'Watcher Entertainment' Latest To Leave YouTube For Their Own Platform, Some Blame A Changing Internet And Others Steven Lim

On Friday, the three creators at the helm of "Watcher," a prominent YouTube channel with around 3 million subscribers, announced they would leave the platform for their own pay-to-watch subscription website, dubbed "Watcher Entertainment."

The decision by Steven Lim, Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara to leave YouTube comes after over a decade of video and content creation. Fans have responded to the news with both anger and frustration, with many of them blaming either Lim or YouTube itself for the contentious decision.

Bergara, Madej and Lim started at Buzzfeed in the mid-2010s, pioneering many viral video genres.

Like the Try Guys and other internet creators that started on BuzzFeed, the three went to YouTube as BuzzFeed declined in popularity and value. Shows like Ghost Files and Puppet History gained massive popularity.

The new subscription service bills at $6 per month, a rate similar to the group's lowest Patreon subscription tier.

Following the announcement video, many fans expressed anger not only at the three creators, but also at YouTube. Watcher is just the latest in a series of high-profile and well-established YouTube channels to leave the platform, including MatPat and Tom Scott.

The reasons for leaving are varied, but many of them have to do with changes in the algorithm that reportedly lead to lower view counts and less pay, as well as a profusion of AI-generated competition that makes it harder for human creators to connect with audiences.

Making videos for the internet has never been a highly stable profession, nor is it very lucrative for many of the people who attempt to do it, but changes to the platform economy over the past several months seem to be making it even harder than it was before to please viewers, advertisers and algorithms all at the same time.

Watcher concluded that if they stayed on YouTube, "We're making content for fans and for advertisers," but if they leave, they'd just be making content for fans.

Some argue that the problem is with creator Steven Lim, one of the three main members of Watcher. A segment of fans argue that Lim's food-based series and more experimental content involving higher-budget concepts repeated mistakes made at BuzzFeed, where a viral video-making business got too ambitious and overextended itself.

Others see the BuzzFeed story from a broader perspective: The internet changed, and the BuzzFeed model stopped working. Some see the increasing number of creator exits from YouTube as evidence that a similar change might be underway.