Inside Nebula, the Creator-Owned Streaming Service

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1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. Well, one thing I say to creators often is like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Because if you think that you're still a YouTuber in 20 years, you might want to rethink how you're playing this game. If step one is build a successful YouTube channel and step 10 is get a Netflix deal, where the hell are steps two through nine? Nobody has built them yet. Whoever can build a bridge between what we call the creator economy and traditional entertainment and media, that's the winner.

1:48That's what we're trying to be.

1:55Hey, podcast listeners, it's Samir. Hey, everybody. This is Colin. And this is Nate. Nate, third time back on the show. Back in the seat. All right, what do we have this week? Yeah, so we're chatting about Nebula. If you're not familiar, Nebula is an independent creator-owned streaming service that ended 2023 with 680 ,000 paying subscribers. Basically how it works is partner creators each have their own unique Nebula signup link. Think Real Engineering, Sam Demby from Wendover Productions. and when a viewer clicks through and purchases a subscription, the corresponding creator receives a cut of the subscription revenue.

2:33Plus, about 50 % of the company's equity pool is allocated to creators on the platform. And this is pretty cool. If Nebula were to ever sell, all participant creators would be paid accordingly. What's the cost for a Nebula subscription? It depends on the deal you get. They had a package with CuriosityStream for a while, but it's roughly$5 a month or so. a month. So this is essentially, it's Patreon or membership, but bundled with a bunch of creators. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I hear a lot about it specifically from you. Am I like the Nebula guy on the side of the house? You're the Nebula guy in the office.

3:10And people ask us to cover them quite a bit. But what really made me familiar with Nebula is jet lag, right? Like that's like probably, I mean, we've talked about it as like their most prominent show, but from what I've heard, it maybe isn't. And there is actually more content on Nebula that people are watching. Yeah, it definitely drives the most subscriptions. But I think even as Dave Wiskus, the CEO of Nebula, who you're about to hear from, said, you know, their three most popular original shows were Jet Lag, a travel competition show, Night of the Coconut, which is a short film about a genocidal coconut.

3:47And... Wait, what? Yeah. I think the third is a play called The Prince that debuted in London to sold out shows. He talks about Abigail Thorne a little bit in our conversation, the creator and actress behind it. So those three shows brought in the most amount of subscriptions. Yep. The number of subscriptions surprises me. 600 ,000 plus subscribers, because that's on a monthly basis. So that's a significant business. That's significant business. Yeah. But just for context, Netflix ended 2023 with around 260 million. Sure. Disney Plus, 146 million. I'm not taking anything away from Nebula, but I think just as we're talking about streaming platforms, this is an indie streaming platform.

4:26It's important to know the difference. Yeah. And I think one thing that's important to note, too, is that it's pretty much entirely bootstrapped. I know they had the deal with CuriosityStream. They had some sort of involvement with capital allocated. But yeah, Nebula is this indie streaming service that the creators, again, founded it, they operate it, and have bootstrapped it to this point. Bootstrapped probably because the production cost is near zero for most of the stuff that they originally put out. But you were talking to Dave because of some news that they announced this week, and you were writing about it in the published press.

4:59Yeah, and what's interesting, you know, I know you compared it, Samir, a little bit to Patreon with like this collection of creators. But the way Dave sees it, he kind of describes Nebula as think of Disney Plus, right? When you log on, they have different categories for Marvel, for Pixar, for Star Wars. And they just announced this big UI update on Tuesday where the platform will look similar with content categories, including news, culture, comedy, etc. But in doing that, it's not the craziest news announcement in the world. But what it means is they're going to be investing, allocating real budgets into each of these categories, into original programming.

5:33And especially on Tuesday, part of their big announcement for their news division, they've tapped Jack Kelly, the creator behind online media group TLDR. And Dave explains that a bit more in our conversation. For me, the reason to talk about this now is also because of the announcement made on our channel on Monday with Mr. Beast announcing his Amazon Prime video competition show. This is an example of, you know, the largest creator taking to a streamer. and we got a question in the comments that was like, well, what does this mean for the rest of us? Because the comment just considers Mr. Beast an outlier, which yes, he is at the very top.

6:11And it begs the question, is there an opportunity for creators to get involved with streamers and to make streaming quality content if you're not Mr. Beast? And that's a lot of what Dave and Nate, I know you get into. So I don't wanna give too much away, but it is a fascinating conversation between the two of you. Yeah, and I mean, I think Nebula is a really interesting player here. And it feels like there's not many people more qualified to comment on, you know, the streaming and creator worlds colliding than Dave. So yeah, we're going to drop you into the conversation I had with him. Really enjoyed it.

6:46And then come back and I'll talk about it together. Dave, great to chat as always. I want to get right into it. You tweeted out on March 12th. Big news coming next week. The floor is yours. what is the big news you have to share? So this is kind of a, we want to do a few things. We want to acknowledge where we come from. So a lot of our slate for this year is documentary projects. Boomers from Tom Nicholas, Pigment of Your Imagination from Sarah Renee Clark, The Baltimore Scandal from Bobby Broccoli, Kevin. These are designed to be factual documentary projects in the spirit of the world we come from, entertaining people or enriching people with facts, breaking it down into fact and fiction.

7:36The factual side of this is where we come from. We don't want to let that go. That's the kind of creator who built the service originally and still core to who we are. And we're going to take that one step further. The news in my big news coming next week is news. We've got one of the big categories, probably the most serviced at launch, is our news category. And part of that is building out new shows. Like we're launching with a new show called The War Room from Real Life Lore, exploring what is the state of all of the various conflicts around the world right now. Because it's hard, especially as Americans, it's hard to remember how many countries there are.

8:19We're terrible at geography. It's hard to remember what's going on here. How does this affect that? Until something really big comes up, like Russia and Ukraine or Israel-Palestine, then those things are heavily in the news cycle. Even then, it's hard to get all the context. So we're building news around keeping and holding that context. The page itself is being curated by the TLDR news team. Jack from TLDR News has come on as our news director, helping to make sure that that page stays fresh and curated and that we're thinking about bringing in the news creators who might be able to flesh it out and add interesting context and expanding that sort of thought and ideology across all of the different categories.

9:04You named a lot of the originals projects. You have slated for 2024 spending up to six-figure budgets on individual projects. I also remember when you put out the release about Abigail Thorne's Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, which I believe is supposed to come out over the summer. What has you the most personally motivated to keep taking Nebula to this next level? So fact is half of the story. The other half is fiction. And this is where my background and Sam's background, Sam Denby, our chief content officer, the guy behind Wendover, half is interesting, Jetlag. Our approaches are a little different.

9:44He's really emotionally invested in documentary storytelling, game shows, that kind of thing. I personally am very excited about the narrative storytelling. And so while half of our slate and half of our motivation right now is around fact, where we come from, I think that to move into the next phase, when you look at YouTube as a platform and you think about what it is and what comes out of YouTube, like you can name your favorite video essayist. You can name your favorite travel creator. Can you name your favorite sitcom? What's your favorite scripted drama on YouTube? Right? Like, it's strange to me that for all of the things that YouTube provides, there's no real motivation baked into the platform for people to do scripted storytelling with any sort of production value and gain any sort of traction.

10:42because it's not because YouTube hates that, I don't believe, or because they're jerks or something. I think that just the dynamics of the platform and the way that the discovery algorithm works is that the amount of time and money and production value you have to put into something to even get the first video out the door. And that first video, you can't even monetize those views because you're not part of the partner program yet. So launching a new show like that, it's a big lift. It's very heavy. And it costs a ton of money. And why would anybody invest in doing a sitcom on YouTube, when you could put the same time and effort into making a pilot and then trying to sell the pilot to Netflix or something?

11:22The kind of person who wants to start experimenting with that kind of storytelling, they just don't really have a good avenue into it. With Dracula's ex-girlfriend, which we announced last year, the background on that story, Abigail Thorn has been an actor for years, I think roughly as long as she's been doing YouTube. And one of the conversations she and I had a couple of years ago was around, she said something like she wants to maybe step back from YouTube and focus on acting. And I was like, well, why not do both? And she said, because nobody's going to give me an acting job because I'm a popular YouTuber.

11:55I'm like, well, no, but you can use the success you find on this platform to go build your own things and then get those taken seriously. And so she did. We made the prints together. It was an interesting choice to go for a play first, but it was actually a really smart choice on her part because it was easier to get attention around the fact that that play sold out. A full five-week run off West End in London sold out every night. And she won some awards for the writing and for her role acting. That got her some attention, and now she's being cast in very large projects you'll likely hear about soon.

12:30So when we were talking about what is the next step in her journey, she was kicking stuff around. And then she came to me and she's like, well, I got this thing. It's a short film. It's like my dinner with Andre, but vampires. Dracula's ex-girlfriend. I was like, done. Yes. The answer is yes. Let's make this happen. And it takes us down this path of she's proven herself. She has the chops. It's not an ambition problem. It's not a skill problem. It's not a talent problem. It's a problem of resources, connections. and so we we can do things to put those pieces together at least at the scale of a short film and years ago i was talking to patrick patrick willems about what is how do you go from being youtuber because his plan was always be a filmmaker and youtube was something that just kind of sidetracked him for a while uh but that that trajectory of dip your toes in with a short then move on to the next thing then move on to the next thing we think that in terms of like leveling up.

13:26Patrick's, his project on our slate, it's called The Dinner Plan, a short film. And before we get to the set to produce, he is on the crew for Dracula's ex-girlfriend. He's the B camera operator to get set experience. He's on set. He's seeing how these things work because our director on Dracula's ex-girlfriend, Valentina V, is very experienced. He's there. He's getting to see how these things are done. He's getting to learn from her. So when he goes on set with his first short, he's got that experience in that context. And we'll have other creators there on set learning from him. So what's got me excited building this pipeline, if step one is build a successful YouTube channel, and step 10 is get a Netflix deal, where the hell are steps two through nine?

14:12Nobody has built them yet. Whoever can build a bridge between what we call the creator economy and traditional entertainment and media. That's the winner. That's what we're trying to be. I do. I hear that. And I hear everything you're saying. And I think it's really in line with what Sam's told talked about as well in the past. I will push back a little bit just from the sense of I'm not sure if you're familiar with a creator named Conigra Dion, who started with low lift sketch comedy videos and has kind of worked her way up to kind of a hybrid model where now she kind of has several TV show style productions and series all going on her YouTube channel at once.

14:56I also know I talked with Rhett and Link recently, and they got so fed up with the traditional process that they decided to shoot their entire TV show concept in-house and release it on their personal YouTube channel. But in bringing both of those examples up, I do agree that there is no path right now, right? And I believe that's what you're saying in the sense of just where is this middle ground? Yeah, I don't mean to suggest that we're the first to do anything. All of this has been done before. The problem is that there's no reproducible way to get there. There's no system built for it. That's the part that hasn't been done before.

15:38And that's what I'm excited about. creators doing sketch comedy i mean like the guy we've got doing it dc pearson he came from uh making sketch comedy videos on an internet platform he's done this before that's not breaking the ground these these aren't necessarily as individual things uh going to redefine how the industry works what i'm excited about and that's not because i don't have faith in those projects. They're all going to change the world. But the thing that has me excited is that these are now possible to go from idea to execution within a system that is built for that to happen. Right now, for Rhett and Link to do what they're doing, they first have to build their empire, then have the room to do that.

16:25For this other creator, I don't know what the story behind the scenes is. I will definitely check it out. But that is a thing that you can make stuff like that. You can. The economic cost will be high if you want there to be strong production value. Or you're going to end up with something that looks like YouTube content, which is going to be hard to have taken seriously. Or you're just so incredibly talented that you were able to pull that off. But another person who might be an incredibly talented writer wouldn't necessarily get to come and join the writer's room. One of the challenges of being a YouTuber is that you have to do everything yourself.

17:03Yeah. And I think that's the key element you identify, which I want to highlight as well as the educational component, right? Like the learning component. Creators being on other creators slash filmmakers sets, what they learn, they then take to their production. And then there's just a whole host of roots, if you will. More and more people just learning these skills that, as you articulated, I've talked with creators myself, some with millions of subscribers who want to start producing shows and concepts at a higher level, but are struggling because they do have to pay the bills and they do have to keep up with the day to day of maintaining a YouTube channel, which is their main source of income that keeps food on the table.

17:45So I do think that's the biggest key distinction I'm hearing. And it seems like that's what you're really investing in how to create a process around all this and a pipeline of sorts. yeah like i don't know if you watched the oscars or emmys or golden globes or any of that but when when i look at those shows versus the streamies what i'm struck by is that the oscars it's a it's a room full of people where everything they've ever done has been in collaboration true collaboration with other people in that room you go to the streamies and we're all like on our own little islands. And there's plenty of people who do collabs.

18:26That's not the same thing. There's plenty of people who work together because they built a channel as like a duo or something like that. But it's not quite the same sort of networked ecology of interaction. It's much more fractured. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody tends to, it's an archipelago. It's not a united nation of any sort. And there can be good things about that. And there can be bad things about it. And this is, again, not because I want to pass judgment, but it is hard to get the kind of experience that you would get working in a Hollywood system. If you are an extremely talented writer who starts making video essays on YouTube, because you saw, I don't know, every frame of painting and you thought, I would love to do stuff like that, as so many creators did.

19:16And you go out and start making, you find success and you're paying your bills, it's great that you're paying your bills. It still doesn't get you a writing job. And it can be somewhat creatively satisfying because you're still writing, but that doesn't get you a job writing for a show. And it doesn't get you any experience in a writer's room. It doesn't get you the experience of developing a script within a studio. So how do you take these people who have that raw talent and they have that ambition and there just isn't a system for them to develop it in any way, how do you create tools for those people to develop those skills?

19:50We know that they're there. We know for a fact that those people exist and we know how talented they are, but not everyone who can write and has an audience on YouTube wants to direct or produce or run a camera or even know what kind of camera to use. And not everyone who wants to be a director has access to those tools. I forget his name. The guy who won for cinematography at the Oscars made a comment about, to all those aspiring filmmakers out there, you should try this hip new thing called celluloid. And it's like, oh, come on, man. Like, we're just trying to get our stuff made. And you want us to, like, go learn a whole new impossibly expensive and difficult process relative to take my phone out of my pocket and hit the cinema mode button?

20:38how about we just make really good things and stop being so pretentious about it? Being taken seriously is the challenge and finding an avenue to make the things that you want to make. Not everyone is a solo artist. How do we create an environment for people to form bands? Attention law enforcement. You took an oath to protect and serve. To keep your family, your neighborhood safe. But in too many cities, dangerous illegals walk free as police are forced to stand down. Join ICE and help us catch the worst of the worst. Drug traffickers, gang members, predators. Join the mission to protect America with bonuses up to$50 ,000 and generous benefits.

21:20Apply now. Join.ice.gov and fulfill your mission. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for 40 % off. Terms apply. It's an interesting circle of life of sorts from the sense of big Hollywood productions taking a whole village in order to even exist in the first place and people who are insanely talented at very specific things.

22:09And then there being such a the big promise of the Internet being that you could handle everything, you know, creative control, writing, be on screen, etc. And now it almost feels like a full circle of, you know, OK, there are a lot of people who figured out how to be really good at a bunch of different facets of the creative process and the entrepreneurial process, the creative entrepreneurial process with it, but still to be at that 99th percentile, to be at the highest level, you know, that takes education and it does take a team. So it almost feels like we're coming full circle a little bit.

22:48Yeah. There's no, there's no university that you can go to to learn how to do all of this. And in terms of being a creator on the internet, you sort of start doing it and you learn the tools as best you can and you make friends along the way and learn from them. And there's podcasts you can listen to and there's no shortage of gurus who are trying to sell you all of the algorithm secrets. But even then, if you somehow crack the code or luck into it, there's no way off of that treadmill necessarily into doing other types of creative work. You're sort of locked into whatever you become. And that's a little unfortunate.

23:31There's so much potential there. There's so much talent there. And not all of those people want to be forever what they are today. Well, one thing I say to creators often is like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Because if you think that you're still a YouTuber in 20 years, you might want to rethink how you're playing this game. Unless you're willing to, you know, make a good mythical morning for 10 straight years, you know, five days a week. Some people have that in them. I don't think everybody does. And not everybody wants to be Mr. Beast. Yeah. Dave, every time we talk, I feel like we could just continue talking for hours, but I might cut it off there.

24:04Thanks for coming on today and taking the time. I appreciate it as always. So guys, in that conversation, Dave talked a lot about positioning themselves as a premium streaming service like a Netflix or an Apple TV Plus. You know, they want to break this mold of being thought of as UGC. They describe Nebula more as a curated group that can upload videos on Nebula. It's not like a YouTube or Facebook where anyone can start an account and upload a video. But I really thought this idea of steps two through nine was really interesting. You know, again, one being a platform where anyone can post, 10 being the creators who can get the Netflix deal.

24:42And Dave did a really great job of illustrating that within this conversation. My question to you all, though, with this idea of steps two through nine, where do you think that place is right now? I think it's an interesting framing that I'd never really thought of before. It's too expensive to make this type of content to just go ahead and release it on YouTube. Dave talks about it. He's like, you're not going to start up a new channel, invest all that money, and then put out something scripted or narrative that costs a lot because you're not going to get any distribution. And he even says you're not going to be a part of the partner program.

25:12Like you won't even make any money potentially. So as I look at it, steps two through nine does not really exist. You can make TV and streaming quality content and video, but you sort of have to be a creator that's already built up your own distribution and you have a way to fund it. You know, Michelle Correa clearly is like making streaming quality video. Same with Yes Theory. You know, there are a lot of creators who are making quality video that, you know, I don't think you would ever watch it and think, oh, well, I can tell by the production that this is YouTube. It's just that to make that, they've had to go through this journey of having the distribution that will allow them to recoup their funds and make money on these productions.

25:57I'll tell you what makes those productions feel YouTube is when they break in the middle and do an ad read. When Michelle Curé does a SoFi ad read in the middle of her Houdini video or Yes Theory does a, you know, Headspace or BetterHelp ad read at the end of their videos. Like it doesn't, the quality of that content doesn't match the nature of like YouTube content. It's very different when you see Drew Gooden, who's like commentary or Cody Ko sitting at their computer delivering. And so I think we are in this weird moment where it's like, Michelle, Yes Theory, these people are capable of producing extremely high quality 22 minute or 30 minute content.