The financial health of Nebula is questionable at the moment. Sure, they moved Wendover Productions' Sam Denby to Chief Content Officer last year and in March 2024 announced (
link/
archive) that they have a slew of original content in development as well as the creation of Nebula News with Jack Kelly of TDLR as News Director. They also seem to be promoting Philosophy Tube rather heavily as their preeminent tranny, which is certainly a choice. However, their minority partner Curiosity Stream
reported their full year 2023 numbers in March 2024 and specifically note an equity loss of $2.3M as an impairment charge from their investment in
Watch Nebula LLC.
According to
Investopedia, "an impairment charge is a process used by businesses to write off worthless goodwill. These are assets whose value drops or is lost completely, rendering them completely worthless." So not only did Curiosity Stream lay off a bunch of people in 2023, they also lost money on their investment in Nebula due to a loss in asset value. Given that Nebula only started with about $51.1M in capital and seed money, those kind of losses add up quickly.
Nebula got one infusion of venture capital in 2023 but have two other late stage VC suckers still in process from last year per
Pitchbook.
2023 did give them a subscriber bump when Lindsay Ellis returned to the scary Internet with the announcement that she would be exclusively producing content for Nebula and encouraging her Patreon paypigs to join Nebula instead (though she did promise her paypigs they would have access to the Nebula content for free, which didn't actually work for most people). The company claims to have tripled their customer base and to have high retention as well (from the press release linked in the first paragraph).
Given that they were giving away annual memberships for less than $15/yr last year through their creators, that's not too surprising and the real test will be their retention after those memberships expire. Despite this rosy public outlook, most of their content creators still make the bulk of their income on YouTube and Patreon because they aren't releasing their content exclusively on Nebula. Mid-range creators like Bright Sun Films barely even mention their Nebula partnership in their main channel videos anymore, while lower tier creators like Todd in the Shadows started out the partnership with sponsorships with SkillShare and the like but have devolved only to shilling Nebula itself and their new lifetime membership of $300. Not a great sign when a company is pushing to get a quick infusion of cash from the existing customer base in Q1.
Nebula's CEO, sole board member and last remaining founder Dave Wiskus is shady and seems to want to be a name himself rather than a corporate head, having his own podcast. He's smug and talks to smug guests like the aforementioned Ms. Ellis. His ego, bolstered by the certainty that he and the Nebula stable are in fact smarter than you, peasant, will probably be the company's downfall alongside the venture capital money drying up IMO.
The James Somerton debacle showed that 1) all the Nebula creators talk to each other and will happily collude/brigade against a wrongthinker and 2) Nebula will absolutely lock it down to keep their customers from seeing anything but the content monkeys being marketable. There is definitely milk here, but their private status makes it difficult to extract without inside data.
