Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus Talks About Accountability to Creators, Building a Companion to YouTube
If your YouTube history feed is full of edu-tainment and video essays, you’ve probably heard of Nebula. Many YouTube creators upload to the streaming service, and some even produce Nebula originals like Maggie Mae Fish’s Unrated.
A few months back, I finally got around to watching Maggie Mae Fish’s excellent documentary series about the history of sex in movies, Unrated. Afterward, Nebula reached out to give me the opportunity to speak with Fish and Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus. Alongside other online creatives, Wiskus founded Nebula in May 2019. This ad-free streaming service hosts a variety of exclusive video projects, as well as material that’s uploaded to YouTube. Its business model allows them to produce and host videos that would scare away advertisers—things like Fish’s Unrated.
In addition to Wiskus’ role as CEO, he also hosts the NDA podcast. There, he talks to friends and business partners about the creator economy. This includes an episode with Fish after the first few Unrated episodes released. With that, we began the interview talking about his creative endeavors alongside his role as CEO of Nebula.
Despite our great conversation, I’ve condensed this interview for length and clarity.
Alyssa Shotwell (TMS): How do you balance your creative goals with your role as CEO?
Dave Wiskus: I would say that I do a terrible job of that. All of the things that I want to build. All the things that I want to make. So much of this company was built as an excuse for me to get access to tools and resources to make the things that I want to make. And then the building of those tools and resources was so successful that it took all of my time away—almost like an episode of the Twilight Zone or something. I have all of the tools now and no time to make things. What I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that the most effective use of my time is when I can be in a situation where I’m adding value, but me stepping away doesn’t subtract value.
The way I’m trying to find a better balance now is mostly through creating more opportunities for the parts of my job that aren’t 100% necessary for me to do, to be done by others. So building a better team so that I can work with. Like with Jessie Gender on Indentiteaze. This is being on set being able to add value. And I get a lot of creative fulfillment out of that. Balancing my actual creative stuff? I don’t know my band, Airplane Mode, we put our last record out February of 2020, right before COVID-19, released a record and then immediately the world shut down. We never toured, we never supported it. And so everything’s kind of been on the back burner there.
TMS: Nebula has a unique structure where the platform is creator founded, partially creator owned through like a semi-cooperative structure. In your opinion, how has Nebula been able to maintain this ethos coming up on 5 years, I think next year?
Wiskus: I think accountability matters. Fundamentally, we’re not a profit-driven capitalist machine. We’ve built a kind of socialism emulator bootstrapped on top of capitalism. In some ways that works really well and in some ways there’s friction. Ultimately we’re much more about vision and philosophy than we are in cashing checks. Now the irony there is so much of our vision philosophy is built around how do we help creators cash more checks? So, you know, balance in all things.
I started the parent company (Standard) ten years ago, mostly as a hobby project. Then, it became more talent management and building tools. That’s where Nebula was born out of. The early days of Standard was in the multi-channel network (MCN) era. These monolithic organizations that were just there to siphon money off of creators with these insane contracts. Nobody trusted MCNs. There’s this shared skepticism amongst our creators and audience that sort of naturally precludes them from jumping on anything that is predatory. It was important that the relationships I build out have to be transparent. The only real product I have at the end of the day to buy, sell, or trade is trust.
One of the first things I did is I created a Slack and invited creators knowing full well, that whatever deal one of them got, they could tell another. But by creating an open forum, they could approach me as a group and say, “Why is this happening?” And at first, that was scary. And over time, I realized that this was a huge asset. That ethos of, of building everything upon the foundation of a trusted relationship means that the accountability permeates everything we do and every decision we make. We build as a collective. Over time, more of the creators have joined as staff. We remain creator built, run, and driven. If we ever tried to not be, then we would lose a bunch of relationships. Nebula would all fall apart by design.
TMS: I’ve noticed an increase in diversity among the creators on the platform. Some of this is ideological, video type or area of expertise. And then also among those of differing gender and racial identities. How does Nebula go through the process of deciding who joins as a creator? I know you’re going to be limited in what you can say. I’ve seen how you navigate this question, but I’m going to ask it still. How does Nebula go through the process of bringing on creators like to the program?
Wiskus: I’m perfectly happy to answer a question like this in an interview. It’s harder to write a policy publicly. But here’s roughly how this works. We have to make decisions based on what is good for the business. And at the end of the day, what is good for the business isn’t necessarily what will make us the most money. Because only signing popular cisgender straight white men may not actually be that good for business. That might hurt things that we want to do two years from now, our reputation, or relationship with our audience.
We exist because we believe that the future of the creator economy should belong to the creators. And, the next generation of filmmakers are all on YouTube. The voices of the people who are working the hardest might not be the voices that are being elevated the most by the structures that exist today. And so there’s a couple of things that we have to do. Looking solely at subscriber and view count alone is so painfully reductive. It works against what we’re trying to achieve. It’s so much more complicated than that. I can point to many creators who are people of color or LGBTQ, etc., who are at the smaller end of the scale, but I can clearly see what their potential is.
As a business, if we think that a creator can make money; will serve as a beacon to attract more audience and creators for us; and we see value in the work that they’re doing, that’s an investment worth making. That doesn’t mean that every marginalized creator with a small audience is a good fit. And it doesn’t mean that every non-marginalized creator with a large audience is a good fit. It’s much more case by case.
When we work with smaller creators and we put in the time and energy and the investment to help them become medium or large creators, but we’re there from an earlier stage, the return on that investment often comes in the form of a very positive attitude and a sense of building things together.
When I look at Abigail Thorne and what we’ve done together with The Prince, and the ways in which we’ve been able to help support her career through several interesting twists and turns over the last few years. This relationship wasn’t born out of finding the biggest creator in a category. It was born out of, we saw the potential, we saw the person, and we recognized the value of their work and how that sort of fit into a larger story and invested in that.
So I don’t I don’t mind answering this question. It’s just hard to capture all of that. While we would love to someday help everyone, we’re not building a YouTube competitor. We don’t need every creator on YouTube to come to Nebula, nor do we want that. This is highly curated by design. And so some of it is, there’s going to be really big voices that are interesting and there’s going to be really small voices that are interesting. And sometimes the bigger voices do bring in more money and we have to find a balance. We have rules about who we can work with in terms of smaller creators, there are thresholds. What value are we really adding here for this creator, for our community, and for our audience? That’s hard to answer in a simple statement.
TMS: I think it’s very interesting what Nebula does regarding that. I, on the audience side, see the pros and cons of going the curation versus algorithmic. Through algorithms, I’ve been able to find people that I wouldn’t have. However, through the curated selection, you also make sure that Nebula don’t have problems later as much, I guess. Although with a referral program it kind of stays into what what sphere the creator has. On the positive end, when Nebula builds trust, then they’ll want to bring in more people of that like group. But also, I know we each in ways we recognize (and don’t) still kind of like, stay huddled with our groups. So I like having a complimentary service I subscribe to that does that too. I think there’s more of that needed.
Wiskus: Yeah, I think that it is important that YouTube exists. None of us would be here if not for YouTube. We have no bigger, more important, or frankly, better partner. We’re very friendly with the team over there, much more than I think would be expected from the outside. Even with the chasm in size and an entire country between us, it’s not uncommon for me to grab a dinner with YouTube executives.
And I can’t stress enough, we don’t see them as competitive, they don’t see us as competitive. We’re trying to solve different problems. And I think that our aim is to be more of like a prestige layer on top of YouTube or more directly if YouTube is the canonical step one in a creator’s career path, “What is step two?” Like what exists between making YouTube videos for a living and making movies for a living? Like if that is the trajectory you want to be on, there’s no clear path. And we are working to build that path. That’s where we want to be.
From from our perspective, the YouTube relationship, the algorithm of it, they’re doing us the biggest favor in the world, they they have a trillion dollar global mega corporation, who’s spending millions and millions of dollars of resources to an audience of billions of people building machines, the algorithm, that go out and find audience for our creators. And then through that, we’re able to, those creators are able to build a relationship with that audience and then tell that audience, hey, come check out Nebula. I see this as beautifully symbiotic.
TMS: In my article on Maggie Mae Fish’s Nebula original, Unrated, I went on a little bit of a tangent. I didn’t review Unrated, but I kind of talked about the context in which what made Nebula like the perfect platform for it. Specifically, the censorship when people talk about sex online and how very few are about to discuss the topic YouTube and still make a living. One of the creators brought up is Dr. Lindsey Doe is now on Nebula!
Wiskus: I loved seeing it when when I saw the name in the list, because I we were like in the final stage to getting things all set up with Lindsey. So when I when I saw them last time, oh, I wish we were ready. I wish we had the channel already up and running. Because that would be it’d be so great to say, “Oh, hey, by the way, about that.” And it was like, not even a week later, I don’t think. It was very, very close. And it was funny timing. Like, “Oh, hey, yeah, we had the same thought.”
I think Sexplanations is one of those first shows that I found a decade or so ago when I started getting into like the education-ish YouTube stuff. So at the time she was working with Complexly. So I was very familiar with her channel and very familiar with her work and we sort of wound up connecting a little while back and there was sort of a conversation around, does this make sense, does this not make sense? And she’s had an interesting trajectory and interesting experience. She has a small but incredibly engaged audience. They were very excited about the Nebula announcement. They value this this kind of content and to be fair so do the people at YouTube. YouTube just answer to advertisers in a way that we just simply don’t.
So the ability, again, it’s that duality of it, the dynamics of, it’s good to have lots of different things. It’s cool that she was able to find and build an audience on YouTube. And it’s also really cool that over here on Nebula—a place to do maybe the spicier stuff without, you know, having to explain no, really, this is actually education.
TMS: I met her right before the pandemic, when she was doing her national road tour. And I know people put on a little bit of performance when you’re like on camera. Dr. Doe is the exact same, just as bubbly and open to discuss sex and health. It was so disarming.
Wiskus: That did not surprise me at all.
TMS: I was very excited to see her get like brought on Nebula, especially at the context of what she talks about how difficult that is to navigate online.
Okay. For this interview, I come with questions, you come with like expectations for the interview, and maybe we didn’t like meet them or something came up that you would want to tell our audience. This is your open floor right here. Is there anything else you would like our audience to know?
We’re seeing different people exploring their identity and talking about how those things intertwine with politics, art, and culture. We’re seeing it at a bigger scale. And that’s scary for some people. It’s going to be and I think it’s necessary for it to be scary. But it’s also it’s so empowering. It’s so great that Nebula gets to be a part of that. And it’s so great to, to know that there’s some infinitesimally small role we play in helping some of those people find their voice, find their audience. And what we really want to do at the end of the day is make sure that the people who do find their voice, who do find their audience and start to get a little bit of momentum. This should be a sustainable career. It should be possible.
Like I said earlier, bootstrapping an emulation layer of socialism on top of capitalism. One of those core tenants are universal basic income. That doesn’t exist, at least in this country. Not in any practical sense, But when you look at the ability to create things on the internet and find an audience and find some level of commerce that can bring you revenue and you can make money from your art or from your writing or from the things that you create. The people who have access to that now, it’s a very different group of people who have access to those tools even 20 years ago.
TMS: You can’t see me, but I’m nodding a lot. I’m like, “Yes to this. Yes.”
Wiskus: I think that’s the most important role we can play. Much more important than money. We are driven by philosophy, we believe that these things should exist. We believe that those voices should be heard. And if someone isn’t out there championing those things, there is a risk, of course, that the the Silicon Valley, venture capitalist tech bro people are going to come in. Or the entertainment people are going to come in, and they’re going to try to siphon as much of that money and as much of that power away from the creators as humanly possible. They are going to look for every opportunity to exploit it.
And as a community, not even us as a company, but as a community, I think it’s important that we recognize the power of our own voices and keep building things that ensure that the power stays with us.
TMS: Thank you so much for your time, Dave. I know there are a lot of questions at you. It was really good to hear your thoughts on so many of these things. Where can people find you online?
Wiskus: Everywhere, I am everywhere. You can’t avoid me. I’m so everywhere. I’m on the artist formerly known as Twitter at @dwiskus. Most things on @dwiskus. My band Airplane Mode. Probably if you’re listening to this, what you’d care about is my podcast NDA, which you can find at Nebula.tv/nda or if you watch the video version, nebula.tv/ndavideo.
(featured image: Nebula.tv edited by Alyssa S.)
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