• mranachi
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    2 months ago

    “Unfortunately, without access to one of their contracts, we can’t know for sure what power the broader group of creators actually has. It’s possible that the terms are so favorable for creators that their shadow equity is as good as actual ownership. It’s equally possible, however, that the system was set up in order to keep any meaningful power away from the creators.”

    I guess this kind of mixes up some concepts when we ask is nebula really creator owned.

    1. How does the equity get shared upon a liquidation.
    2. Can a creator cash in their shadow equity without liquidation.
    3. Do creators have ‘the potential’ for governance input.

    I see some positive in the fact that they offer ownership of the top holding company to big creators as an option. The most invested have the full protection. I can see reasons for having a two tierd system with phantom stocks, mostly in making adding new content creators easy.

    But I guess the question really is, is nebula willing to share standard terms of their creator contract?

    • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world
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      2 months 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.