You’ll be there one day, too.
I don’t think “bought them out” is a good explanation of what happened. Iirc there were 3 big Sam Hyde clip channels. He told them all to compete for 30 days bringing him donors and the guy who won got to partner with him. The other guys got dmca’s and had to stop. At least that was the initial offer from Sam. “Make me money or get DMCA’d.” Which is a pretty good attitude imho.
Edit: I’m remembering more now. I followed one of the clip channels before the offer was made. He was the one who eventually won. I’m not sure if the others got dmca’d but that guy posted the terms of the contest the day the offer was made to him/them.
You're right, it wasn't a buyout. It was a salary position to edit PGL clips full time. This was an unexplainably controversial thing at the time. People called Sam a kike for paying someone a salary to edit videos they don't own the rights to.
The upside is having a steady revenue stream and getting an actual job doing something absurd like editing videos for YouTube. The biggest downside is that an independent clip channel could potentially make more money on ad revenue - but could also have their entire operation deleted after DMCA violations. For some reason this was a very polarizing decision. Sam was heavily criticized and many people said his career would never recover without clippers. There's like fifty pages of people seething about it ITT.
There were two big clip channels: The New Pill and Lil Shit Post. After speaking with both editors, Sam decided to hire LSP. The LSP channel became the Sam's Perfect Clips channel. Sam said he's fine with clip channels, as long as they aren't using stuff from his paywall content. TNP is still uploading Sam Hyde clips and hasn't had any taken down.
Shortly after that went down Sam started doing live streams on the LSP channel, then Nick came on board and now that it seems to be the official MDE channel. Sam uploads new videos directly to the channel and it's where they were streaming Fishtank Live when the site was down.
When Sam and/or Nick are streaming they pull in the second highest amount of revenue over any other YT channel by a huge margin. Their only competition is some gay Oakland Raiders podcast.
There are 5x as many SH clip channels now than there were before, mostly because his popularity has skyrocketed since the iDubbz and boxing match, and continues to climb with Nick's real estate podcast and now Fishtank.
Just last week Sam, once again, posted a public notice to anyone looking to clip his content: just don't use the paywall exclusive content and it's all good. Seems pretty fair and transparent to me.