Watcher and YouTube

Originally Posted 4/21/24; Last Updated 4/22/24

A Quick Note:

In this article I will be talking about the Watcher video of them saying Goodbye to Youtube. If you do not want spoilers, go watch that video now.

Update 4/22/24: Watcher has released An Update

What is Watcher Entertainment?

Watcher Entertainment is a YouTube Channel that features a variety of content. Some of their notable series are Ghost Files in which they go to haunted locations and hunt for Ghosts, as well as Puppet History in which they talk about history with a puppet. They have a lot of other content as well.

Why are we talking about them?

Watcher has recently put up a video stating they're leaving YouTube. In the video they talk about how they are leaving YouTube due to no longer wanting to be beholden to advertisers. They feel this gets in the way of making the content that they want to make. They have decided that, going foward, they will be posting all of their work to a streaming service they're launching called Watcher TV. Their goal, as far as I can tell, is to get enough people to sign up where they can continue to make the content they want, and even expand their productions, without having to worry about what advertisers want. It is currently $5.99/ month, or $59.99/ year. In their video, they said they chose these price points to try and make it so everyone could afford it.

Update 4/22/24: Watcher has released An Update on everything. My general thoguhts are overall it seemed very scripted, however I was happy to see they did outline their plans for change. They're going to upload the videos first to their new subscription service and have them ad free there. One month later, they will post the videos with ads to YouTube, that way fans who can not afford to pay can still watch videos. Out of the entire group, Shane seemed to show the most emotion when talking about the changes and apologizing. Overall I think a pretty standard, but good, apology video.

Rant Time

My Initial Thoughts

Okay, so with the basics out of the way, there are some things here I want to talk about. So I don't watch Watcher much. My girlfriend watches them much more often, and I tend to just watch when she's watching while I'm around. But watching their Goodbye Video, I had a couple of thoughts come to mind.

First was that out of the YouTube channels I watch, Watcher has good enough quality content where I would consider signing up for their subscription service. My thoughts were sort of "You know, out of the list of people I'd throw $5 a month towards, these guys are up there".

Secondly, I think it's weird they decided to make their own streaming service. In their video they spoke about how funding and wanting to be able to have larger productions were their main reasons for doing this. But... hosting video is extremely expensive. Not only that, but developing a website that can handle streaming for a mass amount of people is also expensive, on top of upkeep of that site and other things that come along with video hosting. I do not have exact numbers on these figures, but it seems like a big undertaking/ gamble from the little I know that would go into these things. I'm assuming they've done the math behind the scenes and view it as an acceptible cost but... still.

YouTube and Video Hosting

Video hosting is expensive. As video quality continues to increase, it becomes even more expensive because the files become bigger and bigger. According to this source, 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's a lot of content. Not only that, but according to this source, there are 122 million daily active users on YouTube. So not only do you need enough storage space for this huge amount of video files being uploaded constantly, but you need enough computing power to send those videos in extremely high definition to millions of users daily.

If you've used YouTube over the years, you've probably noticed the amount of ads they show you are ever increasing. While this may just be due to corporate greed, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it is simply because YouTube is just a black hole eating up any money they throw at it. So I wouldn't be surprised if one day, YouTube stops offering free uploads or becomes so riddled with ads that people don't want to use it.

With that in mind, I completely understand why people would want to move away from YouTube. Having your financials tied up with a company who can just change policies on a whim is a scary prospect. On top of that, as Watcher mentioned in their video, trying to pander to advertisers can get in the way of the type of content you'd want to make more of. There's also really no good alternative to YouTube at the moment (at least, that I know of). So creating your own video hosting platform seems like a logical enough step.

That said, this brings me to the next issue. Bigger companies have tried to create their own platforms before, and failed. According to Watcher's YouTube page, they have 2.85 million subscribers. Linus Tech Tips has 15.6 million. If you're not familiar with Linus Tech Tips, it's a channel dedicated to technology entertainment content. Towards the end of 2019 (had a hard time finding good sources on this, but from their video here I'm pulling the date from) Linus Tech Tips launched their own video streaming service called Floatplane. To their credit, Floatplane is still around and I assume doing well enough for them to keep it going, but I've not really heard of Floatplane brought up anywhere else outside of LTT. It might be I just don't swim in the same circle as people who use this site, but I feel like if it was gaining popularity, more people would be talking about it. Especially too because Floatplane allows other creators to post there as well. On top of all of this, Linus Tech Tips still post a majority of their videos on YouTube as well.

And so my thought with Watcher becomes: if Linus Tech Tips, who are all very skilled in technology, can not make a streaming service that catches on, then what chance does Watcher have? Especially since their platform will only have Watcher things on it. And again, maybe Floatplane is way more popular than I know about. Or maybe with the smaller audience Watcher has, the cost of hosting the video files will be much more manageable.

General Reception to Watchers Announcement

Taking a look through Watchers "Goodbye Youtube" video, there are a lot of negative comments. A majority of them that I've seen tend to comment on the pricing, saying it's not that affordable. My girlfriend when she first watched the video had the feeling that the video itself was tone deaf, and really infuriating. It makes sense to me why people would be mad that something they used to get for free is now going behind a paywall. One of the things my girlfriend said to me was that she'd understand if bonus content or something was going behind the paywall, similar to how a lot of creators handle patreon, but to put all new content behind a paywall felt horrible.

Concluding Thoughts

This situation to me feels like a bit of a pickle. On one hand, I think it's great that channels are trying to get away from YouTube. I personally don't know how long YouTube in its current form is going to be staying around for, and I love the idea of creators becoming more self sufficient. On the other, the reaction seems so negative I wonder if Watcher is simply going to either disappear due to low sign up numbers, or end up right back on YouTube. Another concerning thing here is we already see an issue with Streaming where if you subscribed to every streaming platform, you'd be paying more than you would for cable. If creators start being more self sufficient, each charging something like $5/ month, at one point does that too become unaffordable for the average person? But I also don't want creators to have to make content for less than they're worth.

The whole situation seems tough to me, and it just makes me more concerned with the direction the internet is heading. Maybe this move will work out for them, and everything with the internet will be fine. To me the way things are going on the internet just seem unsustainable.

Let me know what you think though! Feel free to send an email to steventanzimedia@gmail.com