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.
If you haven’t already, take a look at Dave Wiskus’s response to it on Reddit, posted elsewhere in the comments.
Thanks for pointing that out. I’d missed the last line on my first read of it somehow.
Additionally, 1/3 of the revenue from any subscriber is allocated to the creator responsible for bringing in that subscriber.
This reads to me like this is the purpose of going to a creator specific link when initially signing up. For example, if you go to nebula.tv and sign up from their main page, no specific creator gets that 33% cut of your revenue. Alternatively, if you see a YouTube video where a creator talks about their content also being on Nebula, they ask you not to go to the platforms main page, but specifically to nebula.tv/zagorath to sign up. If I went to that link and signed up, you would get 33% of my subscription revenue.
To me, this opens another question of what is this the term of this 33% cut. I doubt it’s a cut of the revenue for so long as my subscription is active. I’d imagine it’s more likely a cut of whatever the initial payment is, be it a single month’s subscription fee or a full year.
Yeah that’s a good question. I’m honestly not sure. I bought a lifetime subscription about a year ago so that woulda given Jason Slaughter a fucktonne, compared to paying month-by-month, if it’s only the first payment.
That would explain why they provide such a strong incentive to pay yearly (since it’s much cheaper than monthly). It’s also interesting that you get a much cheaper price if you go through a creator’s code rather than heading straight to nebula.tv.
