Sourcefed was started in 2012 by YouTuber Philip DeFranco with three hosts. The channel was a comedy news channel keeping the audience up to date with current events as well as making hilarious skits. The channel expanded over the years, gaining new hosts and making spinoff channels to cover more specific topics, such as SourceFedNerd, which focused on everything nerdy from video games to anime. There was a large community of over a million subscribers following the SourceFed channels on YouTube and with the recent developments fans have shown that they remain loyal.
On March 20 it was announced that the beloved YouTube channel SourceFed and it's associated channels, SourceFedNerd and PeopleBeLike, were cancelled by their mother company, Discovery. The hosts, editors, and all other people that worked hard on these channels were fired and content was no longer created for these channels after a farewell livestream that included many of the people that had been part of SourceFed.
On May 4, a new video was added to the SourceFedNerd channel, with the new channel name, NowThis Nerd. The video features a man named Michael Calabro talking about the takeover, claiming that he was a SourceFed fan and is saddened by the cancellation, but honored to be making content for, "...such an awesome, loyal community." He then says, "Our ultimate goal is the same as SourceFedNerd," while the words, "OUR GOAL IS STILL THE SAME," are shown on screen over him. Calabro also encourages the SourceFed community to comment because, "We really want to hear what you guys have to say." This is probably a statement that Calabro regrets considering that the entire comment section is filled with negativity. The SourceFed community is not very happy about this betrayal. In fact, the video only has around 1200 likes and nearly 60,000 dislikes.
So, why is this takeover a betrayal? Many people lost their jobs when SourceFed and its spinoff channels were cancelled. The video says itself that their goal is the same, so it's a slap in the face to everyone that worked on SourceFed to get an entirely new team to do exactly what they were already doing. NowThis Nerd also made the mistake of trying to piggyback off of the hard work of the people of SourceFedNerd and tried to take the subscribers for their own, instead of making their own channel and working their way up.
This move also shows the company's lack of knowledge in regards to the YouTube community. Content creators gain popularity through connecting with the audience. Fans of SourceFed subscribed to the channel because of their connection with the hosts and others associated with the channel. Now that those people are gone, they aren't going to put up with a completely new group of people swooping in to the dead channel like vultures, feeding off of the remaining subscribers.
Ever since the new video was posted, the subscriber count has dropped significantly. The channel that had over a million subscribers is now down to 941,264 at the time of this writing. It is sure to be even lower by the time you read this article, as the count is a hundred lower than when I first started typing this article. In fact, you can even watch the subscriber count drop in real-time.
NowThis Nerd has also posted a few more videos since the first and each of them have far more dislikes than likes. They also feature new hosts, without ever actually introducing them to the audience. By giving the audience no chance to connect to them, they give the audience no reason to care about them. If NowThis Nerd is smart, they'll back off for awhile. So far, it's clear that the audience does not want them. Now that I've finished typing this article, the subscriber count is already down a hundred more. The best decision would probably be to make a new channel and earn subscribers like everyone else.