Short answer? Curse can do it because of the web business we have. Most (all?) companies out there are dedicated Youtube companies, they had to build their management team from the grounds up, finance, legal, etc... then you add the initial cost of having headquarters and a couple of other things and it adds up.
On my side, I just get to piggyback our existing infrastructure, my lovely CEO basically asked me to do something nice with what we already have and that's exactly what I'm doing. There's no catch, the first year has been slightly bumpy on the support/signup side but almost all these problems are resolved at this point, or should be resolved by the end of the month. We're also adding more staff to help with the influx of new partners, the network has been growing 20% a month steadily, and the growth should be around 33% for July actually.
You know why there's no lock in on my contract? First, because I think lock ins are insane. Even a "small" 2 year lock in is basically the time it took to the Yogscast to go from 50k subs to 3 million subs. This isn't even the main reason why I don't do lock-ins though, there's two reasons why I do it:
- I just don't have to. Our contract is very good and our leave % is incredibly low, on a bad month it will be 3 or 4 partners maybe? And honestly, half of them are people getting scammed by subnetworks who promise insane stuff. I just make sure they get a trial period/open ended contract with their new network and they end up coming back after a month when they realize that it was a mistake.
- This is just not how Youtube should work. We reached a point where we all know that things can get big, really fast, and getting yourself locked in a bad/average contract for 2 years means you could be significantly hurting your main source of income in 6 months or 1 year. I'm still amazed by how people are willing to sign their freedom away on the internet, which is usually the place where people will complain the most about this kind of things.
I honestly think we're reaching a point in the Youtube scene where networks will have to evolve. I'm not necessarily good with fancy words so I'll just keep it simple: I think we need to be in a situation where networks are your b***h, not the other way around. Youtubers should have the power, not huge network X who goes "not happy? yeah well, tough luck, you're stuck with us for 2 years". It doesn't mean that you should be super mean to your networks, you usually deal with people who care a lot about what they do regardless of who you're working with.
That was a slightly ranty wall of text I guess. Just let me say this, I'm a community person from the beginning, and as dumb as it sounds I do believe we can build something much better for Youtubers than what there is out there.
