bump obviously
(20:44):
when jet Lags on air, we conversions sign ups for
jet Lag go up dramatically, but it kind of happens
that way. We have shows that drive huge numbers. Interestingly,
by various metrics, jet Lag is not our number one show.
(21:04):
It is, I think by audience engagement in terms of
just people being excited about it and sending us fan art,
certainly our number one show, but not always by watch time,
not always by sign ups. So whenever certain kinds of
projects go out, I think jet Legs are our only
travel or game show style thing at the moment in
(21:26):
that format. We're working on some stuff, handful of things.
We don't want to just make jet Lag two. We
want to be really careful about one not saturating, but
two not like, I don't know, diluting, if that makes sense.
We want to reinvest our success into doing something creatively interesting,
not just doing the same thing again. But there's a
(21:49):
number of formats. Different creators work on different things. It's
more about like audience depth and audience love will drive
the big numbers.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
So with that all that said, why is.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Jet LaGG not exclusively on Nebula, And that same question
going for any really high trafficking Nebula stuff, and if
those conversations have ever been had with those creators and
why from a business standpoint, someone would see, well, obviously
this does very well and it could do better if
it only existed here.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
It's easy to think that what we're building is a
YouTube competitor, and if you imagine it as a YouTube competitor,
it's easy to think that anything we do from any
creator we work with, the goal should be for it
to be exclusively on Nebula. What we're really building is
(22:43):
a Netflix competitor, and the path we're going to have
to take to get there. YouTube is our biggest partner.
YouTube is our closest ally. YouTube is the top of
the funnel for us. We're just sold bit further down,
and the way that the audience dynamics work, the YouTube algorithm,
(23:06):
much maligned, is our greatest champion. It's out there finding
new fans for us. It's out there finding new people
who love the things that our creators make. And so
we've designed our system, our entire business model around leveraging
that to bring those fans to us. How often do
(23:29):
you get, like an egga corporation building you a free
machine to bring you audience first. I'm going to take
advantage of that. Someday. It's entirely possible that any of
our shows become exclusive to Nebula, not really by design,
at least at the moment we have folks. Lindsay Ellis
is one hundred percent exclusive to Nebula, not really by
(23:51):
our request so much as hers. She sort of got
tired of the way she was in the public eye,
and she sort of wanted to approach her career differently,
and we were supportive of that. He absolutely kills on Watschteim.
Her fans love her too. But it wasn't because we're like,
we must collect all of the things and they must
all be hours. We're not like Thanos out there grabbing
(24:14):
all the Infinity stones. We're not here to catch them all.
I'm back to Pokemon. The goal rather is to build
a bridge. I want to occupy a much more a
twenty four style space where we work with the creators,
we help them make the We help them make the
things that they want to make, we help them develop
(24:36):
as creators. I'm in La right now on set with
Jesse Earl Jesse Gender, who's directing her first larger, larger
budget short film, sci fi production, narrative fiction. We've got
like panavision, camera and the actors you've heard of and
(24:58):
all of this. And the idea is that if we
provide Jesse with a structure that can help her become successful,
she can actually become a real filmmaker. She has the talent,
she has the skill, she has the ambition. It's for
most of our creators, those aren't the gap. For most
people on YouTube, those aren't the gap. It usually comes
down to connections, funding and experience. And so what we're
(25:23):
trying to do with Nebula is build a system that
can provide the connections the funding and the experience and
build a bridge so not everything has to be exclusive here.
I would love it if we could live in a
world where Jesse or other filmmakers we work with Patrick
Williams start making movies that go to a wide theatrical
release and there's some segment of the audience where the
(25:45):
only thing they know Nebula as is the you know,
the stinger that comes up before the movie starts, the
same way that you would see the A twenty four
logo or the sky Dance logo, Amble and Entertainment like
these kinds of things. I guess the closest analog for
the division is something like if A twenty four had
(26:05):
their own streaming service, you can see everything everywhere, all
at once on any of the things. But if you
go to A twenty four saying you can see all
of their productions, That's kind of how we're thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Okay, with that, I'm wondering if you can explain what
the difference is between original content that lives on Nebula
and a Nebula original.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Is there a difference? Well, make sure.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Underting you guys have a state of Nebula originals that
you've announced coming in the fall, So I wonder what
they are and why they're labeled that way, and what
that means. A Nebula versus a creator whose content exists
on Nebula if there are things commissioned by Nebula and
that are owned by Nebula versus content that does a
creator own it when it exists on there and is on.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
Nebula Ooh, there's a part of this question I'm really
excited to answer. I'll save that part. So there's the
it's a yeah, this isn't entirely intuitive and there's not
a great solution for this. But the best way to
think of this is if we are paying for it
in total or you know, in majority, and we are
(27:14):
providing our own production resources. We have an entire Nebula
Studios team, which is headed up by a former Marvel
Studios producer, that exists specifically to help creators make the
things that they want to make. So, like for Identities,
the Nebula original film that we're working on here in
La this week, we have an entire production team working
(27:37):
together to support Jesse in making this film that is
very clearly a Nebula original, writing, production, support, with providing funding,
and it'll live exclusively on Nebula for a creator who
they made a video and they also made like a
five minute companion piece that doesn't really fit on YouTube.
So they're going to make it like a Nebula exclusive
thing that's not really an original, not in not in
(28:00):
the way that you'd think prestige original. It's more of
like bonus content, like a DVD extra, So we kind
of break it down like that. If it's its own
thing and stands alone and you could imagine, you know,
sitting down and hitting play on just that and we
help to make it, then that's an original. If there's prestige,
(28:20):
that's an original. But if it's like a thing that
kind of needs the rest of the system to make
any sense, that's more of a plus kind of thing.
But the other part of your question, like who owns it,
Every single thing that the creators make that go on Nebula,
including every single one of our originals, are owned by
(28:41):
the creators. We do not own the intellectual property. If
it's a Nebula original, we get an exclusive an exclusive
streaming license, but we don't own the IP. So if
in the case of the short film that we're working
on now, Identities, it could be treated as a pilot
episode of a show, and Jesse could take that pilot
to Netflix, to HBO, to whomever and sell the show.
(29:06):
They would have to buy their rights to the pilot
from us, the streaming rights to the pilot from us,
but Jesse could sell the entire show. We don't get
a penny. You can develop merchandising around it. We don't
get a penny. Ask George Lucas how valuable that can be.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
So does that pose, you know, concerns to Nebula as
a company that you don't own the IP and could
a creator take their content off Nebula anytime they wanted to.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Concerns? No, No, I think that trust has to be
at the core of what we do. Like I don't
want to be in business with anybody who doesn't want
to be in business with me. I don't want people
locked into a relationship for a creator. They either they
believe in what we're doing and we're all on the
same team, or they don't. And it's helpful to note
that Nebula fifty perc of Nebula is owned by the creators.
(30:03):
If we were to ever sell it, we have to
contractually give fifty percent of that money to the creators.
Whenever there's there's profit, we have to give fifty percent
of that profit to the creators. This is a partnership.
So when we bring a new creator in, we're not
signing talent. We're bringing in a new business. It's part
of the reason why we're so slow and methodical and
(30:25):
how we grow our roster, like we're we're not signing
random deals to get content. We are. You know, these
are new roommates we're interviewing. These are longer term relationships.
So because of that, because of the nature of the relationships,
we don't see a lot of people leave. There's not
a ton of hard requirements for things people are have
(30:46):
to do. So for the folks who maybe don't have
the bandwidth or aren't seeing returns, then you know, they
can kind of just coast on it and keep uploading
to both places and still get some level of reward. Also,
we're the largest sponsor for all of our creators. We
literally every month, our largest line item is we pay
(31:07):
all of our creators to go tell our audience that
they're on Nebula. So there's not a ton of incentive
for anyone to walk away from that relationship. So we're
not really worried about it. I think we have to
lock people into anything. If the deal is good enough,
if the relationship is good enough, they'll stay. And hanging
on to intellectual property licenses doesn't get us out of that,
(31:29):
it doesn't solve any problems. In fact, by not doing that,
it helps us at a tempo of like we're in
this together. We're helping you build things. Our mission is
not to own all of the things in the world.
Our mission is to help an extremely talented and ambitious
group of young creators. I say young not because they're twelve,
(31:50):
but because the industry is young, help them make the
things that they want to make because we know they can.
And if we're a hit maker, and if we are,
if we build our reputation on trust and our ability
to help achieve those goals, then that's where we're going
to win. Not because we have an infinitely deep content
(32:11):
catalog of things we own. We don't need to own everything.
It's better if we don't.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Thank you for joining me today, Bab.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
In closing, is there anything else you want our audience
to know about Nebula?
Speaker 3 (32:22):
There's this uphill battle we've been fighting for years to
get any kind of recognition outside of our bubble. And
we talked to going back to the thing with Sam
and doing Netflix stuff, or you developing shows for other
platforms and all of that. We've had similar conversations. We've
been approached by major Hollywood development companies like yeah, we
(32:46):
want to put your show, your creators on Netflix. We
do these things and we go through the exercise like Okay,
well how long would development take? What does the money
look like? And it ends up being like, okay, so
you want us to You want this creator to commit
two years of their life to developing a thing that
they sell for fifty thousand dollars and they maybe get
a roll on for another maybe one hundred two hundred k,
(33:07):
setting aside everything else they could be working on. You
want them to spend two years on this for a
show that you're going to cancel after one season because
it's Netflix two hundred and fifty k, right, Or we
could just stay on YouTube, reach hundreds of millions of
people and make millions of dollars a year. Why the
hell are we even talking to you? It just doesn't
(33:27):
make any sense. Hollywood treats us as a farm league.
They treat us like cheap talent. My number one goal
in starting doing like real pr work and getting our
name out there in a different way was getting coverage
and Variety.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of
Variety Strictly Business podcast. You can find new episodes weekly
on Apple Podcasts.
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