It looks like this was shared to Reddit as well, https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1ffnaza/who_actually_owns_nebula/

Dave Wiskus (CEO) responded over there:

Nebula the business is “Standard Broadcast LLC,” and is directly owned at the LLC level by me and 43 other creators (and growing).

Nebula the streaming video service (which controls the streaming revenue) is Watch Nebula LLC, which is about 83% owned by Standard Broadcast LLC, with the rest held by Curiosity Stream. All control and all board seats belong to Standard Broadcast LLC.

We use shadow equity for platform creators because assigning LLC-level equity would make signing new creators logistically impractical, and would have complex tax implications for every creator we bring in. US securities laws also are skewed in favor of the wealthy: it would be very expensive or potentially impossible for us to comply with them if we were issuing securities to small creators who aren’t accredited investors.

If substantial control of the streaming service ever changes hands, we are contractually required to split the proceeds 50/50 with the creators on the platform. 50% of streaming profits are distributed to creators based on watch time. Additionally, 1/3 of the revenue from any subscriber is allocated to the creator responsible for bringing in that subscriber.

Weird that he didn’t just ask.

You realize Nikocado has over 4 million subscribers, plus another million on his second channel? It’s not like there’s just a small handful of people who engage with this person.

It’s wild that Ben seems to think pickle juice counts as “eating pickles”. They were certainly a little lenient on that challenge.

The best we can do with current tools is just trying to tie multiple platforms/views together I think. Programming.dev runs a bunch of different services under the same umbrella like that, and I’ve setup something similar on bestiver.se / xxxiver.se

I think having communities that consist of a group of fediverse services like that are probably the way forward in the short term. I kinda want to package that up as a ‘Verse as a Service sort of thing, but I’m still not sure if anybody will be willing to pay for it.

FYI, if you really think that’s enough then you should check out https://feddit.org/post/2600584

The most efficient large instances cost ~$1.40 per user per year for hosting costs, and that’s if you value the admin/mod costs at $0

Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.

Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.

My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there’s not really a useful cost/user and I can’t really provide info on scaling.

Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.

Your last sentence is unclear, is that actually implemented?

I am trying the approach of just making multiple affiliated services, and forcing people to have consistent account names across each. See https://bestiver.se