After viewer backlash, Watcher’s content is staying on YouTube. But the studio says it’s struggling.

Last week, Watcher–the content studio founded in 2019 by former Buzzfeed-ers Ryan Bergara, Steven Lim, and Shane Madej–surprised viewers by announcing it would no longer be uploading its videos to YouTube.

Instead, it said, it would take further episodes of shows like Ghost Files, Mystery Files, and Puppet History to its own new, standalone, and paywalled platform, where fans would have to pay $6/month or $60/year to watch.

The backlash to this announcement was swift and vicious. Watcher’s YouTube channel lost more than 50,000 subscribers in 24 hours, and nearly 100,000 over the weekend. Commenters on the announcement video and across social media were particularly rankled by Lim’s assertion that the subscription service’s $6/month price had been picked because it was “low enough where anybody and everybody is able to afford it.”

Now, Watcher has rolled back this decision. In an update video, Bergara, Lim, and Madej apologized for how they announced the service and for “overlook[ing] the way it would impact all of you.”

To be clear, Watcher still plans to introduce its own streaming service at the same price. However, future Watcher content will not be exclusive to its paywalled platform. Instead, the trio explained, new Watcher content will premiere first on its subscription service. Then, a month later, that same content will go out to YouTube, for free.

Additionally, Watcher is giving all of its current patrons over on Patreon (more than 13,000 people paying at least $5/month) a free membership to the service, and says it’ll refund any patron who already paid to subscribe.

“We’re sorry for how we originally delivered our goodbye message to YouTube,” Bergara said. “It was insensitive. We didn’t properly express how much we appreciate all of you, and we did a really bad job of explaining the reasoning behind this transition.”

That reasoning? Watcher–which brings in between 8 and 13 million views per month–is struggling to survive financially, they said.

“When we started Watcher, we wanted to create shows that we were proud of, that we had ownership over, and that would provide you the caliber of content that we felt you deserved,” Bergara said. “However, we were finding it harder and harder to stay relevant to advertisers in the constantly changing YouTube landscape.”

The company is facing “some incredibly challenging decisions,” he went on. “But we didn’t want to compromise our content to ensure they met advertising requirements, and we definitely did not want to lay people off that have brought Watcher to life behind the scenes, and we didn’t want to bring Watcher to a close, which would have happened if we stayed solely on YouTube.”

“That’s why we decided to launch the platform, so that we as a company could continue, so we could pay our staff fairly, and not only continue to make great content for you, but expand with new shows, new voices, all ad-free,” Madej added. “And now with the addition of accessible options, this is a decision that we all believe is the best for Watcher.”