Nebula, a creator-built alternative to YouTube, passed 100,000 subscribers

Nebula Logo
Nebula Logo (Image credit: Nebula)

What you need to know

  • Nebula has now passed 100,000 subscribers.
  • The service is only a year old.
  • Standard, the company behind Nebula, plans to expand its offering.

Nebula, the creator-built platform that describes itself as a "thoughtful expansion pack for YouTube," has announced that it has passed 100,000 paying subscribers.

Reported by Tubefilter, the platform has accomplished the milestone in a year, with around one hundred YouTube creators now part of the service. Between copying over videos from YouTube and creating originals, creators have uploaded over 5,000 videos to the service already.

Since Nebula launched in June 2019, around 100 YouTube creators working with its parent company, Standard, have uploaded more than 5,000 videos to the service. Some are mirrored from their channels, and some are Nebula original standalones or series, made in partnership with Standard.

Nebula is positioning itself as a way for creators to create content that they would otherwise shy away from uploading to their YouTube channel.

To that end, Standard hasn't really advertised the service. It simply deployed creators like Lindsay Ellis (948K subscribers on YouTube), Tom Scott (2.8 million), and Jon Taylor Chapman and Joseph Pisenti (who run three channels between them, including Real Life Lore, with 3.7 million subscribers, Second Thought, with 871K, and Grand Test Auto, with 12K) to tell their followers, Hey, I'm making an original show on this new platform. Come watch it.

Nebula Library

Nebula Library (Image credit: Nebula)

Dave Wiskus, Standard's founder and CEO, says that the success of the last year has propelled the team to now focus its effort to improve the user experience. It is also doubling its efforts with CuriosityStream, another streaming service that Nebula has partnered with to offer a bundle package.

"The engineering team has had to grow up quickly," he says. "We're placing much more emphasis on quality assurance over rushing things out the door." Sometime soon, Nebula viewers can expect quality of life improvements like "better playback speed controls, but also improved platform support, like Android TV, Roku, and so on," he says ... "Nebula makes for a great selling point, so customers are more likely to sign up," Wiskus says, adding, "We have more cool stuff planned with CuriosityStream. No signs of slowing down. In fact, we're going to dial it up."

You can try out Nebula free for 7 days, and then either pay $3 per month of $30 per year. For those who want to sign up for the Nebula/CuriosityStream bundle for $14.79 per year, you can do so by clicking on the link for the offer from one of your favorite YouTubers who are part of the platform.

Joe Wituschek
Contributor

Joe Wituschek is a Contributor at iMore. With over ten years in the technology industry, one of them being at Apple, Joe now covers the company for the website. In addition to covering breaking news, Joe also writes editorials and reviews for a range of products. He fell in love with Apple products when he got an iPod nano for Christmas almost twenty years ago. Despite being considered a "heavy" user, he has always preferred the consumer-focused products like the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPhone 13 mini. He will fight to the death to keep a mini iPhone in the lineup. In his free time, Joe enjoys video games, movies, photography, running, and basically everything outdoors.