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  • 4 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 30th, 2023
  • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.worldtoNebula@lemmy.world•Who Owns Nebula?
    2·
    6 days ago

    It would be nice to see a standard contract, but I can’t blame them for keeping it under wraps. Unless it’s unreasonably lucrative, there’s no benefit to having it out there I can see.

    My thoughts on your questions:

    • I would assume it’s by watch time to some degree. Either overall views, or number of minutes watched. Though the latter would put shorter content / infrequent creators at a significant disadvantage.

    • I know it’s a progressive platform, but I feel like cashing out your equity in any situation other than a sale is probably not a possibility.

    • If there were, say, a single board seat available that represented the creators, and they could all vote on decision making, they probably would use this in their marketing. It sounds too good to be true, so it’s likely to me they don’t have any real governance input.

    Specifically when it comes to the creator pool, being their 50% of subscriptions after costs, I do wonder what that looks like. It occurs to me that it must be number of views, as I mentioned above. However this opens the question of how they determine the distribution.

    If it’s simply by ranking view counts for the month across the platform, that means the largest creators that I don’t watch are getting a fraction of my subscription fee. Not the worst way to do it, but probably is the easiest from a technical perspective.

    An idealistic approach may be if Nebula looked at the specific channels I watch on the platform, and divvy my subscription money amongst them, ranked by view count. This way, the channels people watch would be directly supported by my viewership, instead of the platform as a whole. Doing so would be better for the lower view count creators, but worse for the high view count creators.

    I’ve not found any definitive answer to how the pool is cut up, but I’m not confident it’s the latter option I described.

    Maybe someone will leak their contract at some point. Otherwise we may never know.

  • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.worldtoNebula@lemmy.world•Who Owns Nebula?
    7·
    6 days ago

    Wasn’t too long ago I was having a chat with someone about the ownership issue with Nebula. I never even looked into Curiosity Stream, as I assumed they were private like Nebula. Good idea to get confirmation on some of these things.

    Key takeaways from Curiosity Streams financials:
    • The initial $6 million was for 12% ownership
    • They had offered enough stock for a potential ownership of 25%. (that’s the additional 6.5 million from the Form D)
    • Standard Broadcast owned 100% of Nebula prior to this investment
    • Curiosity Stream controls 25% of Nebula’s board
    From this we can infer:
    • Nebula was valued at exactly $50 million, not over
    • Nebula has 4 board members
    • The creators directly own 0% of Nebula

    Later in the article it’s shown that the creators are given “shadow equity”. This can be thought of, presumably, as a contract directing proceeds of subscriptions - and potentially a sale - go half to the creators in the form of a pool.

    Obviously this is a hit to the company’s primary marketing method, being that Nebula is a platform owned by the creators. This is either a lie, or a tongue in cheek way of being honest, seeing as the owners of Standard are also content creators.

    Regardless it’s annoying this information has been drummed up by Nebula to be complicated or not public, when it is neither complicated nor private seeing it’s in Curiosity Stream’s publicly available information.

    Kind of sours me on Nebula to be honest.