SourceFed

» see sourcefed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

SourceFed's five years line up with the stretch when YouTube stopped being a place i went to find a specific video and became a place where people had jobs. The distance is that those same years opened with the site unreachable from where i live. YouTube was blocked in Turkey by court order from 2008 to 2010, and it came back to a country that had spent two and a half years learning to work around it. A daily American news show made for people who watched YouTube the way an earlier generation watched television landed next to me rather than on me.

Philip DeFranco was already doing this alone on his own channel. In January 2012 YouTube started writing checks under its original channel initiative, and he used his to build something that could run without his face in it. SourceFed went live on 23 January 2012 with six hosts he chose himself, doing two or three stories a shift in a format that was closer to a group chat than a bulletin. The hosts reacted to the news at roughly the speed and register of the comment section, which was the entire trick.

It moved fast. The channel cleared a million subscribers inside the first year and finished at about 1.7 million with something near 900 million views across its run. A second channel, SourceFedNERD, took the games and film material. In June 2013 DeFranco sold the studio to Revision3, which put the whole operation inside Discovery, and at the time that read as the exit every channel was being told to want.

Revision3 turned into Discovery Digital Networks. In October 2016 Discovery folded it into a new holding company called Group Nine Media, alongside Thrillist and NowThis. Five months later the new owner went through the inventory and decided a daily comedy news channel was not in it. Layoffs hit the office a week before the announcement, which came on 20 March 2017. The last broadcast was a farewell livestream on the 24th.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the format actually was ~

The thing SourceFed built was not a news product. It was a shift rota. Two hosts sat down, read stories somebody else had picked, said what they thought, and left. The value was in the specific people and their specific reactions, which meant the channel was worth exactly as much as its cast on any given month and nothing more.

That is a fragile asset to own and everyone involved knew it. The original six left in waves across 2015 and 2016 and the numbers went with them, because the audience had subscribed to Lee Newton or Elliott Morgan rather than to a brand. By the time Group Nine did the math, the channel it was reviewing was not the channel that had earned the subscriber count in the first place.

~ the postmortem ~

Nothing failed in a way that shows up on a chart. Group Nine Media was five companies stapled together in October 2016 to make something big enough to sell ads against television, and the merger came with the usual instruction to find overlap. SourceFed was a daily show with high labor cost and declining views inside a portfolio that now also owned NowThis, which did news with a different cost structure. Seeker Daily got rebranded into NowThis on the same day SourceFed got canceled.

DeFranco had sold out of it in 2013 and had no say by 2017. He left Group Nine after the shutdown and went back to running his own channel, funded by his audience directly through Patreon. That reversal is the part worth keeping: the money that built SourceFed came from a platform trying to look like television, and the thing DeFranco went back to afterward was a subscription from viewers with no company in between.

~ the long tail ~

Most of the cast landed fine and several of them are still working in the same medium under their own names, which is the clean argument that the hosts were the product. The channels are still sitting on YouTube, unlisted from the algorithm but not deleted, five years of daily news about things nobody remembers being news.

The wider pattern outlived the specific company. Every network built on the premise that YouTube personalities could be bought, consolidated and sold at scale ran into the same wall within about four years of each other. What the buyers acquired was never the infrastructure. It was a group of people who could leave.

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